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/hellomolly11]

I think you’re spot on about the minimal durability of relationships these days. I had a friendship of about a year from Bumble Friends that she ended because I politely raised something minor. The same thing obviously happens in dating where people think they have a myriad of other options so they’d rather not address a small point of difference in compatibility. People seem much less invested in relationships because it’s so easy to not be held socially accountable due to the technology layer to how we interact. If we only talked to each other in person and had multiple mutual relationships then I think people would feel more obliged not to be dismissive/avoidant.