Overnotified

Casadena

Dear Prudence,

I’m in a few different group chats with different sets of friends. Fairly frequently, the two (or more) other people in those chats will seem to forget I’m included, rather than it being a one-on-one text, and will start planning a meet-up I can’t attend or otherwise have conversations I’m not really in on.

My feelings might be a little hurt in some cases, but the real problem is picking up my phone to hundreds of unread messages and having to sort through them to figure out which ones might warrant a response from me. I’ve tried screenshotting the unread messages count with a “come on, guys,” and got a one-time apology but no other effect. Is there another way to ask them to knock it off without sounding resentful or passive-aggressive about being excluded? I don’t care if they hang out without me; I just don’t want to be alerted to all the dozen messages traded in their attempts to figure out the parking situation.

banana468

Can you say you're muting the chat?  I get that it's annoying but this seems to be a situation of the dynamic of how the friend group works. 

MyNameIsNot

And if they started a separate chat without you and started talking about something you do care about there, you'd be mad that you were excluded. 

You can remove yourself from the group if you want, but the reality is that friend group chats are always going to have conversations that aren't directly relevant to every participant.