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Is friendship bad?
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I have no friends, for I am several abyssal frogs in a trench coat.
Thus, I can only conclude friendship is, in fact, good - but people are very sour grapes about it.
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Friendship, like any kind of relationship begins with yourself. Setting healthy boundaries is part of that foundation.
So, if you have built a healthy friendship with yourself and respect your own boundaries, your friends will also respect your boundaries. If they don’t, they aren’t good friends and you don’t have to keep that friendship.
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People get too caught up in this shit. Yes, I have MU friends. I think I handle those relationships pretty well ethically but if I didn’t, genuinely didn’t and not just someone being pissy because I don’t negotiate with emotional terrorists, then you can vote with you feet or, hell, even talk to me or talk to someone else who staffs with me about your concerns. Because I think we can all have blind spots and if I am fucking up, I definitely am not intending to do so I want to know to correct whatever mistake I am making.
I know that easier said than done. I know there are people who find even talking with staff about small issues to be incredibly intimidating but I hope to reach a point where people would feel comfortable offering legit feedback even if it leads to a disagreement.
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Honestly, this is true of even the closest IRL friends I have. Sometimes, life gets in the way! Or sometimes, one or two of the group is super into a game that others aren’t, and so we don’t see them for awhile.
Or hell, sometimes depression just eats people, and you gotta give 'em the space to recover while occasionally poking them to make sure they know you’re there if they need you.
Friends in mushing works the same way. When I have a positive experience with someone, I tend to consider them a friend. If we don’t play for a few months or years, they’re not any different than a friend who just had a baby and needed to focus on family. As long as people aren’t jerks, they remain my friends, no matter how much time has elapsed.
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I’m a working person with a full time job that just took on a side gig so I can get ahead, a parent, a spouse. Idk who has time to worry about other people’s friendships.
My internet friends are my friends. If I stopped being friends with them, I’d have a whole hell of a lot less friends and that just seems silly when you’re an adult and making friends is hard as hell???
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i mean if you have a long enough view, every friendship ends badly
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I admit I was trolling just a little bit with the title and then I got distracted by dinner. But I do have some thoughts about it.
I get this feeling that there’s the part of the MU world that looks down on friendship - like if you’re RPing with people you’re not allowed to also like them because… reasons?
And of course, one of the things about friends is they tend to have similar-ish opinions, and so if you don’t agree with someone on a subject you may well not agree with their friends. And suddenly, cliques are born, where clique == group of people that you aren’t in.
Staff, of course, are not allowed friends because they staff out of the goodness of their hearts, but they must not enjoy it because if you enjoy something then you might be tempted to do more things for the people that you enjoy doing things for and then that’s favouritism.
I dunno, I thought I had a point, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen an online community be so split about the idea of being friends with people you spend time with.
I’m on the side of friendship good, in case that wasn’t clear. A friend is someone I want to spend time with and share experiences with. Sometimes I feel we’ve got so lost in the weeds of “everyone must be equal in their fun having” that we forget that we’re adults with lives and jobs and we do this in our spare time. I want to spend my spare time with my friends, not with people I keep at arm’s length.
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Friendship is magic, and it’s the real treasure we found.
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The real treasure was the coin I wasn’t auto-splitting with the group and no one noticed.
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There is also something I learned some years ago. And that was to stop trying to be everyone’s friend because you don’t like where you’re at in life.
And I liken it slightly to the idea of getting into a relationship with someone. Are you doing it because you actually like/care about them or are you doing it for yourself because you don’t want to be by yourself.
It’ll sound stupid and cliche, but you gotta like yourself before you can try to expand that outwardly. So while I say I wouldn’t mind having more friends in my life, because, well, I don’t think that’s a terrible thing to want, I’m also perfectly content if that doesn’t happen.
I may be depressed, but at least these days I don’t completely hate myself. I was surprised by how many more people I found in my life once I got past that hurdle.
We all deserve to love ourselves, even if I know it can be the hardest ever to do.
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@Solstice said in Is friendship bad?:
The real treasure was the coin I wasn’t auto-splitting with the group and no one noticed.
This hits home so hard for me as someone who spent 20 years on MUDs.
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I’ve developed a very sensitive NOPE reflex over the years, which might be why I’ve grown with like two close friends from back when we all sucked at boundaries (both incoming and outgoing), but neither of them really MU anymore.
It does make joining games a little less fun, honestly.
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Clique is a word that has lost all meaning, to the point where trying to use it when it’s actually applicable means it just gets lost in the noise of everyone and their dog referring to any friend group (or in a lot of cases, perceived friend group that may or may not exist) of which they’re not a part as a clique.
To some degree I can understand why it happens, but it’s a big personal peeve, and it does indeed compound the idea that being friends with people in this hobby is in some way a bad thing that must be justified, but which will always be seen as slightly shady, particularly if any of those friends is in some sort of authoritative position (or, heaven forbid, most/all of them).
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Friendship is not bad.
Friendship is amazing.
Being an exclusionary twit, that is bad.
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I’ve got friends. Even one or two from MUing. As a matter of course I never deal with them ‘professionally’ in any capacity, MU or RL.
That’s how I keep friends.
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it’s still bad
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