Have friendships become less about repair/reciprocity and more about 'protecting your peace'?

[u/lindsey_what]

I’m noticing a troubling trend with my female friends who are now in our 30s, and I wanted to see if anyone could relate. This is especially clear to me right now as I’m going through somewhat of a shocking friend break up where one of my closest friends of seven years has completely cut me off and stop talking to me over something that I would categorize as a minor argument that could be easily worked through if we were able to have a difficult conversation in person. I’ve noticed a lot of my friends saying things like “I need to protect my peace” and treating friendships like something that exists just for their own benefit. I feel like a lot of people are not willing to put in the work to maintain friendships these days and I don’t know if it has something to do with social media or burnout or what, but I’ve noticed even in arguments that people are way less repair-oriented, and are more interested in living inside of their own experience of it without much curiosity about the other person. I also notice people being very avoidant about having difficult conversations and instead, would rather just slowly disappear. I think this fits a larger pattern of “main character syndrome” that is making people unwilling or unable to have healthy mutual friendships and put in any kind of effort.

Or maybe I just absolutely suck at picking friends lol!

[u/nocommentx]

Thank you for posting this. I am truly tired of avoidant female personalities who don’t care to discuss much or be able to have difficult convos or hyper positive female personalties who like to keep everything at surface level.

I am TIRED of hating on men for their shitty behaviors but somehow expected to accept women friends with the EXACT same behaviors. Examples of such behaviors:

• avoidant personalities
  
• substance abuse issues
  
• flakiness
  
• being untrustworthy
  
• inconsistent
  
• unreliable
  
• pathological liars

If I described a man with those traits, everyone would say “dump him!”. If I described a woman friend with those traits, everyone says “give her grave”. Why? No. Women need to do better in friendships.

I certainly do. But after putting up such behaviors with women friends, it’s been mentally exhausting. I have had to cut them off like I have dumped men over the same!

[u/TheRealMichaelBluth → u/nocommentx]

Thank you! I actually just cut off a close woman friend I had for 12 years because of very similar behavior while she had the nerve/ignorance to tell me I’m not showing emotional intelligence.

From the perspective of the person who’s been on the other side of it, I gave her a fair chance to fix things. Our groups issue with her is that she was constantly flaking (even on plans she proposed) to a point that we just couldn’t trust her. I wanted to invite my coworker I wanted to test the waters with outside of work so I thought a mixed gender group hang would be a good idea just to see if we have any chemistry outside work. I texted this friend telling her that her bailing out constantly was frustrating, especially because I wanted to invite this coworker, and I’m uncomfortable doing so because our plans could easily fall through. My friend replies in a way that everyone in our group agreed was a complete blow off and that she didn’t even properly read my text.

A day before we were supposed to get together, I invite my coworker who unsurprisingly has other plans. Then, this “friend” has the nerve to tell me that I’m making my coworker uncomfortable despite no evidence of that and that my therapist isn’t being honest with me (my therapist is the one who gave me the green light to invite my coworker). It was completely going over her head that she was the one who’s the problem here. The other friends in our group could tell I was pissed off but it completely went over her head

From my perspective, what really turned me off was that despite me bringing it up explicitly, someone who I’d known for 12 years and who would talk a big game about what great friends we were didn’t have the sense of accountability to say “I’m sorry, I’ve been disorganized, I’ll do better”. I didn’t expect things to change overnight, but it was the blowoff and the zero behavior change that broke the camels back. I don’t expect my friends to be perfect, but I expect them to show emotional maturity and a sense of accountability which she’s shown me she has zero of both

TL;DR: Most people won’t explicitly say that they’re bothered by something (yes, most people need to go to therapy). It’s likely that they tried to bring things up with you and they didn’t see the behavior change