Friendships are changing

They’re becoming more intense. All the houses are gifting each other Christmas gifts this year, and I’m one of the only people who didn’t give a gift to the friends outside of our house. People in my house made sweets, similar to how they did in previous years, but this time I really do feel like I could have taken some more time to make something or think of something small to give. Maybe I’ll start doing that in future years.

I think in the past, I was lulled into a false sense of security. I already had an SO, so I didn’t care about how I interacted with other people. I felt like even if I was shitty to my friends, even if I didn’t reply to them, or was always late, or didn’t care about their emotions and well being, that as long as I tried my best with my SO, then I would be ok in the long run anyway. I figured that friendships seemed to be fleeting anyway, that in the long run, I probably wouldn’t be talking that much to my friends in the future.

But now, I realize that isn’t the case. I realize that hanging out with my friends is pretty much the only thing that is keeping my life interesting right now. I am more than satisfied with my social life, exhausted even. If I took that away, I would probably safely say that I don’t have a lot going on for me otherwise. I don’t have my own hobbies. I don’t have career ambitions except for getting the next promotion or getting my green card. I don’t have an SO or a family that I’m working towards. And even though I spend a lot of time with friends, I’d have to say that my friends are a lot closer to each other than they are with me. I haven’t especially put in effort to be closer to them, especially not in comparison to my housemates, who make them things and gives them gifts.

So then I should definitely be putting in more effort, and I should be more thankful for the friends that I do have now. I should be making more effort to keep them, and to be nice to them. And I can’t take for granted that they want to hang out with me. Because although that is true now, that can definitely cease to be true in the future. And although that’s a sad fact, if I bother to spend this much time with them now, I might as well put in my full effort, and make the all of it.

It’s useless for me to spend time thinking about things of the past. Exes are fully in the past and objectively would not be useful for me to brood on. It’s clear why we’re not together anymore, and those reasons will stay that way. I was probably living as a braindead person for most of my adult life, being complacent in my friendships and opportunities. I put my eggs in the relationship basket, and they all didn’t work out. Should I have tried harder to keep them? If I think back, I feel that I probably wasn’t going to grow in the relationship. But I’m not sure whether it’s because I didn’t put in the significant effort needed to fix it. But, if I am getting the realization that I’m being complacent in my relationships (both with friendships, family and SOs), then it’s probably something important that I would have needed to learn that I was too immature to learn inside the relationship. I wouldn’t want to be in a 10 year relationship and suddenly realize that I wasn’t investing the effort that I needed to make it last a lifetime. I am grateful that with every relationship I was in, I learned some significant things about myself. Some relationships gave me more revelations than others, but there were learnings all the same. With J, I climbed the very steep learning curve in the short time we had. With A, I think I learned the most thinking about the relationship, but not necessarily while we were together since we were also so brief. I learned that I would probably need to put in a lot of effort to keep someone interested. With M, I think I learned things more slowly, but ultimately I think it was probably the best relationship for me. I do observe qualities in others that I wish he had, but ultimately, I think they don’t really matter as much, and we could have grown together.

It’s fine though. I think that ultimately, my conclusion is that if at the time, I wasn’t aligned with these people, it’s better for me to grow individually and hope to be a better person for future relationships (romantic or otherwise) with people. I know that I haven’t written as much in years as I have in this past year, and although it means more emotional turmoil for me, I also think it means that I’m being more active and cognizant.