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.

Perhaps it all comes down to confidence. I couldn't give two hoots if someone doesn't want to be my friend. I find the idea of people talking about me, even negatively, strangely thrilling - it means they're interested in you, doesn't it? I never think anyone is talking about me though, I can't see why they would.

I think people do pick up on confidence, and it makes them less likely to treat you badly. A counsellor once said to me that it's basically survival of the fittest; if people can find a weakness in someone's self esteem or confidence then they will treat that person as being beneath them.

It may be too that you have a good group of lovely friends and so you give off the impression that you simply are not bothered about making new ones, therefore people are drawn to you because of this.

But if you are a nice group, you will want everyone to join, surely?
They are the only groups I want to be part of.

Basically I like people and find most people very interesting. So I suppose that comes across.

Of course blue. But I'm not going to drag someone in and make them talk. They have to get involved and show their desire to join in. It's a two-way street.

After 9 years in one playground at a very small school I pretty much knew everyone, and am always a say hello to everyone type.

Then we moved and I was the new girl. I did the school tour at the same time as another Mum who was joining the school. As we had DCs in different key stages who came out of different entrances I didn't see her often, so I knew nobody. I am naturally shy but had to put myself out there and bit by bit got to know DCs friends parents and have a pretty big group of people that I am on friendly terms with.

I bumped into the other Mum a term later at a function and she said she hated the school as no-one would talk to her, it was cliquey etc. Her expectation was that people would come up to her and introduce themselves and invite her to things.

Just a difference of perception I guess.

I think it depends on the kind of people in the group too. I was friendly with 4 other women and one in particular loved to arrange everything like meals out etc, the rest of us were prob too busy/lazy so at first really appreciated it. We would ask others to come along sometimes but we soon realised that this woman would invite people then uninvite them and tell people that we had invited that the date/time had changed. A chance comment made me realise that we were seen as this bitchy group of unfriendly women. I was mortified. It all kicked off anyway and the group is fractured beyond repair but I am still very close to two of the women.

As an example, there's a mum at playgroup who I like a lot. She is from another country snd though she's been here a while she doesn't have many friends and is lonely. I've invited her to my house numerous time and asked her to join the playgroup committee. She flipflopped on the decision about the committee and has turned diwn quige a few invitations. Plus she has only invited me to her house once. I get the impression she wants to be my friend - she has cooked food for me, lent me things and asked my advice but she just won't play ball in getting the friendship going. I've tried. A lot. But there's only so much I can do.

Going back to the confidence thing, cailin, I think too that if you are c

Confident then you are able to suss people out and are less likely to get involved with piss takers and bitches as you realise quite early on what they are like

90sthrowback (ha, me too) - you don't know what the other mum was like though, it might not be just that you made the effort to approach people and she didn't. maybe she said things that put people off.

Eg I have an unusual name that sounds like another and every time I introduce myself to someone I have to say it twice. Fine. but every now and then someone:

1 - tries to convince me my name is actually the one it sounds a bit like (like I have made a mistake)
2 - goes into a fucking tedious interrogation about my ethnic background and why I should have such a name (not a brief probe, but a scrunchy-faced need to hear me recite my family tree)
3 - this usually involves me needing to say where I am actually from. When I do, this kind of person invariably wants to know "what happened to my accent"

People like that bore and tire me so intensely within 5 minutes of meeting them I am making excuses to get away, not arranging to go down the pub with them.
Maybe she was that kind of person.

So this is why I kind of sit on the fence - while there is such a thing as unwelcoming behaviour in some sort of public sphere, I reserve the right not to have my daily life blighted by dickheads like that, or people who have stupid opinions about redheads, or people who want to talk about what was in the Mail, or people who keep floating vaguely racist stuff hoping that someone will join in and they can pile in, or people who I just don't like

Unfortunately some people just have terrible social skills.

I often stand and chat to the same mums whist I'm waiting for DD (YR) to come out that I used to stand with on previous years, waiting for our older children. It just so happens that we have younger ones in the same year. We're all busy with other kids/working so when we do see each other, it's nice to catch up. To mums for whom this is their eldest/first child-this might seem like a clique?

The first time I went to my local Sure Start Centre, I arrived before anyone else and settled myself and 3 week old DS1 on the playmat. The resident clique arrived en mass, ignored my "hello" and sat on the other side of the room with their backs to me, making it very clear they were not in the market for new friends. I mentioned to the centre manager that I had been made to feel very unwelcome - she was shocked.

Thing is Rachel, there is actually no requirement for them to talk to you. As far as they were concerned they were meeting up for a chat, they felt no obligation to talk to you. Not exactly nice, but not shocking either IMO.

Actually I am not sure it's so cut and dried because "meeting up for a chat" in a surestart centre is not the same as "meeting up for a chat" by appointment in a coffee shop. I think when you go a stay and play at a surestart centre you should go with the expectation that some other parents will not know anyone and will be looking to meet people. If you aren't up for that, you don't have to be, by law or anything, but you could just invite your friends to your house and those tiresome strangers wouldn't bother you.

It's all about context. we interpret contexts differently - I send my child to school to get educated and because I have to by law, not because I think the parents of the other children there provide a ready-made community that should accept me with love - here I differ from some others, I think. I go to work to earn a living, not to make friends, but because we all work together I expect people to be superficially friendly and welcoming to each other, at least, even if they don't all hang out at the weekends. I think a surestart centre is a bit like a work place in that circumstances have brought you together and you have a sort of responsibility to make some effort to get on.

going to the cinema - getting the bus - things like this - are all things where you should reasonably expect to be able to do them alone as if in a bubble

See I don't give an actual fuck about who chats with who in the playground, because I usually don't have time to stand about and gab all morning due to having a job and things, but I object to the very premise of your post which is that no one has any obligation to another human being unless they are related or paid to do something. This is false and inhuman. You have a duty to all other humans, particularly vulnerable or lonely ones. That's the whole point of society. Since your starting point is so alien to me, I don't see it as answering anything regarding supposed cliques, whether or not those exist for adults (they shouldn't, surely?).

Also I think the solution to some people being dicks is that they stop being dicks, not that other people go through some charade of pretending not to care about their isolation in order to make a point/seem 'cool'.

Are newbies welcomed or talked and gossiped and put down?

If you buy a book on the subject, you will soon see what constitutes a clique.

Totally agree with OP. I have two close friends, we do stuff as a group of three. We each have other friends and acquaintances but the three of us together aren't looking for new close friends. I'm sorry that other people are lonely, but friendship should be based upon mutual enjoyment of a persons company, not on feeling sorry for somebody or doing the right thing.

Maybe no requirement to be friendly, but I still think they were rude.

If someone is at a playgroup by themselves and makes the effort to try to start a conversation, I think the least they can do is be pleasant and reply. Instead they looked at me like something they'd scrape off their shoe, went into their little huddle and shot me dirty looks from across the room.

Fair enough, shooting dirty looks was rude. But then you could argue that it was better that they showed their true colours straight off the bat.

Fudge I disagree that I've said that "no one has any obligation to any other human." Of course everyone should be kind and courteous. But surely it's normal to choose your friends? Or should everyone be friends with everyone else?

Also if I decide I simply don't like someone, does that make me a dick?