So for context, during the pandemic my senior year of high school they had a hybrid model where you could choose to go in person or stay at home. I chose to go in person and since most of my friends at the time stayed home, I tried talking and becoming friends with new people. During lunch breaks, I would go to one of my favorite teacher’s classroom just to chill out and draw. That’s where I started being friendly with one of the students there. It felt like a casual friendship, not too deep, so I was surprised that when we graduated hs, they still kept in touch with me.
They initiated hangouts a couple times and I decided sure why not bc I kinda drifted away from my high school friends. Through all the times we’ve talked or hung out tho, it didn’t feel like the friendship moved beyond casual acquaintance so I low key was bored and didn’t feel like hanging out with them in the future. I didn’t know how to express this feeling to them and therefore stop seeing them so I came to the conclusion that I should try harder to find something to base our friendship on.
The following hangouts I made an effort to ask them a lot of questions and try to find out who they are as a person. Usually the questions I ask people allows me to dig deeper and find a spark that kindles a friendship but for whatever reason I couldn’t really find common ground (beyond maybe some superficial stuff I wasn’t too interested in). Also I realized that while we were hanging out and I decided to stop initiating the conversation, the other person wouldn’t really say anything or wouldn’t initiate any conversation. Eventually hanging out with them made me feel like I’m draining my energy.
When I tried to let the friendship fizzle out slowly by not making an effort to text them (and also due to the fact that I have a hard time making connections over text), they would still message me and ask if we could hang out. I would mostly decline (also because I‘m a very busy person now that I’m studying a hard major). A couple times, they called me out for being unresponsive or not showing interest in the friendship (saying stuff like “that’s not what a real friend does, if you wanted to be friends with me you would show interest). This caused me to feel anxious because I didn’t know how to express that due to multiple factors, being friends isn’t working out.
One day when they sent me a similar message responding to me declining their invitation, I decided I had enough and respectfully told them that I found it hard to relate with them and that’s not a good basis for a friendship to grow. Since then they’ve left me alone. Is there a better way I could’ve handled this? In future friendships, how can I better express when I don’t think being friends is working out?
1 comment
You don’t have to express anything just block