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Monday, January 23, 2023

Confronting a mate about selfish behaviour

Tl;dr: long standing mate has selfish behaviour traits. How do I call him out?

I’ve been mates with one of my friends for over 10 years. He’s my best friend and we get on great, he’s suffered from deep depression throughout this time and he has limited friends so I guess at times I’ve been really accommodating towards him to support and give him a social life (he doesn’t like to venture out of his town, so when I go back to my hometown I always have to travel to visit him, always being the one to suggest doing things outside of his comfort zone (although we rarely do these things), listening and being there for him when he feels down etc.). He has been told by others that he is quite selfish, and I guess it does feel like I’m always the one driving the friendship and more recently it’s certainly felt that way.

I guess I suffer from my own mental health issues and sometimes this can make me withdraw from texting people unless it’s specifically to make plans to meet them. It’s bad as I end up feeling lonely and isolated, and it feels like a tough mental barrier to overcome. I last text my best mate almost 4 months ago, but I feel like I need to text him soon as I miss his presence in my life. What does annoy me is that I know it’s bad I just didn’t reply one day (although our last conversation had fizzled out rather than me just dropping it), but he hasn’t checked in on me at all in that period, despite knowing I can at times go missing when it all gets too much. There have been loads of times that he’s maybe been slow at replying over a couple of weeks, but I’ve always checked in on him to make sure he’s ok.

I plan on texting him today, but at some point I do want to raise with him the fact that as much as I will apologise for ‘ignoring’ him, it’s annoyed me that he has equally decided not to message. Is this a rational approach to take?

submitted by /u/Riverblack01
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* This article was originally published here

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