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.
You could try “I’m going to do this thing on this day. If you would like to join me, I’ll be there at this time. Let me know if you’re coming by (RSVP date) so that I can book you a spot/plate/room: it will be $this much.” And then make your plans and do them anyway.
This way it’s clear that you are doing the thing. If people say “can we do this or this instead?” you reply with “Hey, great idea! Maybe next time. I’ve already planned the other thing for this time.”
Sometimes it will be on your own. Sometimes others will want to join you. Sometimes you can join others on their quests, too, but remember to not try and change their plans to suit yourself.
You could try “I’m going to do this thing on this day. If you would like to join me, I’ll be there at this time. Let me know if you’re coming by (RSVP date) so that I can book you a spot/plate/room: it will be $this much.” And then make your plans and do them anyway.
I thought alot about doing this but I cannot wrap my head around how to actually do that? Like ok I’m gonna try to express some of my mental blocks I have right now:
- I feel rude, I feel like I’m bragging to my friends that I’m doing stuff I know they just won’t do
- If I did this then I’d have to plan for the real possibility of doing an activity alone, that’s gonna bias me towards doing things that might be less social than if I was picking things to do at random
- If I do this than how do I know if I’m being too inflexible when my friends want to make changes? In the past year I tried litterally letting go of everything and just going with the flow for a year straight and I made friends who deep down I don’t think I like, while doing things that were objectivily painful (that is a seperate thing I’m working on I need to excersise more lol). There has to be some sort of goal/point/reason to hanging out with friends and if that is nothing more or less than “I feel good when I’m with my friends” then what do I do when I don’t feel good? Do I change what it takes for me to feel good or do I change my friends?
Wow tying that last bullet point really coalesed what I wanted to ask in this post, thank you <3
making a decision and having an opinion is not rude. And actually, often people are glad that you’ve removed the mental labor and discussion.
It isn’t rude to tell people that you’re doing an activity and that you’re open to having company.
As for being inflexible, you’re doing an activity and inviting people, not finding something to do with people. If they want to do something else, plan to do that a different day, because you’ve already made plans.
it gets reshaped into something I don’t want
It is bizarre that this happens so regularly to you. Could you go into detail, like at least 3 examples of this? What’s going on?
HUGE CONFOUNDING VARIABLE
I am diagnosed with OCD,
That being said I still assert that the changes made are sevear enough that anyone would agree that two plans are not similar:
I summarized a list of ideas for things to do in this comment but this list is a subset of a much larger more specific list (I don’t want to share) so let’s keep using it.
There was a time where I had no idea if I did or did not like any of these activities and wanted to find out if I did and it did not make sense to me to do these activities alone when I can ask friends to come with me because any friend can text me “why didn’t you invite me I would have liked to come”:
- Luxury spas => hang out in a cold basement with candles and facemasks and phone playing
- Guided tours => their average opinion of the concept was negative, I didn’t have the energy to go do that by myself so I just didn’t
- Bar standing => we got older I thought we should try more mature things, they disagreed
- Board games => this was the only plan that stuck, problem is I’m a goal oriented person by nature, even video games don’t intrest me as much as writing code does. I used to be a senior redstone developer in minecraft
- Movies => I don’t really have much free time to discover movies I like enough that I my friends would like too, I mean I’ll find movies that I like but there’s no guarentee that it would be something they like. So when they want to watch a movie (usually at home) they’d default pick the most popular one and when I offer an alternative I get shot down. I watched the MCU series and I don’t like it. I don’t hate it but I wished I had watched other movies
- Shopping => my friends are either broke or paying nyc rent. I guess the world sucks too much anyways and shopping as a friends thing is gone anyways
- Museum standing => my whole body hurts if I stand for >40 mins… I timed it… after 15mins I start walking funny… after 30mins I struggle to hold my head up… if I get dehydrated I loose the ability to banter or be funny. I slowly decay into an unpleasent person and there’s nothing I can do about it
In summary:
me: “Hey let’s do anything”
most of the friends I had: “Come to my apartment”
I know I’m not blowing this out of proportions. I’m alittle more sensitive then the average person and I can compensate for that but what do I do if my limits perclude me from doing things with friends.
inb4 “it sounds like your friends are lame” what are normal people such that they are not like the friends I’ve had??
Apologies in advance if you are disabled, but if you can’t stand for 40 minutes+ then I think the first thing to work on is your endurance. Even if it doesn’t lead to more hang time with your friends, it will be rewarding for you and probably mitigate the chance of early death.
