First Impressions

I have this thing about being friends with people.  In the current popular perspective on more friends, extroversion, and get-along-with-everyone-because-they're-special! mentality being best, I totally suck at being friendly.  I'd rather stick a fork in my eye than have to deal with smalltalk, big parties with lots of unknown people, and generally overdone, theatrical (and false) female friendliness.

I like having friends, but only when I actually get along with them.  I like to make the distinction between "friend" and "acquaintance." There's people I've met, perhaps multiple times, but they are impossibly boring, shallow, or generally incompatible with me, and though I know who they are, I do not pursue any kind of friendship, as I tend to not like to waste my time.  Those are "acquaintances," and I tend to try to avoid them as much as possible. My boyfriend tends to have no idea what I am talking about when I say this, asking "Doesn't every human interaction give you something in return and therefore not waste your time?"  Perhaps given the fact that social situations scare the life out of me and require hours of pep-talking myself to be ready, I really need to evaluate the cost-benefit ratio before spending my time with someone.  Only people who show a promising "return on investment" get upgraded to "friend" status.  This happens very infrequently, as I have very demanding standards.

When it comes to making new friends, I do tend to have a 6th sense that will automatically direct me to be friendly with people that I do in fact get along well with, though logically it makes no sense for me to socialize with those people.  Times when I have "forced" myself to be friendly with people because it made "sense" and not because I "felt" it have usually crashed and burned.  The friendships that made no "sense" yet were guided by my intuitive friend-sensing equipment have usually gone well.

The thing that I find most fascinating about this is that I don't talk with 50 people at a party and then go "Hey, So-And-So was nice, let's look into getting to know them more," I zero in on So-and-So fairly quickly within moments of entering a room, and though I will talk to the other people, So-And-So is 99% of the time the person I do match best with.  It seems that I can "tell" a person's compatibility with me, as a friend, from across the room, nearly instantaneously.

I often think this tracking ability developed as a reaction to my anxiety due to social situations, to save my time and give me the best effort-to-reward result.  But the method by which I can scan a room of people and know who is most like me is a mystery to me.

Is this just me, or is everyone like this?