How do you navigate an imbalanced friendship?

ACEmat
2025-04-09T03:47:16Z

I want to give some context before I get to the meat and potatoes. I (M28) have IRL friends that I communicate and spend time with regularly. However, I do not engage in conversations with them daily. I'm not a texter, or a phone call person. If one of them has a question, or wants to share a meme, I'll respond, but I don't have digital conversations that stretch for hours. I prefer in person communication, and in person I don't shut the fuck up.

Additionally, I do not have any 'Online' friends. All of my friendships are with people I know in real life. I have talked with others on Discord, but again, I don't engage in casual chatter. I'll respond when prompted, but that's about it.

Now that that's out of the way, both of these things kind of got turned on their head in the beginning of November, when I met Alice (F28) through a Roleplaying Discord server. We had kind of eyed each other for a Roleplay session, and it went well. What I wasn't really prepared for, was her poking me in DMs afterwards just to chat. Not really my thing, buuuut, long story short we have now talked every day since then. We wish each other a good morning and good night. Sometimes we talk all day, sometimes we just get a few messages if we're busy. She's the first new friend I've made since high school, and that is a title I don't use lightly. The fact is, I just have zero interest in interacting freely with most people. Typically they end up annoying me in some way.

I'm not shy at all, not particularly introverted, I just really don't like talking to people.

And yet, somehow, I find myself trying to talk to Alice all day. I feel myself growing antsy when I go just a few hours without talking to her. Here's where the imbalance part comes from: Alice isn't like me. She has a group of people she talks with regularly, I'm just one of them. Whereas she is the only person I talk to daily. I completely acknowledge that this is 100% a me problem; I don't want this to come across as me being jealous of her friends. She struggles to balance time between her girlfriend, me, and her other friends, and most of the time I just feel kind of bad for her, like I'm a dog begging for table scraps, and she's trying to appease everybody.

On the other hand, I can also pretty confidently look at our older conversations, and note that we don't talk as much as we used to. Our conversations used to be long and while we still sometimes have longer chats, it's really only when I get her on a tangent involving a particular interest of hers. I don't want to dig too deep into why that is, it could be the 'met someone new' energy has worn off and I'm just not as much of a priority anymore, maybe I became annoying at some point and remain blissfully unaware of it, I dunno.

My question is, how do you handle wanting to spend more time with someone who just cannot spend that time with you?

TL;DR: Made a new friend online, and she doesn't have nearly as much time for me as I have for her.

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~life/1n9j/how_do_you_navigate_an_imbalanced_friendship

Votes: 23

Comments: 12