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Having your own big group of friends is seen as a cultural marker of success. But what if it doesn’t come naturally? And what if it never has?
grainy face on the laptop screen, my own bathed in the pink glow of my bedroom lamp. She opens her mouth slightly, as if I’m about to impart something serious.
I pause, trying to find the right words.
“I don’t like hanging out with loads of people. I don’t like hanging out with… more than two, maybe three at a time. ” Another pause.
“When sober, at least. ” My therapist’s face doesn’t move. And then she shrugs.
“So don’t hang out with more than two or three people. ”“But, also. Don’t you think it’s a bit weird? It’s a good thing to have a big friendship group, right?
Isn’t that, like, a measure of success? I know people who had 15 bridesmaids. And they’re going on all these hen parties and holidays and everything’s done together in this big, amorphous… mass! ” I spit out that last word like it’s dirty.
“No, I have friends. I just like seeing them separately, or in tight little groups. ” Something flits across my therapist’s face. I realise that I am describing what could be called a non-issue.
Hardly a crisis. I’m reminded of one of the cast members onwho started crying at a dinner table because she had no real problems.
“Daisy. The thing about all of this,” – I’m assuming she means life – “is that for the most part, we get to choose what we do. ”There’s no time to meditate on this, our 50 minutes are up. I slam the laptop shut, feeling vaguely dissatisfied.
It wasn’t that what she was saying wasn’t correct. It was that she didn’t quite answer my question, or get to the crux of what I was worried about. That I’m weird for not wanting a big friendship group.
That the anxiety I feel in such scenarios – a combination of feeling trapped, self-conscious and generally unlike myself; a sensation I have felt since I was a child – suggests I have failed at what is supposed to come most naturally: being human. Being normal. Being likeable. As with most people, the notion that everyone can and should have a big friendship group was etched into my cultural consciousness early.
People meet these friends while at school, or university, or early on in their working life, and they stick with them. I havefriendship groups that are just like this. But I’ve never been able to sustain the constant connectedness that acts as their glue over a long period of time.
“Well, we’re going to the party without you! ” I can still remember one friend huffing down the phone, when I skipped out on yet another event. Another time: downing two G&Ts before an eight-person dinner, just so I could get through it. Another time: the feeling of horror that bloomed in my gut when I received a WhatsApp asking if I wanted to join a big group trip to an absolutely gorgeous tumbledown villa in southern Italy.
Why did I react this way, I wondered? Not for the first time. I’ve never had a problem making friends. Rather, I’ve often amassed friends from all different walks of life.
In my late teens, I used to hang out with a very small bald man in his 50s who wore a jabot and worked at a television company. In my early 20s, two of my closest friends were Finnish twins who were a decade or so my senior. I was once good friends with a young man in atribute band. He performed as Louis Tomlinson and could do backflips.
On a recent trip to Saint-Tropez, I befriended a baroness from the Hamptons who was probably nearing 80. We took photos of each other in the town square and laughed a lot. But to imagine gathering these people together in the same room isn’t just uncomfortable, it’s daunting, inconceivable. How would I give them all my full attention?
Again, what is wrong with me? Years ago, I appeared on Jeremy Vine’s radio show to discuss being an only child, and how I believed it had made me inherently self-centred. Part of my argument was my need to spend a lot of time alone – how I loathe being in big groups. Afterwards, I received upwards of 50 emails and Instagram DMs from strangers saying that I sounded.
That they too found it harder to mask when surrounded by multiple people. That the act of group socialising was exhausting. I replied to some of these people saying that I didn’t fit all the criteria. My wife’s autistic, and she hates the sound of ambulances.
I don’t mind the sound of ambulances!
“Sounds like something someone autistic would say,” one of the strangers replied. Even so, I remained unconvinced. Does labelling a problem make it less of a problem, I wondered? I still don’t have answers to many of these questions.
As I’ve settled into my 30s, I’ve tried hard to make peace with the fact that I don’t have – and, crucially, don’t want – a big friendship group. That my life doesn’t look like the TV shows and films I was raised on as a child. That, despite forcing myself into umpteen scenarios in which I am part of a coterie, it’s not where I feel most myself, or where others truly get the best of me.
I’ve said no to the joint trips, and the. I’ve said: “I can’t make that, but I’d love to catch up, just us. ” I may have expressed to my therapist that I’m concerned about this aspect of my personality. But there’s a bigger part of me, perhaps, that knows it doesn’t really matter.
Not in the grand scheme of things. Recently, I had dinner and then drinks with a close friend. We spoke for hours, late into the night, and then meandered home in the balmy orange air of a city on the brink of summertime. Afterwards, at home, pulling on my sleep mask, I felt completely at ease with the world.
I didn’t feel drained in the way I would had we met for a huge and sprawling picnic, where I couldn’t hear anyone, and didn’t know what to do with my legs, and was worried about saying the wrong thing. My therapist had a point, I conceded. We choose what we do. It’s only now that I’m properly leaning into that.
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