This is the fucking truth. I've seen so many friend groups fall apart when that one person who was making all the effort checks out.
It's a shame that we all expect friendships to be deep, immediate, and effortless. We'd all be a lot less lonely if we tried to show up for each other. If we didn't make excuses for ourselves but not for our friends
I was that friend making all the effort and man it fucking hurt. I had a really rough patch in college (and that's putting it lightly tbh) and really needed someone to just let me know that they actually gave a shit about me or even just realize that it'd been weeks since any of them had last seen me. Like not asking for a whole intervention or for them to drop everything to cater to my depression, just a text saying "hey, haven't heard from you in awhile, wanna hang out?"... But the minute I stopped scheduling stuff and being the first to reach out, they completely ghosted me. Like if it was the other way around, I absolutely would have reached out to check on a friend if we had been in regular contact and I just suddenly hadn't seen or heard from them in over a week.
The whole time the only thing I could think of was that I could be dead and I didn't think any of them would have noticed.
Wow! This could be me. I scheduled the friend events. Didn't even host, sometimes I was calling places asking if it was okay if 5-8 late teen/young adults [18-21]. One time I made a real life slender and murder mystery games. Mine bad patch was I went through a terrible breakup. (One of the highlights was he didn't even do it he made my grandma do it.)
I lost my home, car etc. Only people who showed up for me we my online friends. I ended up with two options: homelessness or move across the country. When I chose to move to where I had a support system no one checked up on me.
A little over a decade later I would return home and meet up with a person in that group who would go on to tell me that when I "just up and disappeared" everyone was very mad at me. He got my point when I pointed out that it was insane that everyone's reaction to the planner of the group who they supposedly cared about a lot very out of characterly disappearing off the face of the earth was anger instead of concern.
I gave the group (that did still exist, just in a new form with mostly new people) one last chance anyway. Then I found out people were still holding that grudge. And they still didn't actually ask me why I left. Everyone just avoided the conversation and danced around the why I was there of all the stories I told. That told me everything I needed to know: they were still 19 in their heads and partying every Friday night by calling it friend dinner where everyone is gossiping/dating in circles/being petty within the group. Oh, and still no one reaches out. Just post in the group chat.
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u/TwinStickDad 14h ago
This is the fucking truth. I've seen so many friend groups fall apart when that one person who was making all the effort checks out.
It's a shame that we all expect friendships to be deep, immediate, and effortless. We'd all be a lot less lonely if we tried to show up for each other. If we didn't make excuses for ourselves but not for our friends