This post is going to stray off course a bit. I can honestly say I wasn’t anticipating having to navigate social nuances in my mid-thirties, let alone writing a post on the internet about it.
I should really take a night and think this post through in an effort to articulate all of my thoughts and feelings in a more concise manner, and while I know this, I’m going to start typing anyways with a little back story.
A few years back I was dating a girl who had a group of friends of around 10 people. They had a group chat that was seemingly fluid and consistent. From the few months I was around, they seemed to all hang out regularly, without the need of an occasion, even though they’re individual positions in life were vastly different from one another. Some had kids, some married, some single. Some were between jobs, while others were extremely well off. Still, their friendship didn’t seem to waver. This is all from the perspective of an outsider anyways, but I liked what I saw and began thinking about how why I didn’t have that. I mean, I had a group of “bros” that had been hanging out since we were 14 +/- years old. We spoke regularly, but without rhyme or reason, and we would never, in a million years, just all be hanging out in someone’s basement on a random Saturday night.
I continued to wonder why of my copious amount of different friend groups I didn’t have this same group dynamic with any of them. I didn’t have that “core” group. The closest thing, post high school, I could think of was the above mentioned bros and our hours spent at Dunkin Donuts daily; that definitely had that same vibe, only in place supporting one another, we drove each other down with a myriad of negative reinforcement… and at the helm of that inevitably sinking ship– yours truly.
It didn’t take much self-reflection for me to realize that I expect more out of people than they expect out of themselves and, more importantly, that that is a ME problem; not them. But I’m getting ahead of myself now…
So, after a few months of seeing this other group of friends interact the way they did, I decided I wanted what they had. So, there I was, softer and more matured, than the menace stacking friends against one another on a proverbial totem pole that I once was. I started the “Bro Chat.”
Upon sending the first text, I explained that we were no longer going to be abusing one another, but rather, supporting one another’s endeavors and seeing more of each other. It didn’t take long for me to realize this wasn’t going to be an easy task. We just weren’t designed to support one another. I remember the first big news was that I had passed a test at work that I had been fighting to pass for literal years. I shared it with the boys in our group chat of six. One congratulations, one nonsensical response, another nonsense reply two days later, and two guys that never responded at all.
Fast forwarding because if I typed every disappointing interaction, we’d be here forever. Soon thereafter, I implemented a breakfast with the boys, affectionately called “dude brekky,” where we could just catch up with one another. I set up trips for the guys. I set up trips for the guys and their girls. I hosted parties. It wasn’t the same dynamic of that group I had hope to mold us after, but it was what I had and after 20 years of friendship, it just was what it was.
I began feeling a bit of a disconnect later on. It began to feel like the only thing we really had in common was that we had been friends for so long. Don’t get me wrong, there were a few trivial shared interests, but at our core, I felt a disconnect. When you start talking dreams and aspirations and achieving goals, things just simply weren’t aligning. In short; we weren’t likeminded, but even still, you can still be friends with people, and so, with the decades long friendship and those few trivial interests in mind, we carried on.
Fast forward to present day, four years from the start of that group text. I continue to try to set plans for the boys. I continue to reach out in hopes that we can all hang out, but the group text has devolved into three remaining guys talking about a very specific hobby, that is probably more appropriately suited for private text. The support system is nil and the entire endeavor, to me, has begun to feel like a failed social experiment more than anything else.
I feel as though I’ve put in maximum effort for little to no return. I could go into specific examples, lots and lots of them, just within the past month, never mind the last four years, never mind the last two decades! The long and the short of it is this: my attempts of get togethers, of keeping the friends- friends, have become futile. More than that, because I fully understand we’re pushing forty and situations change, families exist, free time is limited, it’s not that these guys can’t make it, It’s that my attempts get ignored. My time, energy, and efforts aren’t respected enough for a response. Their behavior is selfish. If they want to hang out individually and I am free, and it’s a shared interest, I would probably go. In some weird way though, the entity that was this group is dead to me.
I think I know where I’ll be investing my time moving forward.
Update: I waited four days to post this. I wanted to read it with a clear mind and make sure it was neither poorly articulated nor whiney. In the end, my decision to delete and block the group chat and focus my energy in places it’s more appreciated is proving beneficial for me, or, at the very least, not wasteful.
Life's A Trap 