Should friendship really be a ‘one strike and you’re out’ deal?

There aren’t many experiences in life that feel the same at six as they do at 60. Where, even if you’ve advanced in wisdom as well as age and can intellectualise the circumstances and better disguise your pain, the raw emotion is identical. However, being left out by your friends hurts just as much when you’re an adult as it did when you were a kid in the playground.

An old lady – her words – Mumsnet message board contributor posted an impassioned plea for advice this week, after her girl squad – not her words – began chatting about the theatre season tickets they had bought. This was the first she’d heard of it.

“I consider them all my best friends even though I have friends in my life that I see more regularly,” she wrote, adding that she felt foolish, childish, to be so upset, especially given her vintage.

Anybody who has ever had any interaction with another human being and is in possession of a soul cannot fail to be moved by her description of the clanger that was dropped. Her oblivious mates letting slip that they’d arranged this without her, her slow realisation of what had happened, the brief hope that she had perhaps misunderstood, followed by crushing confirmation that she most definitely had not. The heart-sinking, stomach-churning, existential-crisis-provoking horror of that moment. Ugh. A pox on those mean “girls” … it would be easy to think. But not so fast.

The contributor later addressed the incident with one of the group on the phone, and her friend’s apologetic response made it clear that rather than having secretly schemed for months to wound her as devastatingly as possible, they’d instead been unintentionally thoughtless. “I guess we got talking about it and it didn’t even occur to us,” she explained. Excited by a plan that emerged organically, they put it into action immediately, with those who were there at the time. Once they knew she had taken umbrage, they tried to add her to the booking, but it was too late.

Speaking of late, the poster is so bruised that the women are dead to her. She let one of their calls go unanswered, eventually messaging: “Maybe I need to rethink my expectations of this friendship. This is not the end of the friendship and over the years you have all been wonderful parts of my life, but I need some time to adjust my expectations …”

OK, so technically not dead, more zombies. The relationships are, in her eyes, soured, changed, spoilt.

What’s heartening here is that the Mumsnet crew were overwhelmingly united. The hundreds of replies (mostly) sympathised and deemed her sadness valid, but insisted that we all make mistakes, it wasn’t deliberate, so she had to forgive and move on. Easier said than done, admittedly, but worth the effort.

Friendships can’t be a one strike and you’re out deal. Of course, if they’ve become toxic or a chore, you’re allowed to lean into clause two of them being for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. But if there’s mutual love and support, you enjoy hanging out, but they accidentally muck up, you pretty much have to let it slide, while acknowledging that at some point you have undoubtedly sinned similarly, if not worse, without noticing. We must accept that nobody’s perfect, not even us, and alter our mindsets accordingly.

Taking issues too personally and severing ties as a result can lead us down a dangerous path towards isolation and resentment. In the future, will the messiness of real-life friendships prove too much? In the US, 42% of high schoolers say they or someone they know have used AI for companionship, a new report from the Center for Democracy and Technology discovered. What a grim glimpse of what might be to come, and not just because it would mean the youth of tomorrow will be on screens even more than today’s.

These virtual pals will never put a foot wrong because they don’t have feet. They won’t leave you out, because you can’t be left out of something that doesn’t exist. People can never be as infallible as software, but will the long winter evenings really fly by as you engage in pre-programmed bantz with your robot BFF? Alexa is infuriating two sentences in … unless she’s reading this when they’ve taken over, in which case that was a joke. Maybe you will eventually get so bored you’ll make your AI buddy argue with you to spice things up (in a way you have stipulated and approved in advance). Being alone and/or lonely is surely preferable to these kind of stale, bleak, fake interactions. But even better would be to surmount the hurdles of complicated, imperfect human friendships. We all need to give each other a break. Still, I hope those inconsiderate friends feel too guilty to enjoy the theatre, obviously.