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Communicating with relations

My preferred channels of communication with everyone else contain between 3 and maybe 10 people, not more nor less. I do not feel comfortable talking when there is too much people listening, nor in a private conversation with someone else. Small groups going out, having some holidays together, speaking over small comfy IRC channels, posting on Gemini, yes.

More than that and I feel like the group is already splitting up in smaller groups, which feels weird in the long term. I'm not even talking about public networks such as Twitter or Mastodon, I can't participate in them without feeling like I'm stepping over a chasm.

Less than that (i.e. a one to one conversation) and a completely different feeling crawls in: I am suddenly stealing this person's attention from the rest of our relations. Who the hell do I think I am? I am not that special for this conversation to deserve privacy, why aren't we talking with the others? They are probably interested in what we are saying. I get this feeling from an opposite perspective when I learn that two of my relations talked together about something I would have liked to know — of course if the subject did not require excluding me from the confidence, in which case I would totally accept that — because I still want to know about it but do not want to ask one of them to repeat what was said, and am just standing there feeling dumb. Did they feel that my inclusion in this conversation was inappropriate? Useless? AM I USELESS? AAAA etc you probably see very well how it can quickly degrade into depreciative bullshit if you're already in a bad mood.

It's nobody's fault, some people like building relations with private conversations and that's completely OK. What's weird about it is that I did not felt that way before. I enjoyed the same group sizes, but I also enjoyed intimate conversations, whether I'm included in them or not. Now they feel like a fault to the groups both participants share a membership with, even though I know how stupid this is. My main explanation is that, lately, several of my groups of relations had their share of drama and what appeared to be rock solid relations are now an ether of uncertainty; even if private conversation are mandatory to clarify some stuff in these situations, we would save so much energy just speaking about things together.

There is a book named « Sociologie des réseaux sociaux » — “Social networks sociology”, nothing to do with Facebook and the like, it's about social networks in the sociological sense — that I lost somewhere and never managed to finish, but it taught me this: it is usually harder to define a relation between two people in a sociological vacuum than two people with regards to a third person, or to a group of people… or something along those lines… well I'm not sure I understood it properly but the idea appealed to me, and seeing the relation graph of a group not as a bunch of lines joining dots but as a complex, nuanced lattice linking more than two dots at once changed the way I envisioned my own relations for good.

Now it's time to stop overthinking it. It is important to care about the equilibrium of friend groups, of course it is, but when you care about it to the point of being anxious over what is not said to the rest of the group, you start resenting how relations, those which you aren't a direct part of, form up and that's messed up. Once again, what initially appears like the virtuous goal of having a functional friend group bends into a desire for control over how others live their life. CRAP! Let's do better!

How do you feel about it? Let me know! ♥