My Friendship Group Is Shrinking, And I’m Torn Between Panic And Content

I should be ok, with my changing situation but I can’t figure out if I’m happy I’m losing friends.

When I was eighteen, I had thirty people I would call “best friends”.

When I was twenty-one, and celebrated the coming of age, there were roughly a hundred and fifty friends who attended the party.

When I was twenty-nine, and walked down the aisle to my beautiful husband, we had a table of thirty friends between us.

Now, if intended to host a dinner, I would feel lucky to find ten people to invite.

It’s not quite where I thought I would be at this age. When I was a teen, I assumed my life was growing bigger. The younger me was entirely wrong. Sure, we grow taller, our hips get bigger, our bills get bigger. And when a mini version of us comes along, the responsibilities triple in an instant.

Life gets bigger, in theory.

But of all the things in my life growing bigger, I didn’t expect my friendship group to be shrinking.

The number of friends in my life decreases with every passing day, too. It’s like one of those tragic graphs, where you see the number plummeting, and there isn’t anything you can do about it.

It’s a runaway freight train and, most days, I feel like I’m a mere passenger.

The people who I can rely on, and tell my secrets to, halves by the second. What makes this decline seem worse is the dreaded comparison; some people in my life have hundreds of friends. Their friendship group could fill an entire bay at a football stadium.

I would be lucky to have enough friends to field an umpiring team.

Well, this is an exaggeration. If I had a gun pointed at my head, I could do my best wrangling act. But I’m not trying to officiate championships here.

Yet, there I am, lying in bed after a weekend of festivities, and I feel exhausted. I’ve spent every waking hour of my rest days socialising and come Monday, returning to work, I feel as if I’m having a respite.

As I enjoy the silence of my office, I’m not sure I could entertain a bigger social circle. In my mind, I’m wrestling with my shrinking friendships.

Am I happy about it or do I want to change it?

I don’t want to be a bad friend

One of my friends hosts an annual Christmas party at their house. The entire five-bedroom house is transformed into a festive wonderland. As much as I should marvel at my friend’s decorating skills, the decor isn’t the impressive part.

I watch in awe when the Facebook invitation goes live; there are hundreds of names on the list and just as many people who attend.

I would love to say I’m exaggerating, but when you arrive at the party, the hundreds turn out in droves.

Every year I study the hoards of people, laughing, drinking, and engaging with each other.

And every year I wonder the same thing about my friend; how do you have meaningful friendships with hundreds of people?

To me, a friendship isn’t real if you can’t maintain the basics. We all differ on what the basics entail, but to me, the basics are knowing things about your friend. Where they work, what they do for work, the name of their dog, who they’re dating, where they’re living.

Then there are the bigger basics, like what’s meaningful to them, their recent accomplishments, and their wishes for life.

This isn’t what people want to admit out loud, but you have to have time for friendships. If you don’t have the time for them, and you’re spread too thin, they disappear.

I have a collective of friends who’ve disappeared from my life because they didn’t have time for me. I wished they had told me this, rather than ghost me out of their life.

But that’s for another day.

As someone who knows what it’s like to have time-poor friends, I couldn’t pass this on to other people. It wouldn’t be fair of me to start hoarding friendships, keeping them in my life frivolously when I couldn’t service our relationships the way they deserve.

I contemplate this servicing idea a lot. We keep our relationships alive by giving them what they need.

But many of my current friendships don’t get what they need now, let alone adding in more. My relationship with my friend, the one with the Christmas party, isn’t what I want it to be. Every day I wish for us to have a deeper, more meaningful connection.

Yet, he doesn’t have time for me.

If want to see him, I need to book him months in advance. If we were lovers, I would assume they didn’t want to be with me because of how hard it is to spend time with them.

I don’t think I could inflict this onto other people.

I want honesty over anything else

I’m aware of the optics of confessing my wants and needs from my friends. But I do have wants from them. Yet, I’m not referring to a give-and-take situation.

I’m talking about the type of connections I would like to have with people. And when I think about those types of connections, what I want is simple honesty.

I want to be able to tell the people in my life what is happening in my life, from the wonderful to the ugly honesty. I equally want to hear the spectrum of their complicated lives, not just the best parts.

But it’s not something you can do with everyone. Many people would preach honesty is what they want, too, but it’s not something that the masses can provide each other.

Honestly seems to be a commodity that is reserved for special people in our lives.

I’ve discovered this the hard way through past friendships that have now gone. I’ve learned that by being honest, you can easily offend people. Or you can ask for honesty and people can’t give it to you.

They feel more comfortable lying or having a fake relationship with you. People would rather have you support them blindly than talk to them about deep truths and realistic growth that comes from being honest.

Like the time I told a friend I was suffering from anxiety and issues with an eating disorder. She said I was too hard to be friends with.

Like the time I told one of my friends a loved one was in a mental hospital and they changed the topic instantly, refusing to engage in my news.

Like the time I expressed displeasure with how one of my friends was treating me, and our mutual friend told me to keep my thoughts to myself.

My want for honesty in my friendships has immediately alienated many people from my life. It seems like the more people you try to be friends with the less honesty you’re going to get.

Perhaps it’s just me who has discovered this through their experiences. I can’t deny what’s happened, though.

