I’ve noticed a pattern in my friendships that I’m struggling with, and I’d love to hear other people’s perspectives.
Whenever I suggest something I genuinely want to do with friends, the plans always get changed around — often to fit schedules or budgets — until they no longer resemble what I originally suggested. By the time we meet up, I usually don’t enjoy the activity itself, though I still value being with my friends.
This cycle tends to repeat:
I suggest something → it gets reshaped into something I don’t want → we meet up but I’m bored/miserable → then we don’t talk for 6–12 months until someone breaks the silence.
Recently, I’ve made a change: I started doing the things I enjoy on my own, without waiting for friends. For the first time, I’ve actually been happy doing what I love — but it also means I’m doing them alone.
Part of why I’m trying this is because I’ve lost friends in the past from being visibly miserable all the time when I adapted to things I didn’t actually like. Honestly, it feels like for most of my life I never really chose my friends — I just adapted to the people around me. Now, I’d really like to choose friends who genuinely align with what I enjoy.
So here’s my question: Is it wrong to want to choose my friends? How do you balance doing what makes you happy with maintaining friendships, especially if your happiness and your current friend group don’t line up?
Any thoughts, advice, or personal experiences would be really helpful.
ai disclaimer
I'm going through a lot and instead of just dumping my feelings here I thought it would make more sense to have Chatgpt handle it.
Here's the source chat but if you want to cite my words I'd prefer you just cite my post instead.
Regardless I stand behind Chatgpt's output as my own words and am accountable for it as though I wrote it.
I am mostly unsure about what you consider friendship. From your description, they are a (big?) group of people that you meet once or twice a year and when you do you don’t enjoy it. At most, I would consider them acquaintances.
Try looking for connections in groups that tailor towards what you like. Join meetups and such on topics of your interest and try to scout for interesting people in there.
That is what it has been recently. Prior to that it has been gigantic groups of which I belonged to a subset of 2~6 outcasted people who usually represented 90% of my awareness of the rest of the group.
I know why I was an outcast for most of my youth, I've fixed that.
That's the thing, those two were the people who I feel like I had the deepest connection with ever. They were there when most of my support circle went away and I think I even had a crush on one of them. But the thing is that I realized that my relationship with the one I had a crush on was completely my own projection who I objectivly know very little about and the other one was a semi transactional relationship. Was any of it ever real?
The meetup app has gone downhill hard in NYC, I've just about given up on it
:+1: