to offer a different perspective on the "clique" thing

[CailinDana]

I sympathise with people who struggle to make friends. It's hard, and loneliness is horrible. I've been in situations where I've struggled to make friends and it was extremely frustrating.

But. I always saw my lack of friends as my problem or the product of circumstances rather than the fault of "cliquey" others who wouldn't include me.

Aren't "cliques" just friendship groups that you don't happen to be part of? And surely it's not their duty to include you if they don't want to? It's up to them who they want to be friends with and it seems odd to get angry at them for not just insiscriminately including everyone.

Definitely, some peope are just Not Nice. But why want to be friends with them anyway? Everyone else is just bumbling along getting by. If they happen to have a group of friends they laugh with at the school gate, good for them.

Don't look to others to validate you. They just don't have the time or inclination to do that.

Thetallesttower wow the scenario in your first paragraph has happened to me quite recently - except it wasn't a NCT group and they bitched about a wide range of women. I agree totally that there is a difference between cliques and friendship groups, and I have seen both (and been in the latter).

There is a group of cliquey mums in DC's class, they add to their numbers now and again but have a core group of members who have been quite rude and unpleasant to others. They bitch about other women - I know as they (briefly) tried to include me in their gang (and I failed miserably at giving a fuck about them and have been on the outside ever since).

So OP, what I am trying to say is - YANBU in offering a different perspective, but YABU if you truly think these cliques are a myth.

I've found the same principles apply to adult queen bees too. They don't care about anyone else and consequently have people falling over themselves to be their friend.

"Self-seeking social engineering" - yes I know people who go in for this. In choosing their "friends" and who their DC play with at weekends/playdates etc.

Lizzie, if there is no actual bullying going on do you not think it's unfair to dictate who the "Alpha girls" have as friends?

From my experience, the 'popular' ringleader girls at school were all mean and manipulative. They were just extremely clever about how and when they did it

I have honestly never met a "queen bee." Maybe others see me as one? What makes a "queen bee"?

You can't expect people to be friends with other people, but there are ways of being nice and accommodating to other people who are forced to share your space (colleagues, classmates, etc) that not all alphas do.

I was once in a group for a hobby where certain of the members had private jokes and giggled all the time. it was very childish but made me very uncomfortable. Only in wild moments of paranoia did it occur to me that they might be laughing at me (or at least I told myself it was wild paranoia) but their insistence on prioritising their private joke above more general group dynamics was uncomfortable because we were all supposed to be working together. I didn't expect them to be friends with me - they all knew each other outside the group - but I did feel like the group as a whole deserved a bit more respect as people.

If you had asked them about it they would have said "we can't help it, we aren't being mean to anyone, we are friends outside this activity and share a sense of humour and just want to have fun on our evenings spare time, why shouldn't we have a laugh while we do this, do you want us to sit in silence?"

All reasonable

yet - it wasn't very nice.

The queen bees I have known have all been quite attractive, very confident, and not bothered at all about whether others like them or about other peoples feelings. I haven't known many but they have all been quite similar

Why do people want to be friends with them cheese?

Popular/beautiful by association perhaps?

bones that also sounds like the other thread where DH wasn't happy that DW and DMIL spoke in their shared foreign language in front of him and he felt excluded because he couldn't speak it. In that instance, everybody rushed to say "they are just being relaxed together and YABU and possibly unPC to even raise it" but I did think it sounded a bit unnecessary and as if they were, as you put it, prioritising their private relationship over the wider family relationship.

I don't think all queen bees are nasty. Maybe you are one, Cailin, in the sense that you are so intrinsically attractive socially that people flock to you. (You need not be nasty or manipulative for this to happen! I am not having a go at you)

I know a group which contains an "unconscious queen bee". She is very beautiful, extremely sociable, and very kind. She has a lot of energy and is always involved in interesting projects. She loves having people around and has made many friends from many different contexts. I would guess that she has very positively affected the dynamic of the group by making bitching look really bad! - if anyone ever thought of bitching (maybe they never did) it can't really be done when the most charismatic and compelling person would be distinctly unimpressed by it.

Cailin, maybe you are like this and so you have influenced the dynamic around you so that you have never come across bitchiness?

Quangle, in that case I think it is different because a woman and her mother have a right to a one-to-one relationship at one of their homes, whereas a hobby group is a bit different - special friendships can be pursued outside the group context.

To me, someone who isn't bitchy and manipulative isn't a queen bee, they're just popular and well liked.

