I do a hobby once a week with my daughter that we have to drive about 40 minutes to get to. My daughter lives with me and we share the driving.
A new woman has joined the group about 3 months ago, who it turns out lives a 5 minutes drive from us, on our route to the hobby. She doesn’t drive and gets the bus to the group.
She has now found out she lives near us and has asked if we can give her a lift. Neither of us want to do it as we don’t really like this woman and we also like having the time to have a good chat and catch up on the journey. Although we live together, with my husband and son as well, we are both busy so it’s nice to have that time each week to talk. We also occassionally don’t go straight to or home after the hobby, but most of the time we do.
We have said no but are now getting some comments from other members of the group that it’s a shame we won’t help her. I have shut them down and changed the subject but people keep suggesting we should help her and we are being unreasonable. She started the group knowing she’d have to use public transport so I don’t really have much sympathy, I’m pissed off with the comments. Last week when we walked in, a group including this woman were talking about the possibility of us giving her a lift with one woman saying she doesn’t see why we won’t. It’s really awkward.
How would you handle it? We have said no, explained we like to use it as a catch up, we don’t always go straight to and from the hobby, but they’re still going on about it.