Adult Friendships: Why that Friendship Feels One-Sided (What Is a Friend part 2)

I get asked about adult friendships A LOT, like why it’s so hard to make friends, why some friends are so difficult, or why some friends keep disappointing us.

Most of the advice out there talks about good communication, having the same values, and letting go of expectations, but I think this angst about friends centers around friendship compatibility.

Compatibility in a friendship goes back to questions we never really sit down and answer, which is what is a friend to me, and are all my friends actually the right kind of friend.

In my own case, for a long time I treated everybody the same, which is where most of my problems came from.

So in this part 2 episode on friendship (listen to part one What Is a Friend) I get into friendship tiers, aka levels of friendship, because once I had those, I stopped handing all of myself to people who didn't want that from me, and I felt a whole lot less used. 

Topics covered in this episode:

• The five year friendship where I finally clocked that I was doing all the reaching out 
• Why lumping everyone into the same friendship level set me up to feel let down 
• How friendships by circumstance doesn’t mean you’re compatible to be long-term friends 
• The check-in with myself when I don't feel good after hanging out a friend
• Letting go of a friend, ghosting vs downgrading 
• The way I think about friends who come and go now, and why I’m at peace

This is the second episode in my “What is a Friend” series. Here’s part one: What is a Friend? Why Making Friends as an Adult Feels So Hard

Transcript

 One of the most common topics I get across almost every single coaching client I've ever had is the idea of friendship and what it means And the reason I think it comes up so often is because it's always some version of people being unhappy with their friends or how they're being treated, or the expectations that they have towards one another.

And eventually they reach a breaking point where they're so unhappy they're considering just walking away from the friendship or the other person has done that to them.

I've been there too. I'm not proud of this, but I've done my fair share of ghosting friendships or people who really didn't deserve that.

I've also been the one ghosted, which obviously didn't feel good to me either.

Now being the nerd I am, I like to sit around and think about why these kinds of things happen and what we can do about them  because it's not like we just all of a sudden one day reach the point of being like, "I don't wanna talk to this person anymore." It doesn't just come out of nowhere.

It's usually things have been building up for a while, and there's always a mismatch of some kind, usually in expectations and communication, which I think a lot of the advice out there on the internet and on other shows and on social media, these ideas are covered, right? Like, these are not new concepts. But in my nerd brain, I'm like, "But why? Why do these things happen?"

After talking about this with so many clients and my friends and even some of my family, I think I actually have some idea as to what's going on underneath the problem. So this is one of those things where it's a problem underneath a problem underneath a problem.

So if you've also experienced a ton of friction in your friendships and you wonder why it's always so fricking hard to keep a good friend or to have friends that treat you right, then this might be the episode for you because I'm going to share what I've learned in my own life and my own relationships and I'll also share some of the stuff that I've learned working with my clients.

You're listening to This Is How You Think, the show that remodels your mindset. I'm your host Jule Kim. Let's dive in.

A little over 10 years ago, I used to have this friend I knew from work. She and her boyfriend hung out with me and my boyfriend, both of these guys now being our husbands. So we would hang out all the time, and the four of us even vacationed together in Maui. She came to my wedding. She was one of the women who was involved in throwing my bachelorette party.

And even after we stopped working together, we still hung out quite a bit.

So on the surface, it looked and felt like a pretty solid friendship.

But I think it was around five years in, I noticed something that had been true for a while, but it just took me a really long time to see it, and it was the fact that I was always the one reaching out. I was always the one suggesting that we get together, like every single time.

Now me being the direct and pretty literal person I am, like just call me Drax from The Avengers, okay? As soon as I noticed this, I asked her about it pretty soon after.

And when I did, she said, "Well, that's just how I am with everyone."

I remember having this moment because I was just like, "Uh-uh, bitch, you are a liar. I know this is not true.

And that is the moment when everything clicked.

This wasn't actually a friendship. I was in a chase.

And maybe you know the feeling too, where you're always the one initiating, you're always the one putting in the effort and you know that if you stopped you're pretty sure that the whole thing would just kinda fall apart.

Me back then, I didn't have the vocabulary for this. And now I know that this is called a one-sided friendship, which honestly sucks pretty hard because it's kinda lonely, right?

I guess it's kinda like the situationship of friendships, maybe?

Anyway, with this particular person, after I had that realization, I stopped reaching out. And as you can guess, she never reached out to me again, like not even once, which told me exactly where I stood. Obviously it didn't feel good.

