So I have this friend. We met irl, but live in different cities, so we mostly communicate through facebook So, for the past couple months, he's been making a habit of not seeing my messages unless they're sent while he's online, sometimes not even then (tho that could maybe be attributed to fb's tendency to have people marked as "active now" for a few minutes after they've closed the app) And I basically can't tell if he's ignoring me on purpose or by accident. On the one hand I always see (and reply to) all of my messages both when I use the website and when I'm restricted to the app, this is also true for most of my friends On the other hand, I'm pretty sure he's got a lot more online friends, and get a lot more messages, than anyone else I know, and I think he's been having some mental health stuff lately And either of those could be a reason why he hasn't seen my messages, but they could also be why he might deliberately choose not to waste time and energy on me. (tbh I don't really get why he bothered to be friends with me in the first place) And I've been the person who keeps trying to get in touch with someone who's trying to cut them off before. Because they wouldn't say so directly and I didn't take the hint until someone else told me. And I don't want to be doing that again, but I also don't want to be assuming someone's ignoring me when they're not And I can't ask him directly, because people aren't honest about stuff like that, and it would be kind of really manipulative Please help?
@overpants-anon Trying to work out if people are avoiding you without asking in some way is pretty well impossible. =/ I get your dilemma entirely. Maybe you could send something like 'Hey I've noticed you've been quieter than usual lately, everything okay?', which gives him a chance to talk about any problems that might be bothering him if he wants to. The trouble with that comes if he responds with something like 'I'm fine', because then you still can't assume he's deliberately ignoring you (he might just not want to talk about any issues) but it probably wouldn't be great to subsequently go 'well in that case would you like me to fuck off and stop talking to you'. Although, if you state outright that something has been bothering you, and that you're going to be completely honest about it and would like him to be too, and he agrees to that, then you can get away with saying things like that, though possibly worded differently. You just have to prepare the ground. Mostly what I would say is don't assume anything, because when I assume things in that sort of situation they are pretty well invariably a long way off the mark- especially if, as your statement about wondering why he bothers to be friends in the first place suggests, you're kind of insecure about things. He probably wanted to be friends because he liked you.
Yeah, there isn't much you can do without flat out asking. I have trouble with this sometimes too. It might also be a personal quirk of his? I have a friend who just avoids answering all of her messages unless it's marked urgent somehow, because of stress. And it's actually pretty frustrating, but since I know that's a thing she does, I can usually assume she's not mad at me.
It seems like he's just been busy, and will probably continue being busy for a while, but at least that probably means that I haven't done anything wrong (except freak out over nothing, I should probably work on avoiding that)
