I’ve noticed a pattern in my friendships that I’m struggling with, and I’d love to hear other people’s perspectives.

Whenever I suggest something I genuinely want to do with friends, the plans always get changed around — often to fit schedules or budgets — until they no longer resemble what I originally suggested. By the time we meet up, I usually don’t enjoy the activity itself, though I still value being with my friends.

This cycle tends to repeat:

I suggest something → it gets reshaped into something I don’t want → we meet up but I’m bored/miserable → then we don’t talk for 6–12 months until someone breaks the silence.

Recently, I’ve made a change: I started doing the things I enjoy on my own, without waiting for friends. For the first time, I’ve actually been happy doing what I love — but it also means I’m doing them alone.

Part of why I’m trying this is because I’ve lost friends in the past from being visibly miserable all the time when I adapted to things I didn’t actually like. Honestly, it feels like for most of my life I never really chose my friends — I just adapted to the people around me. Now, I’d really like to choose friends who genuinely align with what I enjoy.

So here’s my question: Is it wrong to want to choose my friends? How do you balance doing what makes you happy with maintaining friendships, especially if your happiness and your current friend group don’t line up?

Any thoughts, advice, or personal experiences would be really helpful.

ai disclaimer

I’m going through a lot and instead of just dumping my feelings here I thought it would make more sense to have Chatgpt handle it.

Here’s the source chat but if you want to cite my words I’d prefer you just cite my post instead.

Regardless I stand behind Chatgpt’s output as my own words and am accountable for it as though I wrote it.

  • over_clox@lemmy.world
    191·
    1 day ago

    Thank you for the AI Disclaimer and owning up to the words it spit out, at least you’re being honest about it, and that’s respectable. 👍

    My personal opinion is don’t expect anything.

    You can try to plan everything out, but almost never will things go perfectly according to plans. And the more effort you put into planning, the less likely things actually go according to plan.

    If you’re just trying to enjoy time with friends, then plans might as well be just suggestions, but sometimes you just gotta roll with whatever happens, and get a good laugh when Jeremy pukes behind the car LOL!

    Sometimes you just gotta live in the moment…

    • danhab99@programming.devOP
      2·
      5 hours ago

      when Jeremy pukes behind the car LOL!

      I wish I had more of this in my life. But yeah that was the first change I made, a few years ago I enumerated the set of every possible thing I can expect from friends and explained 1 reason why each specific reason is not correct as an emotional excersise.

      • over_clox@lemmy.world
        1·
        5 hours ago

        Nah, don’t take me too seriously, you don’t want Jeremy to puke at all, but I’d rather him puke behind the car than inside the car…

        I just mean to appreciate the randomness of life in general. If you somehow or another came and knocked on my door, I’d probably show you some interesting stuff I found online, and challenge you to try my modded Rubik’s Cube.

        Of course that wouldn’t have been any of your evening plans, I really don’t know what your plans might have actually been, but I’d still be a decent host and try to be welcoming to your company.