I've been friends with this girl for 10+ years. I consider her to be a good friend but I'm not sure how to handle this issue without really offending her.
Basically, I feel she wants to hang out too much. I work full time in a a patient facing job, with a long commute and it's often mentally exhausting. By the time I get home in the evenings and eat and do all my daily chores, I just want to relax on the couch with my boyfriend and dog. I spend most of my day talking so I want my evenings to be chilled out and peaceful.
My friend is lovely, she's a great person and I feel so bad that I'm even having this problem. I graduated from college around four years ago and have been working full time since, so I'm pretty used to the daily grind and know my limits for how much interaction I'm willing to have with others. I struggle sometimes with work-life balance so my time off is super important to me. She knows how demanding my work is, and how precious my free time is.
My friend started college a little later and just graduated this summer. She doesn't yet have a job so her time is free to do all this fun stuff. She doesn't get that I don't have the same energy as her to do stuff in the evenings. She'll ask me a few times a week to the movies, dinner, musicals etc, even though she knows I'm not interested in musicals. Or she'll invite me to her house. Oh you can't come over? I'll come to yours! Once she stayed until after midnight even though she knew my boyfriend and I were both working the next day. We were both obviously tired and yawning for a while before she took the hint and left.
Her profession is also a challenging one, and I understand that she lived and breathed her college course for the past few years, but no matter what the subject, we'll always arrive back to her job. Every. Single. Time. I can't bring g much to these conversations as our jobs are like chalk and cheese. To be quite honest, she just seems to be a bit unaware of the expectations and boundaries of an adult friendship. She has lots of other friends too so it's not as if she depends on me as her main social outlet. The funny thing is if I text her and she's unavailable, she'll reply with a quick "sorry I can't talk, I'm doing x".
So my question is: how can I kindly convey to my demanding friend that I'm not available or able to hang out so frequently?
TL;DR friend knows I don't have much free time but constantly wants to hang out. Suggestions on how to deal with it kindly but also getting the point across?
Submitted November 27, 2018 at 05:12AM by delzerk https://ift.tt/2PZvmtA
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