All I know is it is the people who have stuck around are the ones I can be completely honest with. And they don’t judge me for being truthful. They appreciate it more than lying and fake relationships.

As I grow through life, I want the unicorns with me, the rare, truthful people. I have a long life to live, and I don’t see why I should have to compromise on my values. Or live with people who I can’t be honest with.

For that reason, I’m pretty happy with a shrinking circle of friends.

I’m traumatised

The thought of walking into a room of a hundred and fifty close friends sends panic through my veins. Once upon a time, I would’ve delighted in knowing every single person in the room. Yet, the thought induces waves of memories and trauma I still haven’t processed.

After leaving school, I ended my adult life with ten close girlfriends. We were a unit right until mid-twenties. Of course, we had some issues and there were common, run-of-the-mill arguments between some of us.

From the outside, we looked like we were a happy group of girls with unwavering support, who would never do anything to intentionally hurt one another.

That’s probably why I surprised many people when I exited the group.

It turned out that for the last five years of our friendship, the entire group was keeping a secret behind my back. I was the laughingstock of every joke. I was the one being whispered about when I was out of earshot.

The secret became something that made them “have” and me the “have nots”.

I can’t be certain that this problem was the result of a numbers game. I don’t know whether the secret was an issue because there were lots of us together.

Yet, with so many people not on my side and against me, it doesn’t make me long for a big group of friends.

Every time I contemplate the scenario, I’m transported back to the day that I found out about the secret. I’m transported back to the hurt and the pain.

I’m also transported back into this feeling of humiliation. It’s not something I want to repeat any time soon. And being lied to is not something I want to inflict on anyone else. That trauma isn’t something I want to share.

If these failed friendships taught me anything, I needed to be more choosy about who I kept around me. It taught me lessons in discernment.

Though the numbers game feels fun like you’re popular, the pain doesn’t outweigh any of the fun.

Sometimes I’m alone in this idea of shrinking friends

It’s hard for people to get on board with my idea of a shrinking social circle.

I’ve talked to many of my remaining friends about this idea, and the initial instinct is to warn me of impending pain.

They tell me that I will regret cutting these friends out.

I will regret not making more friends.

I will regret not reaching out to someone from my past. They could be a good friend now time has passed.

Of all the people giving me this advice, there is one common thread between them. These people are friendship hoarders.

For the life of them, they can’t cut out anyone in their lives. They are my friends with a hundred guests at a Christmas party. They are the ones who spend the entire of December going to Christmas events, just to keep up appearances. They are the ones who go to birthday parties every single week, even with people they don’t like to avoid letting any friendships go.

It’s kind of gross how many people they keep “close” to them. However, how close they are is something I question.

I liken it to the idea of boxes in the storage unit.

You have all these things that you’ve kept that you don’t even like, and that aren’t meaningful in your everyday life, but you simply can’t part with them.

People shouldn’t be treated like objects. We shouldn’t hold them in fear of the fact that we might lose them, and that means we are without lots of “friends”.

And you shouldn’t hold onto friends because you don’t want to end up like me.

Sometimes I want to jump in and save the friendship hoarders. Though I don’t want them to do the same thing as what I’m doing, I do want them to acknowledge their toxic friendships.

I want to pull them away from people who make their lives harder.

I want to show them that they can have a better life if they are careful about who is close to them.

And whilst not all friendships they’re holding onto are bad ones, maybe I could offer them a way of lightening their social load. Give them more time for things they want to do rather than maintaining friendships that they only kind of care about.

But in these matters, I can’t force people to think about their life like this. They have to go through the trauma themselves.

I don’t want to be alone

Having a small social circle has one very obvious downside. I’m lonely a lot of the time.

Exacerbated by the way I work from home, I don’t have colleagues to bounce ideas off, or even a boss to verbally tango with now and again. It takes its toll on me.

When I’m sitting at my desk alone, I feel like a loser. I feel like some tragic mid-thirties woman who isn’t living her life with people around her.

And as the days go by between messages or calls from friends, I get that confirmation bias. I’m lonely. And people don’t care about me as much as I need them to.

I don’t think being adverse to loneliness is something that I should feel ashamed of saying. I also don’t think it’s a bad reason to keep friends in your life.

This type of loneliness is incredibly crippling. It’s one of those loneliness that doesn’t make sense to a lot of people.

I’m married and I chose a life of working on my own, and I also chose to walk away from a lot of friendships.

To many people, it looks like I deserve loneliness. It looks like I’ve set up my life for loneliness.

Whilst I agree with that perception, I don’t think people deserve to be lonely, because they choose certain career paths, or because they choose to remove toxic people from their lives.

I can always make more friends

Here’s what’s going to help me sleep at night. I don’t have to be happy with my situation.

I don’t have to love that I seem like an unpopular person who is lonely and tragic. I also don’t have to be happy with the loneliness I feel.

Yet, friendships are meant to come and go. Whilst the romantics of the world will claim that friendships are forever, they’re not. They are like every other relationship.

We can break up.

We can get back together.

They can hurt us.

They can sustain us.

I take solace in knowing that I can make more friends. I take solace in the fact that I’m only in my mid-thirties, and I have so much more life to live.

And as much as some of my decisions seem permanent, they are not.

I’m here to use my wins and losses in life, business and relationships as your cautionary tale | http://www.ellenjellymcrae.com/