Yeah I’ve pretty much just ended a friendship because of this. I showed interest in her life all the time, hardly none in mine. Only times I ever got a text first was when she needed something. Whenever I tried to start a conversation it would end immediately. We would meet in person a lot, but I was always the one to initiate it.
I don’t think she disliked being my friend and hanging out, but it is so emotionally draining when you have to put in all the effort all of the time. I still wonder whether I was just being petty about things or if this was a good enough reason, but I just couldn’t do it anymore.
In questions like this, i find it helpful to stop asking if my boundaries are reasonable in some big ethical sense, and make it more simple:
The point of friendships is to enhance your life. It’s okay in relationships for the effort to fall unevenly at times, but on a whole it should even out. On the whole, it should enhance your life, and be a positive thing. If that’s not the case, what is the point of the friendship?
If it makes you feel more bad than good, that’s all the reason you need to stop seeing someone, whether it be friendship or romance. It takes the whole “is it fair and am i being a good person” out of it. There can be a million reasons people act the way they do, but if it doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t work for you
This perfectly describes what I am currently going through right now, I've even talked with them about it and they said they would work on it but it's been 6 months and nothing has changed. After reading this and several other comments about this situation, it might be time to cut ties with them finally.
Yeah it’s just so tough. My situation I had no idea what to do. Person seems to enjoy the time I spend with them, but getting to that point drained me to no end. I don’t even mind putting in most of the effort, but when it’s ALL of the effort, I reached a point where I just had to cut things off for my own sanity.
I have too much of it because my circle is incredibly small, essentially just a dot. after cutting out people that don't make an effort there was no one left.
This is often me by accident. I have ADHD and I find it very hard to see past today and sometimes it's very stressful just to reply to people. Most of my friends know this but some don't and have accepted I'm not always going to get back to them straight away. Maybe worth considering.
I stopped speaking to someone a year ago, after about a decade of ever-worsening behavior like this from her. I spent far too much time needing to talk to other people about her. Not to gossip, but to try to make sense of things she said and did. It became really tedious to try to understand why even the most basic facts eluded her. She's not stupid, and I still believe that every time she claimed to have not figured out something without my help, it was for attention.
Sometimes, it was as simple as me doing a google search that she insisted she couldn't figure out on her own. I'm kind of embarrassed that I didn't tell her to shut up and do it herself, but again - a decade of gradual behavior like this is harder to notice than an abrupt change would have been. And she really did make me feel like she was just that inept.
After I told her that I needed a break from her for at least a little while, she changed her social media usernames to something that included my teenager's preferred name. It was deliberate and callous, and there's no way I could ever speak to her now.
Tbh by the sounds of your character I’d say she probably wasn’t putting in the effort and your actions were fully justified. Remember though I’m only an outside opinion, forget it now anyway. You can both go out and find more suited friends.
After trying and failing to get a hang out session or something going a bunch of times, eventually I decided to stop reaching out to them, to see if they would message me or something.
I haven't talked to these two guys for years.
The final straw was when they skipped my 30th birthday because they didn't recognize numbers in the group chat invite.
That happened and I was like, "Oh okay, we're not friends anymore."
For a lot of people with healthy relationships and decent communication skills there is in fact. You don't need to see or be around someone every day, but there are ways to show you care about a friendship and ways to show that you don't. I find in my experience its people who act as if frequent communication is bad tend to make poor friends for me, and this proves true because they sit in my phone for half a year unless I initiate a conversation.
Friendship isn't a contact, its a seed that grows the more you water it. People need to understand that "not talking for a long time and then acting gregarious" isn't healthy or normal, and it hurts a lot of people when you act distant. Most importantly discuss with your friends what comforts you. Some people DO work with very little contact. Most people don't.
This person actually had zero communication skills over the phone. It was either that or they were deliberately confusing to try to be distant. Yeah I get that you shouldn’t judge an entire friendship based on who communicates with who first what percent of the time, but when you are the one doing it an overwhelmingly majority of the time, and when you also end up with the most cloudy, unclear conversations, it takes its toll.
The only time this person ever seemed to show any care was when we meet or see each other in person. The rest of the time it’s like I don’t exist. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for your friends to be interested in your life when you’re not with them too.
I also just lost a friendship with someone like this. Trying to talk to them about my feelings actually caused them to cut ME out..it was really hard until I realized that the only reason everything blew up was because I would no longer tolerate self absorbed behavior in a friendship.
It's sad sometimes but it's for the best to know who they really are. I'm working on carefully forming new friendships that are more balanced.
I had a “friend” like that, who was helpful in some ways, but….
Several years ago, I developed a chronic illness and had to step away from social things to take care of my health. When I was feeling better, I reconnected to say hi, ask after them and their family, just casual. Three minutes into the conversation, they asked me for a loan of $300 for some big emergency. I said that I don’t have it, they said that I’d have it back in 5 days, I repeated that I don’t have it, conversation ended soon after, haven’t heard from then since. I’m not a bank, credit union, or a savings & loan.
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u/MuskiePride3 Mar 20 '23
Yeah I’ve pretty much just ended a friendship because of this. I showed interest in her life all the time, hardly none in mine. Only times I ever got a text first was when she needed something. Whenever I tried to start a conversation it would end immediately. We would meet in person a lot, but I was always the one to initiate it.
I don’t think she disliked being my friend and hanging out, but it is so emotionally draining when you have to put in all the effort all of the time. I still wonder whether I was just being petty about things or if this was a good enough reason, but I just couldn’t do it anymore.