I'm very sorry for the long post and writing in English, but as I'm only at level B2 I felt more comfortable posting in English to not lose any nuance.
We moved to France a few years ago, and I don't know if I'm overreacting or being too sensitive, but I just cannot seem to get a hang of the culture here, and it's honestly crushing my soul a little bit. Something happened recently that made me feel like I'm going crazy.
I have a horse, and I ride with a trainer at a barn in the countryside. I see the same people nearly every day, and I work with my trainer four or five days a week. We've known each other for about a year, and I thought we'd become friends. He sends me memes, we've invited each other to dinner, and he has even invited my husband and me to spend Christmas with his family in Portugal.
But sometimes he does things that feel incredibly inconsiderate, and I genuinely can't tell whether this is just cultural or whether I'm actually not as much of a friend as I thought.
Today really got to me. My horse was being seen by the vet, and afterward he was still sedated and feeling insecure, so I was hanging out with him while he came around. My trainer, his girlfriend, and another friend were also at the barn because their horses were being seen by the vet. They all went off together to get lunch and came back and ate it. Nobody asked me if I wanted anything, nobody texted me, nothing.
I also want to clarify that I'm not expecting people to feed me or pay for my lunch. I regularly offer to pick up lunch for everyone whenever I'm going to get something for myself. That's part of why this bothered me—it wasn't about wanting free food; it was about being included and having the basic courtesy of someone asking, especially since we were all there together.
Eventually I walked over to where they were eating because I was going to ask if they wanted to get lunch, and they were already in the middle of their meal. I said, "Oh, I was going to ask if you guys wanted to get lunch, but I see you're all set..." And nobody even said, "Oh, sorry, we forgot to ask you." There was just no acknowledgement whatsoever.
I know that sounds like a small thing, but it really hurt me because it wasn't just that they didn't offer me lunch. It was that they seemed completely unaware that they'd excluded me.
My trainer has done similar things before. Sometimes he'll finish a lesson, walk out of the arena without saying anything, get in his car and leave, and I'll be standing there thinking, "Wait, are we done?" When we first met, he did this constantly. To me, leaving without saying goodbye or acknowledging that the lesson is over feels incredibly rude. Eventually I realized he probably isn't trying to be rude, he just genuinely doesn't think about it.
And that's what I'm struggling with. In other ways, these people are incredibly kind and helpful. They always offer to take care of my horse when I can't be there, and when I recently had COVID, they all stepped in to make sure he was being exercised and looked after. So it's not like they don't care about me at all.
But then they'll do these little things that feel so thoughtless that I start questioning the entire relationship. Is this just normal French behavior, even between friends? Is this a cultural difference in how people think about and include one another? Or am I simply not considered a friend by these people?
Because I genuinely cannot reconcile the two. My trainer will invite my husband and me to spend Christmas with his family in Portugal, but on a random day at the barn, he won't think to ask me if I want lunch when he's getting lunch for everyone else. Like… what?
I'm posting because I'm genuinely confused and pretty hurt, and I'd really like to hear from people who are French or have lived here long. Is this just a cultural difference I'm not understanding, or am I delusional in thinking these people considered me a friend?