This is a somewhat lighthearted post. I have a friend, who I do like and we’ve been friends for a long time, but she is definitely a “small doses” person for me. We’re just very different.
Over the past few months somehow we’ve fallen in to the habit of chatting a lot. We never used to really. She’s also very needy, and quite an insecure person so a lot of our conversations I end up in therapy mode and very centred around her. It’s a lot. Im also very introverted, so the feeling of obligation of having to message/voice note back constantly is stressful for me. Sometimes I’m happy to engage but I reach a cut off point quite quickly and i dread her name coming up on phone, often with a 10 minute voice note. My conversations with other friends are usually more logistical and then we chat when we see other.
I don’t want to hurt her feelings, and I don’t want to be rude or to make her feel like she can’t message me either. But I just need it to be less frequent and less intense. Sometimes I’ll just not reply if it’s nothing urgent, or at least take a few days. She does this annoying thing though where is deliberately asks questions to “guarantee” a response. I know she does this, cause she’s mentions doing it to other people (not in so many words) and the questions are super random, and doesn’t flow with the conversation. It feels really disingenuous and like she doesn’t actually care about me, she just wants my attention. It kind of works though cause then I feel obligated to reply to at least questions.
How do I deal with this? Im kind of hoping she’ll bring it up, I’ll be able to have a conversation about it then but it feels a bit cruel to tell her this? Or do I just suck it up and reply to her? Maybe I’m being unreasonable complaining about it?
TLDR: friend is intense with messaging. Do I have a conversation with her about it, continue to sporadically message back, or am I in the wrong and I need to be a better friend?