Do you ever get frustrated with your friends?

LOL! Thank you for that story. I have indeed felt like that before! I've even from time to time had my parents not understand - and I am grown, married, and live several states away. I feel I put forth a reasonable effort to stay in touch. I am very good with email, texts, instant messaging. If you have access to any or all of those things, I will answer anything you send me. If you rely only on snail mail, I don't have a lot of time. I have some cards staring me in the face right now in fact from older relatives who ONLY send me things through the postal service. I could talk to them every day if they used email or text! It only takes a few minutes and I can ALWAYS spare a few minutes. I can't always go buy a card, find a pen that still works, have 15 minutes to write something, and who knows if I even have a stamp with the correct postage anymore. Not to mention photos are so much easier to send via email or post on a webpage. I am sorry about the situation with your friend. I have some high school friends I have ultimately lost touch with, probably because we have all moved and we all have families. It is a bummer certainly but the priorities of course are our families and jobs and hobbies, sometimes people do grow apart because of those plus geographical distance. I would love to see them or get in touch of course but I know they are busy and they should I know that I am busy. If something works out to not being able to keep the plans I had made, I would try to do something, maybe a quick hour visit, some coffee, maybe a lunch break during the work day, just something small to connect and not jeopardize whatever else was going on so he or she would know they were still valuable and I could still deal with work or my other prior plans. Planning is hard for me - once I have done things like made reservations or checked openings and gotten babysitters lined up for kids, so much work has gone into the planning that to not do what was planned is costly in terms of time AND money lol.

I know, right? Just let me tell you how humbling this can be. I was supposed to pick up a friend's children Friday afternoon for a couple of hours from her job to keep them occupied. I was supposed to pick them up at 4:30. Usually my Friday afternoons are empty. This particular day, I had several clients calling asking me to come to their homes for assistance, so out I go and got into just working. I came home around 7 and then another friend called me and we were just talking randomly and then I mentioned my other friend's name and stopped in mid sentence. "Oh, my God", I said, "I forgot her kids!!!!!!!!" How humiliating is that? Thank God they were with her in the first place and she is kind and loving enough to laugh about it and not hold a grudge. I was/am so crestfallen about the whole incident, I took her a dinner today at lunch with my head bowed, but she is so great and forgave me. We all just get caught up in stuff and don't realize how we are hurting a friend. I am sure that my...uhh..oversight is extreme enough to make me contrite, but it makes us think that maybe even the little things can hurt. You never know what someone else is going through and what they may be feeling, even if it seems like a little something to us. Although this was a minor thing to her and she was so forgiving, it makes me want to be more forgiving toward others, you know? Cause I was sure praying for her to forgive ME! Lol...

All too true! That's why I said frustration, it passes after a little time but it is still well... frustrating in the moment!

That's good! I try to stay in touch but I am not as good at it as I wish I was. I have learned that if you try to do everything well, something suffers. It's better to just choose certain things to focus on and at least accomplish those. As long as I try to get around to everything every month instead of every week or every day, I am doing okay lol.

Thanks. That is frustrating and it might help to mention what's going on to her. I am pretty honest with my best friend if something bothers me. She knows sometimes I was just trying to help too but she has a hard time accepting help even if she is about drowning lol.

I tend to agree with all the comments. Alot of friendships are conditional, rather than unconditional and supportive. I tend to have driften apart from a lot of my friends as they have completely separate lives .

Really? I have never met somebody who has NEVER been frustrated from time to time by their parents, spouses, or children, and those are people to whom you have lifelong loving ties - if you're the average person.

Hehehe! I remember one time when I was about 19 I griped to my mom and told her I hated all of my friends and I thought I should go get new ones. She thought it was kind of a silly thing to say but she did understand where I was coming from. I had one friend for awhile I no longer see at ALL and the reason for that was that she got used to me coming over to see her all the time, I'm talking DAILY. She never wanted to come to my house or meet me anywhere, or take our kids someplace, she wanted me to just come to her house and spend most of my day there. I have older kids and they were both still in high school at the time, and it started to be an issue with some transportation things, so I stopped hanging out with her. Then she got mad at me and decided I purposely did not invite her to my daughter's birthday party! It got to a point where she was whining to my other friends that I was ignoring her but did she bother to PHONE me or drop by or email and let me know? Of course not. I felt bad for a short time but after awhile her attitude got to me.

The problem though is that somebody cannot have it both ways. If they are complaining that they never hear from anybody and then you DO call them or drop by or try to make plans and then they don't act like they enjoy it, then what is it - they LIED about wanting to hear from you? I mean what are you supposed to think??

Sometimes there has to be balance. If you tell them that you've set aside a certain time to get together because that's what will fit into your life, it would be nice for that to be appreciated. I do try to have it be a time that works for both or all of us if there's several people, but after something has been set up, I want to keep it that way so none of us have to completely alter our other plans or our whole days.