[00:00:00] Nina: Welcome to Dear Nina, Conversations About Friendship. So I’m trying this as a video solo episode because I know videos are all the rage. I’m very late to it. I do social media stuff on video, which I only started doing a couple of months ago and got a little more used to it. So I figured I would try as an experiment following the advice of podcast professionals who say you got to get on video.
Now, this is also audio too, of course. So if you are listening on your podcast app, which 99 percent of my listeners will do, you won’t notice any difference. It’s the same experience for you. But if you’re somebody who likes YouTube, then this will be there. Speaking of video, what I want to talk about today started on a video that I saw on TikTok.
I’m going to describe it to you. So don’t worry, you don’t have to find it. I’m going to tell you exactly what happened. And this is something I wrote about on my substack. dearnina.substack.,com. But I know that just a fraction of my listeners read the substack and this essay really, I know, do we call it an essay on sub stack? I don’t know, it really meant a lot to me because it just sort of poured out. And it wasn’t something I planned on writing about.
I called it Don’t Focus on Who Said No and I think I took a different view of what was a really popular TikTok video about a mom, she seemed to be in her mid-thirties and she says that her daughter asked her one day, why do you never do anything with friends? Don’t you wish you had friends? Something along those lines.
Those weren’t the exact words, but that was the sense. It was a young daughter. I got the sense she was like around eight, nine years old.Then the mom explains to us, the TikTok audience, you know, tears in her eyes, that she did have friends once when she was a younger mom, like when she had toddlers and the women that she thought were her friends planned a birthday trip without her to celebrate the birthday of someone.
This mom had been busy trying to organize a birthday party for her, not like a party, but a dinner. She was saying to her daughter, “she” being the woman in the video, I used to have friends and I was on this group chat I wrote in the group chat without the person whose birthday it was so she had made a different chat without that person because she said basically, hey, let’s do something for so and so’s birthday and it was like crickets. Finally, one of the women decided to tell her the truth and said that they were already planning something to celebrate so and so’s birthday and it was actually a trip and that trip was happening right now and she had not been included, she being the mom in the video.
Now, I felt terrible hearing that. I have, of course, been left out in my life both as a kid, a teen, an adult. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t. But this kind of situation was particularly egregious.
Why? Why was it egregious? It is not like people can’t do stuff without everybody. And it’s not unrealistic that some people in a group are going to be closer than others. But to keep a whole group trip from one person is a big effort to undertake. First of all, it also shows that maybe these moms had been doing stuff to make this one woman feel like she was totally part of the group, maybe, but I also really believe we can’t make people feel anything. And it is possible that the woman making the TikTok wasn’t picking up on signs that had been there all along.
So without knowing more, I can’t really opine on that part. The part I do feel comfortable talking about is just commenting on how the woman who made the video said she told her daughter that the lesson on this was never ever leave anyone out. I feel funny about teaching that to a kid because yes, of course, we want our kids to learn all be kind all the time. You know, we do.
Nobody wants our kids to be the kids and we, most adults, don’t want to be the person who is making somebody feel excluded. But I don’t know that that’s the takeaway. The whole thing really bothered me. I mean, yes, I felt terrible for the mom. I’m backing up just a minute. But now you’ve been introduced to the idea that I am going to talk about the fact that I don’t think that’s a great lesson to teach a kid.
It did make me think of when I moved here to Minneapolis 20 years ago, and I was trying to make friends and I was really barking up the wrong tree, and it took me a while to figure that out. And it was so clear that there were women who were not interested in me and at the time and for many years after it kind of hurt my feelings for lack of a better word. I still hate that expression, but it did. I mean that’s I guess how I felt, like they had their hand up like, no thank you, we are not interested. And it’s kind of like this mom maybe it took me a while to get that hint.
Although like I said, we don’t know if in fairness, they were giving that hint or not. We don’t know. I kind of assume so. Because I think for a whole group to plan a trip without her, it’s just not something that people do randomly one day. Like that took a lot of planning. But if I had focused on the people in town who weren’t interested in being friends with me and really just said, you know what, you can’t trust people, people leave you out, they don’t invite you to everything, I just never would have made friends.
I found myself feeling so upset for this mom. I mean first of all, for her very present anguish. When I do the show notes for this, we’ll go back and find the link so that it will be there in the show notes if you want to see it. You’ll see that I don’t have the quotes exactly right, but I’m giving you the sense. The mom, before she gave her lesson to her daughter, said she would be very careful from then on out.
She had promised herself to really not trust any friends with her heart that it would, you know, just hurt her too much and she didn’t want to put her heart out there like that. She didn’t tell that part to her kid, but that was very present when you’re watching it because her daughter does ask the question, who are your friends? Why don’t you spend time with friends?
And her answer to us, the audience is, well, I don’t trust anybody anymore. I hang out with my family basically. And I’m satisfied with that. I just felt like that it’s so sad. And there were all these people in the comments really egging that on and being like, people are horrible and you’re right. And women are vicious. And I mean, not all women are vicious. Talk to any woman who has good friends or friends or casual friends, and they will tell you that not all women are vicious as long as we don’t only focus on the people who rejected us, or who weren’t interested in the first place. You can’t focus on on that, or even the ones who really did leave you out.
Not that you can’t feel the pain and grieve. Because what I saw in this woman’s face, I have felt too. I have had friends break up with me. I’ve had friends disappear without a word, ghost. And then the plenty of much less dramatic drifting.mAnd I am sure I have drifted from people too. That’s just life. People drift and it’s not even personal most of the time. It’s a lot of times circumstantial and just as we get older, we can only keep so many people close. Not realistic.
