Rejected by my high school friends
A young woman feels rejected by her friends from high school.
QUESTION
Hi,
I am 22 years old and recently contacted two of my best friends from high school and they were really rude to me.
I asked them if they wanted to get together and they came up with dumb excuses. I do not know what I did to make them not want to be my friends anymore, and I don’t know if they are just being mean and rude because they want to be.
Can you please help me?
Signed, Abby
ANSWER
Hi Abby,
I’m not sure how long it has been since you had contact with these friends but I suspect that their lack of interest has as much (or more) to do with them than it does with you.
After high school, graduates generally move on to jobs or pursue further educational opportunities. Your friends may be busy with their lives and have no time and/or interest in looking back or reengaging with old friends. Moreover, your friendship with them may have felt more “situational’ to them than it did to you—it was easy to be friends when you were in the same place at the same time.
While their “dumb excuses” may be disappointing, I wouldn’t waste your time trying to figure out why they weren’t responsive. As you know, friendships take two and can’t be forced. Your energies would be better spent focusing on making new friends in your new setting.
Hope this helps.
Best, Irene
Category: MAKING FRIENDS, Renewing old friendships
want to make a friend.
I remember in 2005 I had been out of high school two years(not too long ago). People I considered close in high school were rude and distant, even making fun of me. This was the beginning of a very dark period of my life, and it took years to recover.
I think a key point is we hardly ever get to know others very well in our lives, let alone ourselves. High school was the time we thought we’d finally figured some things out, then comes the world and facing decades ahead of dreams, ambitions, fears, hopes. We change from who we once were, meet new people, learn new things.
From this post there doesn’t seem to be much we can speculate as to why there is such a rude reaction from people you once were close to. Maybe they’re parents of young children and need to be close to their new families? Or if they’re in the last year of college they might be focused on graduating, landing a good job or graduate school acceptance.
One of the problems in understanding what the “real” issue is we only have your perspective. We know nothing about where the other people are at or why they would respond in the way they did. I have a friend who is “borderline personality disorder” and she would complain about everyone in her life but be unwilling to see her personality to be the cause of any of it.
It is hard to realize anyone we thought would not accept and like us change their feeling. You are 22. This is a life-long lesson that goes on throughout the years. Imagine that you come to a place in life where droves of people in your life have no interest in maintaining relationship. Far fetched you say? When my father died in 2008 and being an adopted child, no uncles or aunts left and no cousin has expressed any interest in maintaining any relationship and many long-term friends just are too involved in their own lives to have meaningful relationships with me.
There’s an old saying that if you can count your friends on one-hand your doing good and I believe in that saying. “A true friend is coming in the door when other friends are going out the door.” You are not alone in your quandary. It may not provide any comfort in your time of anguish but your quandary is a normal part of living for many of us…
Hi Abby.
It’s hard to know why your friends weren’t willing or able to get together. You can come up with all the possible reasons in the world, but the only way you’d know for sure is if they told you the reason they can’t get together honestly. Maybe they were truthful and you chalked it up to a dumb reason without giving your friends the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they’ve grown in different directions than you have. Maybe they have different reasons from each other. Maybe you misinterpreted the situation.
You can try again at a less busy time, the holidays are often super busy with personal and professional obligations, if your friends are dating they may also have plans with their significant others’ friends and family.
I wouldn’t give up on my friends if i were in your situation. I’d assume maybe my hurt over their unavailability led me to hear their reasons more harshly than they were delivered. If I reacted defensively or needily, I’d apologize. In the mean time, I’d concentrate of friends who were more availability and keep the lines of communication open unless I was certain I no longer wanted to maintain the friendship. I don’t rarely if ever end friendships because over the lifetime of a long term friendship, there’s often an ebb and flow of energy and intensity.