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.

  • danhab99@programming.devOP
    3·
    4 days ago

    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??

    • Flagstaff@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      what are normal people such that they are not like the friends I’ve had??

      It does not matter if you have OCD or not; these people seem to consistently not care about your suggestions. If I tell my friends, “I really wanna play Space Base,” then we make it happen.

      These people sound like the type who would not check up on you if you just suddenly stopped responding, and those are not friends. I would try to make new friends elsewhere… Sorry!