Getting to the part that disturbed me, I don’t know another way to say it; this idea that the woman in the video said that she is telling her daughter that you have to include everybody all the time. So she’s basically making a choice in front of her daughter to not have friends because she was rejected. And I just wanted to reach into my little Tik Tok screen and say to her, you are worthy of good friends. You’re worthy of at least casual friends. That just because 10 years ago, one group of friends very cruelly planned this trip without you, it does not mean that there are no good friends out there to be had. There are so many lonely people out there who probably would benefit from her friendship; Somebody like her who is sensitive, who has been hurt, who wants to be a good friend and wants to have a good friend.
I believe deep down she wants to have a good friend. She’s saying that she doesn’t really need that. I guess I am totally projecting that I would be lonely. So I would find it hard to live that way because those kids are eventually going to grow up and leave the house.
I think it’s so important. It’s not just, I think, my opinion, Every book, every study about friendship says this, that it is for your physical and mental health, not just mental health, your physical health, personal relationships beyond just your family are really important.
Now let’s tackle that idea that one should teach their children to never ever leave anybody out. It teaches them a couple of things. It teaches them first of all, that if they were to ever get left out, that that’s the worst thing that could possibly happen to them. And then if they do, they’re not really worthy of friendship because it’s kind of what the mom is saying.
Like, Oh, I was left out and now I can’t have friends. And then when you teach your kid that they have so much power, that their decision about whether to hang out with somebody or not is so powerful that it would mean that the person they’re leaving out isn’t worthy of friendship, I mean, we just don’t give people that much power. On either end it’s giving power to other people to say whether we are worthy.
I just don’t think it’s a good idea to even make it normalized, to use an extremely overused word on the internet, especially on social media in particular, that we just fall apart completely and turn our lives upside down when friends do things without us. If we’re going to normalize anything, let’s normalize, I’ve done a whole episode just titled that. It was way earlier. It might’ve been nine. It might’ve been 18. One of, one of those two. And it was called, Friends Will Hang Out Without You. They just will. There’s no question. And we should make it okay. Just like we sometimes want to hang out in smaller groups or just one on one.
Many people cannot tolerate doing things with six people, seven people, eight people, ten people. It’s just a lot all the time. And all these teen friend groups, they’re so big, a lot of them. And then adult friend groups end up really big and it’s a lot. I’ve done a few episodes about these things. One of them was with Dr. Lisa Damour. We focused on teen friend groups. Another one was with Stephanie Sprenger, writer and podcaster. We discussed how involved parents should get or not get in all of the teen stuff and how anxious we get when we know our kids are veering away from friends whose parents will be upset with us that our kid is veering away.
I also did an episode with Ruchi Koval. It was called, I’m Just Not Into This Friendship, which applies to kids and adults. And how do you handle that? How do you handle a natural drifting away, both for you and your friends and for your kids and their friends.
ultimately a theme that comes up in all of those episodes. So that was four episodes. I named, I’m just not into this friendship. Friends will hang out without you. I did the one on teen friend groups and Stephanie and I did the one on how involved parents should be or not and just being anxious about all of that.
And I’ll put those all in the show notes because they’re much longer and I talk about it with other people. It’s not just my opinion, the running theme is that every single person is going to experience being left out.
Most of us as parents are going to experience several ends of it for our children, which is they are going to be left out and they are going to be the ones who want to make a demonstrative choice about their friendship. Depending on their age, we can really only get so involved. Yes, we want them to be kind. Of course we don’t want our kids to be the cruel one. But is it mean to make a decision about who you want to be friends with?
What happened to the mom in the video where they planned this trip and she was, didn’t even know. And here she was thinking she was good enough friends with them to be part of a birthday plan. Maybe not a trip, but at least a dinner or something for this one friend and they’re already celebrating it. Yeah, that’s rough. I’m not talking about something that extreme.
I don’t even have the answer. I’m just posing it out here and we can discuss it more in another episode. How do you teach those of us younger than us and, and frankly, even for us as adults, how do you, without hurting feelings, not be close friends with every single person who crosses your path? And when I tried to wrap up this issue in the newsletter that I wrote, I was talking about my episode with the two women behind Sister I Am With You, that’s Amy Weatherly and Jess Johnston, and we were talking about the courage it really takes to make new friends and especially the courage it takes to make new friends when you’ve been hurt.
Amy said in the episode, go build something. We’re all waiting to be welcomed into a building that already exists, but really there is a lot of beauty in building something brand new. It’s a powerful thing. To be like, this is a gift I can give. Who should I be giving it to? I think people just want friends.
This is still Amy. People want a reason to get together. If you give them that, they will come. But you have to make sure you’re not focusing on the people who said no. That you’re not hell bent on holding on to that. Make sure you’re focused on the one who said yes. Focus on that and you build there.
Gosh, I just love that so much because all these years later, this woman in the video, I mean, it’s not just her. I’m using her as an example because there’s many people out there like her. I hear from a lot of them in my inbox. There’s so much focus on who wasn’t interested, who drifted away, who left, who left you out, who left your kid out. Let’s focus on who said yes. That is where our energy should be.
There’s always going to be people who say no, and we say no to people. We do! It is not possible to take all of our energy and put it towards every single person who asks for coffee, lunch, a walk, calls on the phone. It’s just not possible. We can’t talk to every person every day. That means some people get more of our energy than others at times. I think we have to make that Okay.
So anyway, thank you for being here. I will be back next week with an interview. You won’t have just my voice alone. But sometimes I like to do these solo episodes. I hope you will enjoy continue this discussion with me because I obviously don’t have all the answers and never claim to. I call myself an enthusiast because I love thinking about these topics and hearing what other people have to say and all of us trying to just do better and friendship, be better friends, have better friends.
Thanks for listening. When our friendships are going well, this is no question. We are happier all around. Have a great week.
