My Ex-Girlfriend Had a Particular Way of Ruining My Nights Out With Friends. I Should’ve Seen It Coming.

Unhinged Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus. Unhinged is Slate’s advice column on the wild world of modern dating. Have a dating question of your own? Send it to Steffi here. It’s anonymous! Dear Unhinged, I’m a straight man in my 20s who recently came out of a short-lived relationship. We were together for about five months. What ended up being our breaking point was her lack of friends. I have a robust friend group, made up of people I went to high school and college with (I went to schools near the city we currently live in). Meanwhile, she moved away, and while she has some friendships back home, she had very few people she knew where we lived other than a few co-workers. At first, I thought this was a bit of a red flag, but I brushed it off as a consequence of her being newish to the area (she’s been living here for three years). Well, this kept coming up throughout our relationship. I have an active social life and she didn’t. I tried to include her in my plans as much as I could, but sometimes it’s nice to just see your buddies without your significant other, and I encouraged her to do the same. But it got to a point where she was giving me a hard time whenever I made social plans without her, and she’d really put a damper on those nights by texting me throughout about how bored/sad she was to be alone. I finally broke up with her because I realized I really value someone who has their own friends and who can give me some room to breathe. How can I look out for this as I continue to date? Is not having established strong friendships always a red flag? I don’t want to write people off without giving them a chance, but I feel pretty burned for having ignored what I saw as a warning sign. Is there a world where I could’ve done better to encourage her to find her people out there beyond our relationship? —Social Ties Dear Social Ties, There are plenty of people in this world who navigate seasons without a support system. Sometimes it’s temporary. Sometimes it’s symptomatic of a long-standing character trait, or deep-rooted anxiety. Life can get really lonely sometimes, and as beings who require community and connection, the loneliness can so often feel damning and like a referendum on our likability. This is also, with all due respect to your ex, not anyone else’s problem. It was your ex’s responsibility to stop and think, “You know what? This version of life kind of blows, and I don’t want to live like this anymore!” I hope you already know this, but I want to underline just how unfair it was of her to expect you, someone she’d only been with for five months, to fix her problems for her. You included her in your plans when you could, and you encouraged her to make her own when you couldn’t. You weren’t going to single-handedly vanquish the demons she’d been dealing with for years. I spoke with Elijah, 30, who once was in a similar relationship. He has a core group of friends, but started dating someone who did not. It led to growing resentment and eventually a breakup, and that experience now informs how he dates other people. His recommendation is to always notice the first red flag and keep it in the back of your mind, then take action when it rears its head again. “You can give it a little bit, if it’s a temporary blip because their friend is on sabbatical or something, if their system is temporarily offline, but if it becomes a pattern and you don’t see them making meaningful steps to remedy it without your help, I would run—not walk—in the other direction,” he said. In his previous relationship, Elijah said that at first, it was hard to tell that his ex had a very scant support system outside of him. “I was so immediately and urgently smitten by this person that our first date was 38 hours long,” he recalled to me. “I think they gave me a key to their apartment on our third or fourth date. We got matching tattoos on our hands two or three months into dating. At first, I thought they were The One. Perhaps they were putting on a bit of a show, or I was overlooking red flags because I had such a big crush. At the beginning, they had one good friend, their apartment was clean and tidy, and I was like, OK, this is what we can expect.” It wasn’t until later on that the relationship took a turn. Their ex’s one good friend moved away, and Elijah slowly started to recognize that they had no one else around but him. The apartment became slovenly. There was always some kind of crisis going on, and Elijah was the only person they felt they could lean on. And while he recognized that there was a very real mental health issue brewing, his ex refused to expand their support system and didn’t want to try therapy. It all became too much to bear. “I became boyfriend, best friend, therapist, cook, laundry person—everything. Of course, I started to burn out and become resentful, and they became shameful and guilty,” he said. “We entered this loop for six months or so. Eventually, I was just at the end of my rope, and I was just a shell of my former self. I had to work up the courage to break up with them.” Now, he said it’s something that he looks out for constantly when dating new people. “It’s something I ask immediately: Tell me about your friends. What do you do when you get sad or stressed or angry?” he said. “I don’t want to be anyone’s caretaker.” I understand the desire to date with the hope that you can avoid this scenario again at all costs, but you’ll need time to see how some of these answers look in practice. Some data points can only be collected after you’ve known each other for a while, and there isn’t as much pressure to show only the shiniest version of yourself to each other. How do they talk about their friends? How do they show up for other people when the stakes are objectively low (i.e., would they go out of their way to pick someone up from the airport)? How do they maintain connections that are not convenient? These are all pieces of information you can use to decide whether you’re compatible in the long run. Still, asking a few questions like Elijah can be helpful when you’re getting to know someone. The answers can be illuminating—not necessarily because the person you’re seeing will always be honest, but because it’ll help you understand how this person wants to feel about themselves and their life. Personally, I would generally be cautious if someone has no interest in building platonic intimacy with others, or doesn’t understand its significance. That’s more important than the sheer number of people in their life. Someone can have a lot of friends but not know them very well, and other people can have a few very good friends who show up for each other often and in tangible ways. I also think someone who is actively trying to put themselves out there to meet new friends is someone worth rooting for. They have to want to build that community for themselves, though. Amanda, 27, has been with her long-term partner for many years and has watched him grow from being a person without very many friendships to someone who is actively trying to be better about having people to turn to outside their relationship. She pointed out that this dynamic feels incredibly gendered: There’s the trope of husbands whose friends are their wives’ friends’ husbands, of boyfriends who have no idea how to ask their buddies personal questions about their lives, and of the discoursed-to-death male loneliness epidemic. But she noted that it happens both ways, especially in heteronormative relationship dynamics, where there is a lot of social pressure to be each other’s “better half ” or their “everything.” “There are not an insignificant number of women who do not know how to form female friendships, because they have always been taught in life, either by society or their families or their friends or their environment, that the No. 1 priority in relationship-building should always be romantic,” she said. “That’s difficult to unlearn.” Part of the change happened because Amanda’s partner saw how much Amanda could rely on other people in hard times, and how stabilizing it was for her mental health to have a community she could turn to. He wanted that for himself. But that was the key: He decided to make the change. He got a new job he was excited about, met people he liked at work, and slowly started to form a network of people. “You have to be open to friendship,” she said. “But I think a lot of people don’t even know what they’re missing. Not to be like, ‘the power of friendship,’ but if I didn’t have my friends, I would be dead, which is why it saddens me that there are people who don’t understand why it’s important to have friends. Romantic relationships aren’t everything.” So, Social Ties, just like your ex couldn’t have asked you to hold up the sky for her, you couldn’t have asked her to go on this journey for your sake. Rest assured that there was nothing you could’ve done to change this person. This kind of change is difficult, because making friends can feel really scary. It requires being open to rejection, failure, embarrassment, and deep moments of awkwardness. All the things that love requires, too. Advice Dating and Relationships Friendship