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How to Not Feel Neglected in Conversations with Friends (and Why Sometimes TMI is a Good Thing) · Friendship IRL: Real Talk About Friendship, Community, and What It Actually Takes

• 0:02
  Podcast Intro/Outro: All right, gang. Here's to nights that turn into mornings and friends that turn into family. Cheers. Hello, hello, and welcome to the Friendship IRL podcast. I'm your host, Alex Alexander. Each week we talk about what is working(and what is not) in our friendships, community and connections. Have you ever wished you could sit down and have a conversation about what is really going on in your friendships? Well, you found your people. Join us as we dive into real life stories and explore new ways to approach these connections. Together, we're reimagining the rules of friendship.
• 0:57
  Alex Alexander: Hi, friends. It has been a few weeks. I am so excited to be back here with you like truly, if you have not tuned in at the past few weeks, there have been some replays of episodes. It's because I needed a little break. I needed a moment. We're almost to 150 episodes. I've taken very few breaks, and I just needed a second to get my inspiration back, and it is back full force.
• 1:22
  Alex Alexander: I'm happy to report. I'm very excited. I have a whole list of episodes for the rest of the year into 2026.
• 1:32
  Alex Alexander: But those replays, I didn't just pick those at random, by the way, if you haven't listened to those, those are what I would consider some of my most like foundational episodes. They're the ones that I'm always sending you back to listen to. So if you've never listened to them, there they are. They're all together, clumped in one little bunch in the episodes before this. But we're ready. We're gonna dive in, and today we're gonna talk about a feeling.
• 2:04
  Alex Alexander: That, gosh, I would bet a lot of money. I bet a lot of money that pretty much almost every person on earth has felt this way at one point or another. I think this is such a universal feeling, and that feeling is that you have just left to hang out, a party, a meeting, a gathering, a conversation, a text conversation. It could be really anything. You've left an interaction with somebody else, and you just you feel a little off. And when you sit with it and you think about it, what you realize is like they never asked about you. You never really talked about your life. You felt like you were ignored, and it really was about the other person or people the entire time. It leaves this kind of icky feeling when that happens, not that it always needs to be about you or I, but the whole point of a relationship is that both people exist, and so if you leave feeling like you didn't really exist, that doesn't leave the best taste in your mouth for that interaction. I know that I have felt this way many a time in my life, and I'm sure that it won't be the last. And something I've actually noticed recently is that I've had a number of friends who have confided in me about times when they felt this way, whether it was in an interaction with me or group or another group, like I've had many a friend who have come and said to me, you know, I just I left feeling like we never talked about my life.
• 3:46
  Alex Alexander: And the interesting thing is that, of course, it is often easier to see the patterns somebody else has than to see our own patterns and blind spots. Right? It's really hard to notice ourselves. And so when I've had friends who have mentioned this to me, the same thought pops up in my head, especially if I was there, like, if I was at the get together that they're talking about, the thought that pops up is like, but when we asked you, you kind of deflected the question. When somebody asked how your week was, you just said, Oh, it was good. And I've now reflected on this many a time, and so I wanted to really sit with that, with my own experiences, with the experiences I've heard from friends and from many of you who have reached out like this is such a universal problem. I've heard it from so many people.
• 4:42
  Alex Alexander: What do I do if my friends never ask about my life? And I think it is only natural to play a blame game right, to always want to blame everyone else. To say, you know, my friends never ask about me, they ask and then just move on.
• 5:00
  Alex Alexander: One, they never really gave me time to open up, this, that or the other thing. There's so many ways people can phrase this, but the honest truth, I think, what I keep coming back to is that, like, yes, your friends need to care enough to ask, and sometimes, if you are not feeling in the mood, or you don't normally open up.
• 5:22
  Alex Alexander: Sometimes your friends might push you harder. They might say,"Hey, No. Really. How are you?
