Complaint Containment

So, to preface, I’m kind of unusual in that I’ve always had a few relatively close friendships where–and I never intended this–basically, to the extent I had any more arm’s-length relationships with other people that I’m not so close to, the people I am close to do kind of relationship management, i.e. I tend to have the fewer, relatively closer relationships and their friends just kind of stay friends of friends and I don’t typically hang out with them without the relatively close friend of mine.

SO, my point is that I don’t have a lot of direct experience with this, but I’m told it’s a thing in Minnesota that, if you move to Minnesota from elsewhere, people will be really nice to you at work or at the bar or whatever, but it can be really hard to get an invite back to their place because Minnesotans tend to just hang out with their high-school friends forever.

So, to the extent that’s true, I want to talk about my relationship with my high-school friends as a Minnesotan.

I had, I believe, as many as four actual friends in high school, not counting my siblings and their friends. (I didn’t tend to hang out with my older sister but I did tend to hang out with my younger brother.) I’m going to resist the temptation here to kind of give a summary of my relationship with each of them, but in general we were kind of “alternative” kids or whatever–kind of the Bad News Bears or whatever. I’m trying to think if any of us took any extracurriculars or anything. I know the one became an Eagle Scout, so there’s that. Back then, you couldn’t become an influencer; if you wanted people to give a care about you that way, you had to start a band as far as we were concerned, so there was a lot (or at least more than average) of involvement in the music scene. We wore a lot of black band t-shirts.

I’ve pretty much lost touch with all of them by now. I’m “not a people person” and have had to learn a lot cognitively/intellectually about how relationships work through things like therapy in the meantime–after the age of 30 in particular. A big thing for me is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People‘s “emotional bank account,” which uses the analogy of, you guessed it, a bank account to explain how you have to work to understand a person and what constitutes a “deposit” or a “withdrawal” to them so that you make more “deposits” than “withdrawals” so you don’t become “overdrawn,” i.e. so that you don’t lose their trust and interest and stuff by doing stuff they don’t like. I guess I didn’t always do that.¹ Some of it is a little mysterious and none of them ever gave me any kind of closure or whatever–I never had a falling out with any of them. It’s just stuff like… well, obviously when the one joined the Army and moved the heck away and I didn’t try to, like, write him or anything. That wasn’t an intentional act on my part; again, I just wasn’t thinking practically about how relationships work.

Mainly, what I think it is is that most of them got busy with work and family and hobbies or whatever. The one, who I’ll probably post (tastefully) about later, I think is still on disability, so it’s a little different, but she was going to go to school and things when she… actually “kind of” assaulted me the last time we talked. A lot of it falls under the header of I wasn’t developing, like, a real, like, adult, productive, independent life in common with them, which, incidentally, is part of why I’m in school as a “post-traditional student” now at this late stage.

I decline to go into the specific state of my friendships now, but it suffices to say I’m kind of repeating the same pattern of having fewer, closer friends who manage relationships with friends of friends, which I’m trying to think of a way out of. I’ve been pretty cool with people at work for almost 10 years; it’s a story for another post what my work persona used to be as a huge introvert. In particular, my biggest, like, “friend goals” or whatever is to make more intellectually driven friendships at school and the discussion groups I go to and things. I’m a huge introvert, though, haha…

1. For example, in, like, 2019, I remembered wistfully listening to a lot of the band the Cure with my one friend back in the day and he kind of grimaced, indicating he never liked that–that was something he was always just putting up with. ↩︎