Talking About Friendships + Relationships
Hello and welcome to some more of my ramblings. Grab a hot beverage of choice and a biscuit - hope you enjoy!
It also doesn't make either of you a bad person. It just means that you guys just aren't compatible in friendship or relationships and that's okay. Life is too short to hope someone is going to change and thing's will work themselves out in that respect. Everyone has different values in a friendship or relationship and if yours don't align with one person, they will align with someone else's and the same goes for the other person.
I was watching Jenn Im on YouTube and she talked about how a major dealbreaker in a friendship for her is when you start becoming a friend that you wouldn't want. Like when you dodge their texts, always flake on them or are just being a generally petty person. In that situation, you have to think 'how would I feel if someone was doing that to me'. It's not nice is it? I've been in that situation before and the best thing to do is to just give each other space, let yourselves breathe because obviously, something isn't quite right and if you keep pushing the friendship, it's only going to bring you both down.
Saying that (and I don't know if its just me) but I think that it's so much harder to have a conversation with a friend about things that are personally affecting you in the relationship than it is to talk to someone who you're in a romantic relationship with. If you're in a relationship and realise that something is off, you can sit down with them and have a talk about either working through it or ending things. But with friends, it can feel more like complaining, or pointless to an extent, and we can tend to take their feelings or emotions more personally.
Why does it feel so much harder to communicate with potentially toxic friends than it is with romantic partners? Honestly, I'm still trying to figure that out. When something goes wrong in a friendship, it's so easy to just cut them out of your life, especially in the world of social media, its just one click and boom. They're blocked/unfollowed/muted/etc. Is that healthy though?
On the one hand, it depends on the circumstances. In friendships, sometimes it is just the healthy thing to do to remove them from your social media feeds for whatever reason. That doesn't mean you have to block them in real life, sometimes removing someone online can lead to more fulfilling and happier time spent face to face.
However, when it comes to 'blocking' someone in real life too, it's not as easy. I think that a big part of this is whether its okay to just cut someone out of your life without talking about it with the other person. Sure, it's easy enough and you might feel better for it in the short-term, but is it going to help you to understand the kind of person you want to be and help you to build better and more fulfilling relationships in the future?
We live in an age where editing, blocking and unblocking, tweeting and so on is just a few clicks away. Social media has unleashed a sense of immediate gratification on whatever it is we're doing online. And since a lot of us spend a lot of our time online and on social media, we can want that immediate gratification to transfer into our day-to-day lives as well and feel frustrated when it doesn't.
Life isn't as clean and as put-together as your instagram feed will have you think. But I know you know that. I feel like we're constantly told that social media is generally a highlight reel of everyone's life and that we shouldn't compare ourselves to it yet we still do. But that's a conversation for another time. I've realised that you can't just cut people out of your real life, just as you would to 'de-clog' your timeline, and go on to have healthy relationships with friends and partners in the future. People may think I'm naive to think I could but I think we're all subconsciously thinking and acting this way without acknowledging it, or at least without realising it.
I'm still working out how to have these conversations with people in a calm and mature way but that's okay. No one is perfect and all you can do is take the lesson and try to be better than the person you were yesterday. Making a conscious effort to understand yourself and what kind of people you want in your life is easier than you might think. Sure, it's uncomfortable but it's so freeing when the people around you fill you with love, support and kindness. Why would you settle for anything other than that?
Obviously, this is just my opinion and what works for me when I'm thinking about what kind of person I am, and who I want to be, around other people. Everyone is different, and people value different things.
I'm fortunate and grateful to have friends around me that encourage, inspire, make me laugh. We pick each other up when we're down and we celebrate our achievements together.
If you've made it this far through my ramblings then thank you haha. Here are the links to some videos that inspired this post:
Jenn Im's Video on Toxic Relationships
Amy Lee's Video on Toxic Friendships
For the past couple of weeks or so I've been researching what it means to be in toxic relationships, how to recognise if your friend is in one and how to help someone, including yourself, out of those situations.
