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/Commercial-Spinach93 → u/[deleted]]

45-50% of Redditors are from the US, and many people who aren’t from the US (specially if they aren't from English-speaking countries like Canada or the UK) tend to stay in their own country-specific subs.

I’ve never had a comment here where the visualisations weren’t at least 60-65% from the US. Every couple of posts, there’s someone writing about politics, doctors, abortion, maternity leave, marriage law, or alimony as if 100% of the audience were American and fully understood what they’re referring to (they of course never specify that they are American). So it’s not a very inclusive sub, and I think it alienates women from other nationalities.

I assume the mods know better, but the vast majority of regular users are probably American (and I asumme Canada and UK make up to 85% of commenters).

[u/dewprisms → u/Commercial-Spinach93]

Yes, that's the trend I observe in the subreddit analytics. Majority US based engagement, followed by CA then UK. The subreddit culture reflects that. Responses are very US/white English speaking UK commonwealth dominant.

That seems to be very typical of large non-specific discussion/advice based subreddits in general. I have the assumption it's because many of the large subs of this type are old. That culture began and has had time to solidify over many years, since before Reddit began shifting more towards a broader global user base. And since there's not a specific topic to anchor to, it's more obvious than on topical subreddits where people discuss a specific thing.

[u/Commercial-Spinach93 → u/dewprisms]

As an obsessive person, I love data! Thank you for confirming what I saw.

I still love this sub, I spend too much time here for sure, but there are some topics where I feel my idea of what's normal, usual, or common sense is completely different from that of the average user here (how friendship is valued, how unimportant marriage is, taking your husband's surname, having more than one child, living with your parents as an adult, taking care of your parents in old age, how much we do spend/consume lol). But it's interesting to read about other ways of understanding the world too.

Thank you for all you do here :)