• 5:34
  Alex Alexander: Tell me." and when you maybe deflect the question again. Let's just say, as an example, they might look at you and say, Nope, we're not going to talk about my life. I want to hear about your life.
• 5:47
  Alex Alexander: Sometimes they might do that.
• 5:47
  Alex Alexander: But the reality is, the question I want to ask you you is, are they really supposed to work that hard every time? Because I don't think that's fair either, I think that they should, for sure, ask, and sometimes maybe they should push hard. Maybe you're having a hard time and you do need that push to open up, but expecting them to push that hard every time.
• 6:12
  Alex Alexander: So the end story here is like you and I are each responsible for our half of the connection, and if we are constantly pushing away the questions or giving generic one word answers or shrinking instead of taking up space, then we are partially to blame, because we are not taking responsibility for our half of the connection. Now, this episode is not about friends who never ask.
• 6:53
  Alex Alexander: This episode is not about friends who maybe ask how you're doing, and then as soon as you say, Well, my week was they start talking over you, and they launch into talking about their week. This is not about friends who never, ever, ever consider you. That is a different episode. Do not apply what I'm about to talk to you today to that episode. What this is about is about friends who maybe are asking, but aren't pushing you so hard, and because they're just asking a simple question, and then you're saying, Yeah, I'm good, and they move on, you're losing out on your half of the connection. That's what we're talking about today.
• 7:39
  Alex Alexander: So now that I've set that stage, because I don't, I don't I don't want you to think what I'm about to say relates to friends who just do not care at all. That's not what this is. We're gonna talk about a few things, and we're gonna talk about maybe the pushback you might have to what I'm about to say. So first, I want to talk about how the details matter. If somebody asks you, how are you doing? And your answer is good, or like, yeah, my week was fine.
• 8:10
  Alex Alexander: Then that doesn't leave a lot for your friends to work off of.
• 8:15
  Alex Alexander: It's like, okay, well, I'm happy you had a good week, right? And then you probably come back and say, Well, how was your week?
• 8:20
  Alex Alexander: You have moved on, you have deflected you have not given them anything to latch on to.
• 8:23
  Alex Alexander: And so this is where I really want you to think about how sharing the small details, the insignificant details, like the dumb details, they matter. So instead of How was your week?
• 8:37
  Alex Alexander: And saying, good. Now I got to think of something silly. Let me think about my own week. I could say, you know, my week was good.
• 8:48
  Alex Alexander: I had these appointments this week. I had three at the same place, and I feel so silly going and I was 10 minutes late to the first one this week, and I couldn't go to the appointment like they have a five minute late policy. So overall, it was good, but I felt really silly that five minutes cost me this appointment. Do you see how that opens so much more space for conversation than my week? Was fine. Share the silly details you could share about how you've seen the same bird out your window every day. You could share about how you spilled your coffee. You could share about how you broke your favorite necklace. I don't care. Share anything. It doesn't have to be your deepest, darkest secret. It doesn't have to be the thing that impacted you the most this week. Just share something. The other thing you could share could be the little or big wins. So it could be a big win, but maybe the big win feels a little too vulnerable. So a little win, when somebody asks you how your work week was, if you were like, um, well, work was fine.
• 9:57
  Alex Alexander: Instead, if you said something.
• 10:00
  Alex Alexander: Like, you know, there are donuts at the meeting the team meeting on Thursday, and I'm always too late to get the maple bar, but I was there early enough to get the maple bar this week. Wow, that's a little win that is so insignificant. But what that just did is allowed your friend to remember that you love maple bars, that they bring you joy and happiness, that you were early to the meeting this week.