The first thing that has really jumped out to me is how another person affects your behaviour. Its all well and good to point out that someone is abusing your kindness and your trust but I think its also important to be self-reflective and have an awareness of how you are reacting to a situation. If you are usually a happy person but when you're around certain people you feel drained, snappy, or just generally negative and not yourself, then it's not going to be a very fulfilling friendship or relationship.
It also doesn't make either of you a bad person. It just means that you guys just aren't compatible in friendship or relationships and that's okay. Life is too short to hope someone is going to change and thing's will work themselves out in that respect. Everyone has different values in a friendship or relationship and if yours don't align with one person, they will align with someone else's and the same goes for the other person.
I was watching Jenn Im on YouTube and she talked about how a major dealbreaker in a friendship for her is when you start becoming a friend that you wouldn't want. Like when you dodge their texts, always flake on them or are just being a generally petty person. In that situation, you have to think 'how would I feel if someone was doing that to me'. It's not nice is it? I've been in that situation before and the best thing to do is to just give each other space, let yourselves breathe because obviously, something isn't quite right and if you keep pushing the friendship, it's only going to bring you both down.
Saying that (and I don't know if its just me) but I think that it's so much harder to have a conversation with a friend about things that are personally affecting you in the relationship than it is to talk to someone who you're in a romantic relationship with. If you're in a relationship and realise that something is off, you can sit down with them and have a talk about either working through it or ending things. But with friends, it can feel more like complaining, or pointless to an extent, and we can tend to take their feelings or emotions more personally.
Why does it feel so much harder to communicate with potentially toxic friends than it is with romantic partners? Honestly, I'm still trying to figure that out. When something goes wrong in a friendship, it's so easy to just cut them out of your life, especially in the world of social media, its just one click and boom. They're blocked/unfollowed/muted/etc. Is that healthy though?
On the one hand, it depends on the circumstances. In friendships, sometimes it is just the healthy thing to do to remove them from your social media feeds for whatever reason. That doesn't mean you have to block them in real life, sometimes removing someone online can lead to more fulfilling and happier time spent face to face.
However, when it comes to 'blocking' someone in real life too, it's not as easy. I think that a big part of this is whether its okay to just cut someone out of your life without talking about it with the other person. Sure, it's easy enough and you might feel better for it in the short-term, but is it going to help you to understand the kind of person you want to be and help you to build better and more fulfilling relationships in the future?
We live in an age where editing, blocking and unblocking, tweeting and so on is just a few clicks away. Social media has unleashed a sense of immediate gratification on whatever it is we're doing online. And since a lot of us spend a lot of our time online and on social media, we can want that immediate gratification to transfer into our day-to-day lives as well and feel frustrated when it doesn't.
Life isn't as clean and as put-together as your instagram feed will have you think. But I know you know that. I feel like we're constantly told that social media is generally a highlight reel of everyone's life and that we shouldn't compare ourselves to it yet we still do. But that's a conversation for another time. I've realised that you can't just cut people out of your real life, just as you would to 'de-clog' your timeline, and go on to have healthy relationships with friends and partners in the future. People may think I'm naive to think I could but I think we're all subconsciously thinking and acting this way without acknowledging it, or at least without realising it.
I'm still working out how to have these conversations with people in a calm and mature way but that's okay. No one is perfect and all you can do is take the lesson and try to be better than the person you were yesterday. Making a conscious effort to understand yourself and what kind of people you want in your life is easier than you might think. Sure, it's uncomfortable but it's so freeing when the people around you fill you with love, support and kindness. Why would you settle for anything other than that?
Obviously, this is just my opinion and what works for me when I'm thinking about what kind of person I am, and who I want to be, around other people. Everyone is different, and people value different things.
If you've made it this far through my ramblings then thank you haha. Here are the links to some videos that inspired this post:
Jenn Im's Video on Toxic Relationships
Amy Lee's Video on Toxic Friendships
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