r/relationships • u/Internal_Coyote_5548 • 2h ago
I (29M)lost my longtime friend group (29Ms) after feeling excluded. How do I navigate these friendships moving forward?
I’m in my late 20s and had been friends with the same group for years, but over time I started feeling like the outsider. Messages I sent in the group chat would sometimes get ignored, and I was already struggling badly with loneliness.
Around that time, my life had also fallen apart. I lost my job and went through a period where I was basically homeless. Meanwhile, most of my friends had partners and seemed to have stable lives. I wasn’t angry at them for that, but being the single guy struggling while everyone else seemed to be moving forward made me feel even more alone.
I still tried to show up for the group. Last Christmas I bought everyone gifts, and when one friend got sick I organized everyone to get him something. Nobody owed me anything for that. I just genuinely cared about these friendships.
Then one longtime friend got married. Almost everyone else in our group was a groomsman except me.
Honestly, I didn’t care about the title of being in wedding. What hurt was that after years of friendship, nobody acknowledged it. Even a simple “we had to make cuts, but you still matter to me” would have meant a lot.
The wedding was out of state, and with everything I was dealing with emotionally and personally, I couldn’t bring myself to go. I still sent a wedding gift because I cared about him.
The groom barely seemed to care whether I came. What hurts much more now is that I seem to have lost the rest of my friends too. Most barely talk to me anymore, including someone I was especially close with who lives in the same city.
I now have a job and my own place, and I’m finally in a better position in life. But I have virtually no friends. I felt alone before, but now it feels official.
I recognize that I should have communicated with my friend before skipping the wedding rather than withdrawing.
I’m honestly not sure whether I even want to repair these friendships. Part of me misses them, but another part wonders whether I was holding onto friendships that had already become one-sided. How do I decide whether to reach out or move on when I still care about these people but don’t want to feel excluded again?
TL;DR: I skipped a longtime friend’s wedding after years of feeling excluded, during a period when I was struggling with unemployment, housing instability and loneliness. Most of the group has since stopped talking to me. My life is finally improving, but I’ve lost my social circle. I’m unsure whether I want these friendships back. How do I decide whether to reconnect or move forward without them?
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u/CollectionClassic105 2h ago
Group chats are a terrible barometer for this, people scroll past and reply to whoever they happen to be texting that week, so being ignored there says almost nothing about whether they actually want you around. If you want back in, skip the group entirely and text one guy directly with something specific, that's the only channel where you can tell whether the friendship is still there or not.