• 10:23
  Alex Alexander: They can ask you so many questions. What happened at the meeting? What donut Do you normally pick if the maple bar is not there? Did you speak of the meeting? Did your presentation go well, like so many jumping off points. Now, some pushback that you might have here. I I hear people say like, but I'm naturally private, okay, but are you private or do you just not want to let people to know you, because it's okay to be private. I am not like I'm saying. I'm not telling you to share your deepest, darkest secrets, your most vulnerable moments. It could just be that I've been thinking about picking up embroidery. Do you think I'd be good at it? You're not even saying you've tried it, that you're good or bad. Just share something. It could just be the simplest little thing. Pick something that doesn't feel like you're exposing yourself too much. That's fine, and go from there, because you're giving your friend an opportunity to prove that they want to learn more about you, that they care to learn more about what you're interested in. Maybe it turns into like a silly conversation, and you find out that you have really fun belly laugh conversations with this friend that you never would have had if you just said, I'm good.
• 11:40
  Alex Alexander: Another common pushback I get is this idea that you will dominate the conversation, right? We're all monitoring how much time we take up, especially women. There are all sorts of studies about that. I don't have the stats, but like women are monitoring, we don't want to take up too much to which I would remind you that sometimes it's okay to dominate the conversation a little bit, especially if you don't normally share, like it's okay to not have you share your day, and then your friends share their day, and then you share about your health problem, and they share about their health problems. Like it doesn't need to be the exact same question back and forth. You can talk about you for a little bit and then weave it back to them. You don't need to monitor it so closely. Now, another scenario I see come up in this situation is people get caught up in this thing where, like everyone else, let's say you're in a group, has something in common that you don't, and I have one, like glaring example that stands out in my mind, which actually happened, like a little over a year ago, but I was a part of the conversation where every person in that conversation was a parent except me and one other friend and all the other parents were like, so deep in talking about their kids, and we were partaking. We were asking about their kids. We were asking about their birth stories and their preschool wait lists and all these things we were partaking in the conversation. And I think when that happens, where the majority of the people all have something in common. It can be really easy for the other people to kind of get left in the dust, because everyone else can easily weave the conversation around.
• 13:32
  Alex Alexander: And in this scenario, I would remind you that sometimes we got to just speak up. Sometimes you have to decide that there has to be one thing that you really want to share today. And you come in and you say, Hey, we've been talking about everybody's kids, and I love your kids, I do, and I am happy to talk about them more, but I've been dying to tell you all about X, Y and Z all week. Sometimes we just have to take ownership of that. Now, this next part about taking responsibility for your half the connection is kind of this idea of initiating your own life. I think a lot of people, I've said this before, a lot of people want to be invited. We all love to be invited. We love to be thought of. We love to be added to the guest list. We love to be included. You may not want to go, right? Isn't that a common sentiment? Like, I may not want to go all the time, but I want you to invite me so often. The conversation then is like, Are you inviting people? Are you initiating? Are you planning things? Are you whatever? And yes, please do that. Please be initiator. But there's also something to be said about just like initiating in your own life, like separate from your friendships. Are you out here doing the things you want to do in your own life so that you can then bring that back to your connections? That's part of.
• 15:00
  Alex Alexander: Owning your half of the connection to I think we've all been a part of a relationship, whether it's a friendship, a family relationship, acquaintance relationship, or something where you run into someone or you talk to someone regularly, and the entire conversation maybe centers around like your life or their life. So let's say you you actually are really busy. You're really initiating in your own life. Think about if the other person really isn't. They're just home all the time, they're kind of down and the whole conversation, they're just asking you about their life, and you almost can't You ever have that feeling where you're frustrated because you can't ask them about theirs because they don't really have anything to share, because they're not initiating in their own life. Again, it's easier to think of other people than ourselves, so maybe you are the initiator, but if you are not, if you are the person that doesn't really have anything to share, then you're kind of caught in what I call the waiting trap.
• 17:04
  Alex Alexander: Because what you want, right when you watch social media or when you think of these things to do is for somebody to invite you. And what I would tell you is, stop waiting for everyone to create all the magic for you.