But you know what's interesting is I didn't hold any bad feelings towards her. Like, I wasn't mad about it, and I didn't feel betrayed or anything. Because I think deep down that I know that I'm always going to be better off with people who actually want to spend their time with me.

Unfortunately, I think that some of us go through that particular scenario more than once, right? You would hope that we would learn after the first or even the second time. But for some reason, some of us keep repeating this cycle.

And so that's the question that I set out to answer: why do some of us seem to take way longer to resolve this and to create an environment of friends where we actually feel supported and loved and cared for?

Why do some people have that, and why do some of us not? And that's what brought me to the whole idea of what is a friend.

So I did an episode way back when on what is friendship and why are adult friendships in particular, why do they feel so hard? So in that episode, I opened some loops on just getting people to consider what even is a friend and what do you need from your friendships so that you can feel happy in them.

And that's the episode where it's pretty different from how my normal episodes are, because I interviewed, I think, four people about their experiences with friendship, because I thought it would be helpful to have people see  that  their experiences with difficult friendships or friends falling out of touch you know, these things happen to everybody.

So hopefully if you've listened to that one, you understand that you're not alone.

But as my beautiful, lovely friend Leena pointed out, it's like, "Hey, man, you opened all these loops, and then you didn't actually tell us what to do." And I was like, "Oh, that is fair." So let me get into the main realization and insight. I mean, to be honest, there's several realizations I've had in my own life, which is why not only are we going to have this episode, but also one more on just how to understand friendships better so that you can have relationships and friendships in a way that makes sense for you, so you stop feeling so, like, ugh about all these people.

So going back to the friend who wasn't really a friend that I started off talking about, the main thing that I had to learn is that I'd never really established tiers of relationships. Okay, so in my mind, which honestly I think is a lot of people, I really only had three buckets or tiers of friendships, okay?

There were the people that I didn't know, then there were the acquaintances, and there were friends, and that was about it, okay? I only had three buckets.

This is where most of my problems with other people came from, like this one thing. I am not joking, okay? The fact that I only had one bucket for friendship really made it a binary thing, right? You're either a friend or you're not a friend, and that's just not how friendship works.

So over time, what I learned to do is to develop tiers inside of that friendship bucket.

I now have casual friends, I have close friends, and I have my inner circle. The inner circle being my core, my intimate. These are the people I could tell anything to, and I know that they would have my back.

Why this matters so much is because before, when I didn't have these tiers in place,  because I only had the one bucket labeled friendship, I was unconsciously treating everybody like they were in my inner circle when they weren't.

That meant I was giving way too much of myself to people. Like I was oversharing, but I was also overly generous with my time, my energy, access to me and my resources.

And this is why I didn't feel good so much of the time because it wasn't being reciprocated and it wasn't being appreciated.

So it took me a long time to learn this. I had to learn the hard way that not everybody deserves all of me like this.

And on the flip side, it is not appropriate for me to hold these unconscious expectations towards everybody, which is what caused more friction.

And I think what was happening is that on the intellectual level, I understood that friendship is a two-way street, but I didn't actually get that. I didn't grasp the mechanics of friendship and what it really means, and that this is why I was so unhappy with so many of the supposed friends in my life.

Okay, so that was the first realization, is that not everybody you call a friend belongs in your inner circle.

And it's the fact that you're giving inner circle effort to somebody who's not actually in that circle that's what puts you in the chase.

Now, the second thing that I had to realize is the reason why you end up with people who are miscategorized, maybe you think that they're closer to you than they actually are, is what I call the proximity effect.

So many of us, including myself, okay, we don't understand that a lot of the people we come across are the ones that circumstance handed to us, right? Like, it's work or school, or your kids go to the same school together, or your kids are the same age. You're in the same season of life.

These are the people you encounter through some common interest, but they slide into your life without actually earning the right to be there.

Now, I'm not saying that you have to sit there and vet everybody like you're some kind of CIA analyst, okay? But I do think that the idea of who is a friend and who isn't, or what tier of friendship they belong to, it might be something you wanna put some effort into thinking about, especially if you're unhappy with some of these people taking up space or presence in your life.

And for me, whenever I end up in this kind of situation, which still pops up every now and then, I think like most people, when 2020 happened, I went through a major purge of my, quote-unquote, friends or just people I knew

So that overhaul and that clearing out of certain energies that weren't serving me or weren't helping me grow as a person, that was a major step in the direction I wanted to take as the future me and the person that I see maybe five years from now or 10 years from now. But sometimes I still have these moments where I let the convenience of circumstance form these relationships where maybe they feel good in some moments, and maybe we laugh and we have fun, but in other moments, I don't feel good.

