Dear Dr. NerdLove,
How do you handle a mutual acquaintance that is just too mutual? I met many friends through my local frisbee club two years ago. The club friendships blossomed into separate gatherings for parties, trivia, and movie watching. These are my main group of people who I love to hang out with……and Tiffany.
Tiffany is a long-standing group member who has known many of my close friends for much longer than I have. She even lives down the street from one of them and works with another. Most group events involve Tiffany in some fashion since she’s close to everybody in the group besides me.
I find it difficult to hang out with her, since she is my total personality opposite. Tiffany is an anxious extrovert, while I am a decisive introvert. I could throw a frisbee around for hours, while she mainly plays frisbee as an excuse to talk to people. Tiffany hates competition and I love trash talk and close games.
Every time I see she’s attending a group event I’m at, I let out a huge sigh. Events with her have been marked by people missing amazing frisbee throws, since she had to show the crowd a video right this second. I was bantering back and forth with a friend in the middle of a course, and Tiffany has to chastise me for being “too mean”. She’s super chatty and has known most of these people 5 years longer than I have. This leads to me feeling left out of conversations, since I don’t know enough to keep up with what’s being discussed.
I know I have no right to kick Tiffany out of the friend group, since she’s not an awful person. I just need a better way to accept we will never be best friends and deal with the fact Tiffany will be at most group events in the foreseeable future.
Overlapping Circles