We has this penpal thing back in school, you send a letter to an unknown kid somewhere, the schools exchanged the letters and made the letter network (which kid wrote to the other one, so when you write back, your letter gets sent to the same kid).
Anyway, I wrote the first letter and gave some basic info, my name, my parent’s names, what I’m interested in, some interesting books I’ve read, etc. I got a reply from the other end, some girl from another town (can’t remember the name now though) and this letter was a 6 page dissertation on her dolls… I just said fuck it 🤷.
I didn’t to be honest… I had no interest in dolls at that age. Sure, when I was toddler, but I think we did that in 3rd or 4th grade, something like that.
I think I just wrote back something like “Oh that’s really interesting.” in my reply… never heard from her again 😂. The teacher wondered why, I never told her what I wrote in my second letter 😂.
I have an old weather-nerd friend in real life who doesn’t take the hint when I don’t want to hear what the weather was like in Melbourne Christmas 1983 at 9am, changing dramatically by 11:47am etc etc
Then when I explicitly tell him to “stop, I am not interested” he comes back with his usual response of “I let you talk when I am not interested”.
Me: So tell me at the time, not keeping it up your sleeve as a defence card to play
Him: Oh I never tell people to stop. That would be rude
Me: Well that’s your problem not mine. Besides I only do it to get you to advance your technical skills, like encouraging you to click the microphone button on your phone to activate voice-to-text because you complain about typing being too difficult.
TL:DR Even dear friends can be annoyingly boring sometimes.
A modern problem is lag in crappy quality phone connections. It makes feedback and interjections difficult. Real life with this friend is much smoother.
I definitely would have ditched him when younger (close to sixty now). Putting up with a lot more now if someone is otherwise honorable, loyal, honest.
People my age run out of friends if they ditch so easily. Indeed that explains many older people being lonely. New friends are harder to come by with age so they should learn more tolerance and social strategy (like my trying to get my friend to text me more than phone me).
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