I don't feel good about how I'm being treated. I don't feel good about how that person talked to me, or maybe I don't feel good about how they give me a last-minute invite always, or they don't seem to actually consider what I would want.

That's always a sign for me to take a pause because a friendship, like any relationship, has to be mutually beneficial. And I'm not talking about from a financial or some kind of transactional standpoint. I'm just saying I need to enjoy my time being in relationship with these people.  I need to feel cared for and I need to feel respected and considered.

But to what degree will look different depending on what tier of friendship we are in. So with my inner circle, if I'm going through a fricking tough time like the last year I've had with my brother passing away, yeah, you bet your sweet bippy that I expect them to be there for me and to know to be there for me. But with somebody maybe that I only know from work or somebody I only see at the gym, yeah, I'm not gonna expect that from them because that's not the relationship we have. It wouldn't really make sense.

Anyway, all of this to say that as you're listening, maybe you have a friendship or two or several like this, and maybe you've been blaming yourself or them for not being a good enough friend or feeling guilty that you're mad at them.

I actually don't think there's anything wrong with that.

I think the fact that you feel some level of disturbance in the force is a sign. It's an indicator that you need to do something about this.

Now, I highly recommend being the adult and putting on your adult pants and having the difficult conversation with them just so you can level set these expectations so that you can both feel good about where you are relative to each other.

In the instance where maybe you're thinking about ghosting them, it is interesting because I find that behavior actually happens a lot more with the men that I know versus the women.

I don't know what it is, but for some reason, women seem to want to verbally articulate the state of the relationship. They want to define it or set parameters, which I don't always have to have that level of clarity, but when somebody else wants that, I'm more than happy to give that to them because I want them to feel safe in being in a relationship with me.

But men are funny because they usually don't do that. They seem to be a lot more like the Homer Simpson meme, like fading backwards into the bushes. So I think it's gonna be up to you to decide how you handle this.

Me, I'm more like Drax, so I tend to be very literal. I tend to wanna say the thing on the nose just so that there's no chance for misunderstanding. But I also understand, too, where in the instances where I've ghosted people, and that is not me acting in my highest self, sometimes I will do that though, because the friendship tier that that person occupies, or maybe they're even just an acquaintance, I do not see them as worth the effort that I would have to put in to experiencing awkwardness and tension and having this potentially challenging conversation, especially if I know they're not gonna take it well, right?

So then I'll just write them off in my head. Now, as I get older, I do less of that because that doesn't align with the person I want to be. And I'm thinking about me on my end, if I care about the person, you know, this is where a lopsided friendship can really complicate things, 'cause if they mean more to you than vice versa, then you would want them to tell you, right?

But on their end, they may not want to invest that level of effort.

And at the end of the day, you know, sometimes the way I like to visualize this is friends are kind of like birds, where sometimes the bird will choose to nest in your tree, and then sometimes they fly away and leave, and they never come back. But sometimes they do, and sometimes they never leave. But either way, I think it's really about offering the freedom of choice to these people and to yourself so that you can find the people who do want to be around you, who celebrate you instead of tolerating you, right?

I think that's the goal here.

So as I close out this episode, I just wanna make it super clear that this isn't about going through your friends list and machete-ing all the people on there.  A lot of this work, I think, is just being aware of who you are, what you need to feel happy, and then maybe refiling some of these friendships, maybe moving them around to different tiers, and maybe even moving them out of the friendship bucket and into the acquaintance bucket.

And that's okay.

This doesn't have to be a breakup unless you really feel strongly that it should be. You know, it's not my place to tell you what's right for you. But hopefully this is a perspective that helps you look at the people you know differently and in a more productive manner without chasing.

You don't wanna chase people who were never in your inner circle, and let's be honest, they never belonged there.

All righty then. That's it for this week.

If you have any questions, feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn. That's always the best place to reach me, or text the link in the description. I think I've mentioned this before, but I should probably say it again, where if you text me, the service doesn't actually show me your phone number.

It only sends me your message, and then it only lets me reply once. So you don't have to worry about being spammed by me, okay?

So whichever way is easier for you, I would love to hear from you. And by the way, if you have a minute, would you mind leaving me a review if you've listened to my show?

It'll help me grow the show and hopefully make me look a little bit more legit.

As always, thank you so much for listening, and remember, I believe in you. See you next time.