• 17:14
  Alex Alexander: Pick something, anything you don't even necessarily need to have leave the house, like pick a new hobby that you can do at home. Get really into it. That's a thing to share in conversation with people when they ask you, how are you doing? What have you been up to? Instead of just, I don't know, I've just, I can't even, like, think of what I've been doing. You can tell them about the new thing you have been doing and enjoying.
• 17:36
  Alex Alexander: Somebody said something to me this last week in my life. It was about another person. So it was like we were talking about somebody else who maybe had expectations of me.
• 17:49
  Alex Alexander: That's the way I'll put it. And this person said, you know, they have their life. They can't have yours too. They can't have my life too. They can't control my life. But I think that also goes for the flip side, like I have one life. I can't have yours too. I have to love my life. You can't do that for me, and if I'm loving my life, even if it's simple things, then it makes it so much more fun to invite people along than always waiting for everyone else to create the magic for you. Now, some pushback you might get here, or I might get here, from people is all my friends have interests that I don't share. And I will tell you right now I have actually really had to sit with this in the last couple of years. Michael and some friends are, for example, like, really into golf. They go golfing all the time. I bought a really cheap set of clubs on Facebook marketplace, and I've gone a few times. And like, I don't mind going to the driving range or a little par three course, but I am nowhere near as obsessed as they are, and so sometimes we go to hang out, and the entire conversation can end up revolving around golf, and I just kind of sit there, and after a while, that gets kind of frustrating, but I really had to sit with that like this is me needing to own my half of the connection.
• 19:07
  Alex Alexander: So what I would say here is one, yes, you can take an interest in your friends, but if you want them to take an interest in things that you want to do, then you need to talk more about those things. So I love to go stand-up paddle boarding. I brought that up recently with these friends. And lo and behold, somebody in the group was like, wait, I actually love paddle boarding, but I haven't done it in years. But because I never talked much about it, it really didn't trigger that thought. Like I said, I am also working on this, but I have been deep in this thought, guys, so speak up about what you want. Tell people. Tell people when you are interested in partaking in something they're doing. If you have spent all this time talking about how you're not that interested in golf, in my case, then I can't really expect out of the blue if I decide you know what, I'm going to give it a try. I can't really expect those friends to just start inviting me, because I have made it quite clear, but I don't want to be golfing every weekend in the past. You know, I've talked about this idea of emotional intimacy roots before, and if you don't know what that is, you can go back a couple episodes, because I it was just a replay, but I don't remember the replay number, so it is episode 12. It's episode 12.
• 20:29
  Alex Alexander: Emotional intimacy roots are like the details we know about each other. And on the podcast, I've talked a lot about when, let's say I used to love chocolate cake and I don't love chocolate cake anymore, and then your friends kind of have to rewire. It works the other way too, if you've always told them you don't like golf and now suddenly you're willing to try it, it's going to take a little time for them to rewrite that detail, that root that they know about you. So the reason I'm pointing that out is because you can't just slyly say one time like, oh yeah, I think I'd go golfing with you. Yeah.
• 21:07
  Alex Alexander: You need to tell them, probably multiple times. You need to be like, hey, when you go golfing, I want to go. I want to try it.
• 21:13
  Alex Alexander: If that course is too difficult, can we set up a time to go to the driving range? I really want to give this a shot. You have to take a little bit of ownership.
• 21:20
  Alex Alexander: And by you, I mean me, both of us, we both have to take a little bit of ownership. So here's where we're at. We're going to think more about owning and taking responsibility for what we share and for the ways that we participate, like the actions we take.