I would only consider someone a queen bee if they were an unpleasant person

Cailin - that's a tricky one. I don't think it is fair to dictate who is friends with who, no. But I do think that (not all)most of the teenage Alphas got a little kick out of people being drawn to them, and were often not actively horrible, but very short with / disinterested in others. I wouldn't expect teenagers to have the emotional maturity to negotiate this successfully every time, but I would hope that adults could usually be sensitive to other people's needs.

That's very simplistic of me of course, as we are all sometimes just too busy/ preoccupied/ putting a brave face on over something to take time to be friendly.

To my mind, a Queen Bee has a certain reserve, is the person to whom dialogue/ questions are directed. She rarely initiates conversation or asks questions of others unless she needs something. Alpha males tend to be much noisier! Both are usually conventionally attractive by the standards of whatever social group they inhabit. Sounds trite, but reflects my personal experience of many years of dedicated people watching.

Ah yes, the old 'I don't want to get involved, but....' They are usually the pivotal and most involved person in it all

Ooh I've just started reading the hive today

Hmm. People do seem to have a somewhat odd "respectful" reaction to me. So for example at school a girl was distraught I might think badly of her. A teacher said I must find it hard to be around people who were so much less mature than me and another girl said I "reminded her of Helen Burns" (from Jane Eyre) . When I pulled a friend up on bad behaviour he cried his eyes out. Not what I wanted at all. I don't particularly like being on such a pedestal - there is far to fall.

It is something that I've thought about, having moved across the country about a year and a half ago, so had to start over again in terms of making friends (coincided with DS starting school). I'm the kind of person who is friendly, but a bit shy. So in moving here, I've had to put myself way out of my comfort zone in order to make friends and I've had to put in loads of effort to grow friendships (it's worked - got lots of 'coffee' friends and even some closer friends).

I was musing to my DH about it how it always seems to be me making the first moves - no one came up to me at school gate to start a conversation, it was always me going up to someone else. And its always me who 'friends' people on facebook, and me who first invites people out for a coffee etc. And he pointed out that if I had stayed in our original location, where I had a large group of friends, who I was very close to and very happy with, I wouldn't have been looking for 'new' friends so (while I would never be rude, and would always reciprocate a friendly overture) I wouldn't have done the running trying to include a new person in my group/social circle. So that is what I am up against in making new friends here, most nice, therefore popular, people, have a good circle of friends and aren't as desperate as an outsider to make friends.

At school the popular girls were definitely fashionable, attractive but not always pretty, outspoken and leaders. Their peers flocked to them like sheep, desperate to be accepted as part of their clan. They had 'friends' and 'hangers on'.

One of my friends grew close with the popular girls and wanted to hang out with them at lunchtimes. I felt so uncomfortable around them. I hardly spoke and was too self conscious. I truly believed I did not belong. Slowly, I drew away and made friends with peers I felt were on my spectrum.

I lack social skills but hide it well and struggle to speak to groups of women. I am far better at one on one, especially with strangers. I wait for people to speak to me which stems back to school where my peers would go from speaking to me to ridiculing me and ignoring me. I often pretend not to see a school mum, giving them the opportunity to say hi. If not nothing is lost.

I think the whole clique/friendship group comes down to the personalities involved. I'm quite prepared to accept that there are groups who get a bit of a kick out of being the "in crowd" but I've personally not come across this at the school gates.

I'd read so much about the cliquey school gate mums on MN that I was quite paranoid about DS1 starting school, but I've actually made a small group of genuine friends there. I'm not very good at making friends in artificial situations - e.g. toddler groups etc. I tend to start talking to someone spontaneously somewhere random, like soft play or in the park, and hit it off, rather than deliberately setting out to meet new friends, if that makes sense.

I met one other school mum outside school and found we shared an interest. She introduced me to another friend of hers, through whom we met another one. I then started chatting to another mum who turned out to share the same interest, and to be friends with one of the others. We all got on, went out for a drink and are now friends.

We always gravitate towards one another in the playground as we all do different school runs so don't see much of one another, and therefore make the most of the opportunity to chat and catch up. I wonder if some people think we're a clique because we always stand together and talk to each other.

I think there probably are genuine cliques out there, but I do think, reading some posts on MN, that some of the groups being described might well just be a handful of people who are friends, and who want to talk to each other when they see each other.

If I was aware of someone who was new and didn't know anyone, I would probably say hello and make an effort, but I have slight face blindness, so I'd probably be entirely oblivious. There are 60 people in DS1's year, and I know about 8 mums by name, another 4 or 5 by who their child is, and vaguely recognise maybe half a dozen more. I could probably pass the rest in the street and not recognise them, or have a faint sense that I'd seen them somewhere but not know where.