Reply to I make friends easily, but it feels like once they get to know me, they don't want to be friends

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[quote=Anonymous]Be careful what you wish for, OP. For a long time I wanted to be part of a group of close girlfriends. So many women seem to travel through life in these packs from which they seem to get a lot of strength and support.

During Covid, I finally found such a pack. In the beginning, I felt I belonged in a way I had never felt before. I felt understood. We all had similar interests and viewpoints. We shared information that was really helpful about schools, the pandemic, home finance, you name it. The support felt invaluable. I loved telling others about my "mom group" and felt real pride in finally having found my tribe after so many years being on the outside of such friendships.

It was great until it wasn't.

In hindsight, the whole experience was exhausting. Frankly, in some ways it seems now to have been very transactional. There was a definite hierarchy among the group, a lot of walking on eggshells so as not to offend the Queen Bee, and it was like there was some invisible accounting book that everyone was tied to where we all had to perform a certain amount of caretaking of others in the group. When demands in my family life became too intense for me to be able to keep up with all that caretaking of friends, I was quickly dumped - and I do mean quickly. I was out in less than two weeks. I went from being BFF to being persona non grata nearly overnight.

Six months later I'm still processing what went down, but I think my biggest take-away has been that I just don't have the bandwidth or interest in being the kind of person I would have to be to have a group of gal pals. I am extremely close to my sister and my BFF of 20 years and I am part of a large extended family through my husband. There's enough on my plate with the care and feeding of these folks.

My advice, based on this very recent experience, is to invest in the relationships you have now and add others only after an extremely long trial period. Most people will never meet the mark and that's ok.[/quote]

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