Dear Prudence,
The emerging post-pandemic world has me thinking about friendships. Most of the people I hung out with in the past few years have been my partner’s friends. I think they are my friends now as well, but it does strike me as being not great that all of our socializing comes from her end. Before the pandemic, when I socialized, I was the organizer and not the invited person an overwhelming majority of the time. This has always annoyed me to varying degrees. I have tried pointing it out to people but not with much success. My partner has noted that some of my friends can be even more introverted than I am, but I recently wished a friend happy birthday and noted it has been a long time since we saw each other and the friend did not seem to pick up on the hint that it meant maybe we should hang out and catch up. One thing that I do wonder about is if people find me too intense on certain subjects. For example, multiple people have told me at various times that they appreciate how deeply I think about politics and social issues. I always wonder this comes with a not-spoken caveat of “but this is also why you are not necessarily good at parties and need to be handled in small doses.” As the pandemic slowly ends, this is something that I would like to change, but I am also now middle-aged and this has been my social life more or less since college. I am not sure how it changes.
— Semi-Introverted