Has anyone ever had the experience of losing long-time friends or finding they're fake or that you were just a backup option for them? About 2 summers ago, 2021, I think, my close guy friend invited me to hang out with one of his friends who I also knew from school, but weren't really close to and never talked to before then. We hung out fairly often together almost all summer, until around August, when my guy friend's friend got a girlfriend. Both of my guy friends knew her and she was one of my friend's friends, but I'd never talked with her before and she also most likely didn't know that I knew her friend. After that, the three of them started hanging out without me. At first, it did hurt a bit, but as time went on, I felt like I was more like an extra person that my friend just brought along to their hangouts, so I eventually got over it. Fast forward to last summer, my guy friend's friend's co-worker started hanging out with them too. I would see their pictures on social media a lot because my guy friend would get tagged by his friend's co-worker and it would show up on my page. A few days ago, my close guy friend was showing me something on his phone, when I saw that he got a whole bunch of notifications from his messages. I don't normally care about who sends him messages and stuff but sometimes, I get curious and would try to see what the notification is. I saw that their whole friend group had made a group chat. I just felt so left out when I saw that. I literally got "kicked out" of the group after his friend got a girlfriend and now, they had formed a new group without me in it. I know it shouldn't matter because I wasn't really even in it or that close to his friend anyway but it still hurt since we hung out a lot that summer before everything changed and now, I'm out of their group, just like that. I actually really liked hanging out together with them before my friend's friend got a girlfriend, even if we did mainly hang out through my guy friend.
That does sound hard to figure out for you...sorry they left you out, just rude. A lot of people don't think that their decisions have reactions.
This 'disconnecting friend' thing happened to me a lot thru the yrs. It really impacted my self-esteem and I had to fight against feeling ALONE a lot.
I don't know if you are an introvert or possibly in a different 'headspace' or something but at least with myself --ppl did not know how to categorize my personality...they always want to put you in a box so they don't have to keep figuring out directionals.
I prob give off a too-direct, no-nonsense vibe, I hate imposters, fake-anything and especially redundancy...they just keep saying the same thing or choosing same actions over and over...why? Why couldn't these ppl open up to you, to new horizons-take a chance and 'include' you?
This problem is so ancient it was happening between Cave-men but our society is still crawling back in the days of NON Evolution.
@Littlesis7 Yeah, I’m an introvert. I feel like they probably don’t feel like I’m “fun” enough to be around. I’m pretty laid back, go with the flow, type of person.