Dear Prudence,
I have a best friend “Bella” who is a lovely person, and also very highly strung and easily overwhelmed. For context, Bella has what I would classify as a busy but not usually excessively burdensome workload; she works part-time and is finishing grad school for education, which is the same schedule I kept a few years ago and certainly found challenging, but perhaps easier to handle than Bella seems to find it. Of course, everyone’s threshold is different, and we never know everything that is going on in even our closest friend’s lives, so I sympathize and am very patient when she needs reassurances and support, but have gotten admittedly annoyed on occasion. Bella has often struggled to answer texts in a timely manner.
She will put her phone on Do Not Disturb to avoid seeing messages at a bad time and then just never see them, or she will see them and get stressed and put off answering for a long time while she takes care of other things and only answer long after things are relevant. Or she’ll just forget. She gets especially stressed when a group text chain fills up quickly when our friends are making plans and will just not read them because she sees she missed 30 texts and taps out. She is then confused and her partner or I will have to do a synopsis for her. I think she sensed that I was a bit frustrated with not getting responses to texts (I am careful to avoid texting too much and try to reserve texting her for when I need confirmation of or have questions about plans or otherwise have something very important to say, so yes, I do get frustrated when important texts go unanswered), because she told me once unprompted that she was sorry to miss so many texts and said that she didn’t mean too but just got inundated at times and couldn’t deal. I appreciated that and I wasn’t all that fussed to begin with.
I recently bought two tickets to see a comedy show in about three weeks. I will often buy two tickets to shows I am going to when I can so that I can invite a friend and treat them. I thought Bella might want to go and I wanted to hang out, so I texted her the details and asked if she was interested. I didn’t get a response for over four days and honestly, I didn’t feel like checking up about this again or having to work so hard to get her to do something with me. I ended up asking another friend, “Giselle”, who told me within minutes she could make it and was excited to go. The next time I saw Bella (about a week after I texted her) was the first time she mentioned the texts, and she said she would like to attend the show I’d told her about. Unfortunately, I had to tell her that the ticket had been passed on. Bella had tears in her eyes when she said she understood, and now I feel really bad. Was I wrong to invite someone else so quickly or not follow up with her before doing so? What could I have done differently to avoid hurt feelings and frustration? How can we avoid these kinds of misunderstandings in the future?
—Texting Troubles