I don’t even know if this is the right sub to ask for help for a problem of this kind, but here we go. So basically, I have started feeling like my happiness depends on this friend of mine and his reactions. Well, not always, but often. We have a close friend group of 5 guys, and we have a group chat. It feels like, every once in a while, he’ll get a bit distant from a person in the group. When I am that person, I’ll usually lose my confidence and seek his approval. Then, when he gets close again, I get hyped and a confidence boost. He kinda ignores messages of that person and rarely interacts with them. Another friend was recently also annoyed by him on one occasion, when he did a similar thing in person. Me, this “problematic” friend, and another friend from the group are in the same class in school. One time, we were sitting next to each other in the classroom, and through the whole day, he put his main focus on the other friend and kinda ignored me. He interacted with the other friend, talked to him a lot, cracked jokes, side hugged him, etc. He basically made me third wheel the whole day, until I started ignoring him back, which he noticed and only then did he change his behaviour. He’s also the most experienced with girls of the 5 of us, and some time ago, a girl was interested in me and we messaged each other for a bit. I told him this, and I expected him to give me some advice and to tell me what to do next, since he’s that kind of person, but he rarely gave me any advice. Recently, I’ve started caring less, but I feel like I still depend on him, and I don’t want to. I feel like I sometimes lose my confidence around him and feel embarrassed to do normal things that other people do. For example, I’m scared to talk about the girl I like around him. Another example, as dumb as it sounds, I’m scared to change my Instagram profile picture to a picture of myself (I have never posted anything on social media), because I’m kinda scared of his (not only his, but he’s one of them) opinion, even though I know he would have a positive reaction. Well, I’m not scared of his opinion on the picture, I’m actually scared to do anything out of the ordinary for me/anything I’m not expected to do. For example, I was scared to start going to the gym because of my brother’s assumptions that I don’t want to go to the gym and because I’m not expected to do it. This has been a big problem in my life and I don’t know what to do about it. I’ve drifted away from the main topic, but I feel like this problem is actually the source of the problem this post is about. I don’t know what to do about these problems, that are definitely making me depressed and making me not enjoy life. Please help, any advice is appreciated. Thanks for reading through the whole post.