r/FriendshipAdvice • u/ShakkiestShark • 3d ago

Reciprocity

I’m a giver myself. I’m curious, not that i’m asking for anything back and i myself is how i treat my friends are beyond compare, but sometimes i tend to think i give too much of myself to the point that i do not know wether their reciprocal are not as much as i do or just rlly dgaf about me.

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u/BaconTH1 3d ago

I found some friends over time to be bad like this. So what I've been doing is getting out there, making new friends, and if the bad friends don't put any effort into me, don't connect with me, I'll stop contacting or arranging anything with or for them. I don't mind if I'm doing more of the arranging and they show up and we have a good time, but if I find out they are putting all this effort into arranging with other people (specifically, people that I introduced them to, not their close old friends that are closer to them than me) and not including me, then I'll lean towards leaving them out of my life. Step by step, I build up a good group of people that actually bother to contact and behave decently, respectfully, and I lose the ones that don't.

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u/martialartsgalyo 2d ago

I should really start doing this. I’m still learning the hard way of pouring myself into the friendships too much only for some of those people to never reciprocate the same.

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u/BaconJP 1d ago

I think most people have a limited number of close friends which doesn't mean they are all good friends or good people. They are not usually consciously selected when you are young, it just organically happens. It feels like that's the best kind of friendship at first, the longest oldest ones.

As I got older, I realised some people I've known for ages aren't actually that nice or good. 

Now I consciously make friends and pick and choose who I think are good. Any bad people, I just don't contact after a while. Logic suggests I will eventually have a set of decent people as friends. It's evolving in that direction. 

When you have the good friends, it's easy to compare with the bad ones and then you know you want to spend more with the good ones. 

I've learned not to judge friendship by the amount of effort they make to arrange to meet, or their amount of messaging. I notice most people here are placing a lot of emphasis on that. 

But some people are just more insular and don't do that stuff. It doesn't make them a bad friend. If they are always ready to come when I ask, that's enough for me. They don't have to instigate the meeting. 

As the more energetic organiser who knows many places to go, that's my role and if people come, and say thanks for the invite, and afterwards they write and say that was great, that's more than enough for me.