What To Do When Our Friends Ignore Us?

Do our friends ignore us or is that what we believe? Friendship relationships are different for each person. Some need to see their friends or talk to them almost daily. However, for others, being present at the end-of-the-year dinner is enough.

Still, if we are questioning ourselves, it is because we feel that something is not going right for us.

The truth is, relationships change. It doesn’t matter if they are friends, family or lovers. The reasons why this happens are several: experiences, change of residence, lack of contact…

Therefore, we have to avoid the mythification of the beginning of a relationship: maybe in the beginning there are more intense moments, but that doesn’t determine that they are the best ones.

Now, what we can ask ourselves is whether the relationship evolved to a point where it was no longer recognizable or began to harm us. This reflection will facilitate an intelligent response to how we feel about our perception of the current relationship.

Are our friends really ignoring us?

Difficult answer, isn’t it? We may think that our friends are ignoring us, but is this really true? Let’s look at some situations that can make us choose this option and start mulling over our thoughts in a harmful way:

• We have a job that, far from filling us, empties us completely. We get so bored and spend so many hours at work that when we go out we want to hang out with friends. However, their hours do not coincide with ours and we believe they do not pay us much attention or ignore us when, in reality, there is just a schedule mismatch.

• We hope they take the first step. Maybe it’s because we’re tired of always acting like this. But when we don’t say anything, there is a silence on the part of our friends that makes us feel very lonely.
• We don’t understand that they have other priorities right now. When our friends find a partner or start having children, the priorities are no longer friends. So maybe they ‘put us aside’ just for lack of time and their responsibilities make us no longer a priority for them.

What we must understand is that, as the study ‘On the value of friendship and its potential conflict with morality’ says,  “friendship implies a relationship of affection and mutual care”. If we feel like we only give in the relationship and we don’t get anything, it’s necessary to talk about it.

The importance of expressing what we feel when we believe our friends ignore us

Instead of drowning in a glass of water, whining and feeling bad, it is necessary to express what we are feeling. Tell your friends how you feel. Perhaps the response you will receive will allow you to understand many of the circumstances mentioned above.

Unfortunately, it is possible to hear phrases such as “I made new friends” or “we got farther apart and the relationship is no longer the same”. However, we will have an answer and we will be able to decide how to act: resume/update the relationship or decide to move forward.

Does the friendship in question make sense?

With all of this, we need to pay attention to those situations where our friends ignore us because they don’t want to be with us anymore. Maybe they think we don’t add anything to them, but they don’t tell us that.

Therefore, it is very important to observe how they act once we express what we feel. Do they commit to getting closer and making plans to meet at least once a month?

We have to understand that it’s hard to tell the truth. This also happens to us under certain circumstances.

However, when it affects us directly, it bothers those people we trust so much not to know how to tell us that shared friendship is no longer so important.

Observing what happens will give us the clues to decide whether to invest more in a relationship or, conversely, to end it.

This ability is part of our social intelligence. An intelligence that, like the emotional one, has been ignored for a long time, despite being extremely important.

As we have seen, communication, given the feeling that our friends ignore us, will give us enough information to use the intelligence we are talking about. Also, reading and interpreting each other’s communication well will make the task much easier.

Finally, note that these moments when you think and talk about the relationship, when managed well, often serve to encourage and strengthen the quality of the bond.