I’ve had plenty of friendships fail due to either misunderstandings or the other person simply not being on the same page as I.
I vividly remember one time in elementary school when I annoyed my friend so much that he became furious and yelled at me (I even remember his name! Not gonna tell it, though). This friend of mine, Friend A, loved Minecraft as much as I and spoke with me about it many a time (that’s unrelated to why the friendship fell apart, but it’s the reason I began). One day, during class, I had the fun idea to suddenly grab his shoulder from behind and yell “BOO!”. Oh boy was it funny! The dude flinched so hard he nearly dropped the stuff he was holding! However, he didn’t find it nearly as funny, and told me not to do it again. You can guess what happened after that. After scaring him two or three more times he had enough, which was when he yelled at me and called me names. Friend A and I weren’t on the same page regarding jump scares and he hated me for it because I didn’t take his words seriously.
Thankfully, that was a long time ago… Not to say that I grew out of scaring people for fun—I still love to do it and will try to scare anyone I can—but that the friendship I lost at the time was meaningless, because it wouldn’t have lasted past that year (if I remember correctly, I moved at the end of the school year).
Another example I recall is when Friend B hated me for…messing with his concentration during a competitive game. I’m not going to be too specific, but we were playing a game to win, we had the option to mess with each other’s concentration to an extent, and I took the opportunity. He told me to stop, despite him doing it too, and…we haven’t yet made up. Oh well.
Anyway, the point of all this is to say…don’t put all your eggs in one basket and invest in many friends so that when some inevitably lose their value you have others to fall back on.
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No, of course not (unless that works for you). The point of this is to say that the ultimate survival skills in a social world include the ability to switch between an introverted persona and an extroverted persona so that when friendships inevitably don’t work out, they don’t emotionally affect you…too much.