• 21:40
  Alex Alexander: And if you're still feeling a little like, I don't know, Alex, I don't know if I can do this right, because you maybe have some stories that you're telling yourself in your head. I'm going to try to anticipate what those stories are for this last little bit of the episode, I'm going to try and bust them wide open, because I want you to go out there and try something new after you listen to this episode. So one of these stories you might be telling yourself is this idea that sharing with your people is TMI. How many times have you said to someone like, oh, this might be TMI, or they've said to you, this might be TMI, and then the detail is, so it's like, I sleep with mouth tape on because I do guys. I go, Oh, that's TMI. Like, that's not TMI. That's just a fact about me. Okay, we have convinced ourselves, society has convinced us, that sharing our lives is too much. And I think so much of this is kind of that social media therapy, social like narrative that we have going on here, that we don't want to take up too much space, right? Our friends don't have time. They don't have capacity. We don't want to bother them or burden them. I am seeing more of these messages out there about how community is inconvenience.
• 22:55
  Alex Alexander: Community is also just knowing really weird, silly facts about our people. It's knowing the little details that somebody else doesn't know. So share the TMI, and if you're still, you're still out here being like, I don't know, Alex, I want to remind you that there is an entire industry of people on the internet, random strangers, who make a living because people are curious about people. They want to know what the inside of their houses looks like what they ate for breakfast, what they kind of underwear they wear. And you're telling me that your friends don't want to know you. Stop it. Stop it right now. I don't want to hear any more of it. I'm done. The other reality check, if you're still struggling with this, is I want you to think about how much you want to know about your friends.
• 23:48
  Alex Alexander: Don't you love when they share a detail with you, especially something you feel like they're not really sharing with others, or is so insignificant that now you see them in a whole new light. We all love that feeling, and your friends love it too.
• 24:01
  Alex Alexander: And I'm gonna go through one more thing here that you might be telling yourself another story. I brought this up earlier, but it's this idea of kind of like this time monitoring trap, where you feel like you've talked about yourself too much and so you change the subject. I want to remind you that, like, sometimes it's okay if a Hangout or a conversation is more about one person. We're not like time tracking. I'm not clicking a stopwatch here, especially if you're not opening up. Like if a friend who really hasn't opened up and has always said, Oh yeah, I'm fine. I'm good, if they start to fill in with some color and then they want to change the subject away. I'm like, no, no, no, no, please keep going. I have been waiting for this day, like, Tell me more. Can't you think of a time where you've experienced that, where you're just so excited that your friend is letting you in or sharing something, and you want to know like you want to keep digging into it. So be okay with that.
• 25:00
  Alex Alexander: You deserve that too. I want to end this episode with a challenge. The next time, if you feel like this is you, if you feel like you are giving generic one word answers or you're deflecting the question, I want you to watch yourself in your next Hangout or conversation and be sure that you don't give those one word answers or deflect the question. Give a little color, say something silly, throw something out there that you've never shared before.
• 25:32
  Alex Alexander: It doesn't have to be the most intensive things. It could just be. You know, I thought about ordering x on the menu, and instead I ordered y, but maybe that one would have been good.
• 25:44
  Alex Alexander: It literally could be that guys and if you do deflect, because it's really hard to change a pattern, right? It's hard to see ourselves if you deflect, and then you know, further into the conversation, 10, 15, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour later, you realize that you deflect it. This is a great moment to take up a little space and be like, Hey, you.
• 26:06
  Alex Alexander: I know that when we talked about my week earlier, I said it was fine, but now that I'm thinking about it, I had this one meeting that really rattled me, because remember, your friends want to know you. Trust them. Trust that they want to know you and take up a little space with that, I'll see you next week.
• 26:31
  Podcast Intro/Outro: Thank you for listening to this episode of Friendship IRL. I am so honored to have these conversations with you. But don't let the chat die here. Send me a voice message. I created a special website just to chat with you. You can find it at alexalex.chat. You can also find me on Instagram. My handle, @itsalexalexander. Or go ahead and leave a review wherever you prefer to listen to podcasts. Now if you want to take this conversation a step further, send this episode to a friend. Tell them you found it interesting. And use what we just talked about as a conversation starter the next time you and your friend hang out. No need for a teary goodbye. I'll be back with a new episode next week.