As the title says, I’m curious to know how to figure out if your “friends” are really your friends.
I would hesitate to call most people I know friends even though I converse and do stuff with them. I would call a friend someone who I have a close relationship with a friend, someone who would have my back if i needed help. Those are not the friends I’m talking about, for the sake of clarity I’ll call them T-friends.
What I’m talking about are the people who you might see on a regular basis and do stuff with, such as play games, eat with, etc. I’m in college, depending on your place in life you may do things differently. Anyways, these “friends” I can never know what their true motives are, with a T-friend you can mostly tell because they seem to care about you and bother you when you don’t want to be bothered(<-joke). With a “friend” though, I can never tell what they think or why they do things.
For example, and what prompted me to write this article, was that I asked my my roommate, who I would label as a “friend” not a T-friend, and some of my other “friends” from down the hall if they wanted to play a board game or something, I couldn’t really interpret what they thought, but they said sure and we played a good game of catan. Afterwards we split up to get back to studying (supposedly). About 3 hours later my roommate leaves, and I don’t think anything of it. About an hour and a half after that I leave to use the rest room down the hall and I hear them all talking and playing games in one of the other’s rooms, not a single word was said to me, and i got the feeling that this wasn’t the first time I have been left out without my knowledge.
This has gotten me thinking about what I really mean to these people, they act polite and friendly as far as I can tell when I am around them, but they don’t seem to care to invite me. And I know it wasn’t that they thought I was busy as my roommate knew I wasn’t busy and the others could have at least asked.
Saying this has reminded me that this isn’t the only time in my life where I have run into this. All of high school the only people who I could call “friends” were two people who I met and found out we had similar interests. So we had LAN parties playing video games, hung out a decent amount, etc. But when it came down to it I realize that I was always the one to initiate it, they never asked me to do stuff and would frequently claim to be busy when I asked them if they wanted to do stuff. Me being an idiot never caught on until about a year and a half ago and just ended all conversation with them. Now to be honest, I don’t think that either of them ever initiated a conversation with me even though they seemed like my only “friends.”
So this brings me back to how do I tell if someone is a friend or is just using me to have a good time. I feel like I have to start every social interaction, which is really hard, and then I get ignored in every other context. This sort of thing makes me truly realize how alone I am.
Thanks for reading my rant, I have so much more I could say but I think it is long enough as is.
I would hesitate to call most people I know friends even though I converse and do stuff with them. I would call a friend someone who I have a close relationship with a friend, someone who would have my back if i needed help. Those are not the friends I’m talking about, for the sake of clarity I’ll call them T-friends.
What I’m talking about are the people who you might see on a regular basis and do stuff with, such as play games, eat with, etc. I’m in college, depending on your place in life you may do things differently. Anyways, these “friends” I can never know what their true motives are, with a T-friend you can mostly tell because they seem to care about you and bother you when you don’t want to be bothered(<-joke). With a “friend” though, I can never tell what they think or why they do things.
For example, and what prompted me to write this article, was that I asked my my roommate, who I would label as a “friend” not a T-friend, and some of my other “friends” from down the hall if they wanted to play a board game or something, I couldn’t really interpret what they thought, but they said sure and we played a good game of catan. Afterwards we split up to get back to studying (supposedly). About 3 hours later my roommate leaves, and I don’t think anything of it. About an hour and a half after that I leave to use the rest room down the hall and I hear them all talking and playing games in one of the other’s rooms, not a single word was said to me, and i got the feeling that this wasn’t the first time I have been left out without my knowledge.
This has gotten me thinking about what I really mean to these people, they act polite and friendly as far as I can tell when I am around them, but they don’t seem to care to invite me. And I know it wasn’t that they thought I was busy as my roommate knew I wasn’t busy and the others could have at least asked.
Saying this has reminded me that this isn’t the only time in my life where I have run into this. All of high school the only people who I could call “friends” were two people who I met and found out we had similar interests. So we had LAN parties playing video games, hung out a decent amount, etc. But when it came down to it I realize that I was always the one to initiate it, they never asked me to do stuff and would frequently claim to be busy when I asked them if they wanted to do stuff. Me being an idiot never caught on until about a year and a half ago and just ended all conversation with them. Now to be honest, I don’t think that either of them ever initiated a conversation with me even though they seemed like my only “friends.”
So this brings me back to how do I tell if someone is a friend or is just using me to have a good time. I feel like I have to start every social interaction, which is really hard, and then I get ignored in every other context. This sort of thing makes me truly realize how alone I am.
Thanks for reading my rant, I have so much more I could say but I think it is long enough as is.
