Being sensitive when friends don't reply to messages (having seen them)

[Anuta77]

Just to be clear I know that everyone is busy and are not obliged to immediately reply to my messages. I totally get not feeling like replying at the moment and even forgetting. It happens to me. But even if I forget, I end up remembering the unanswered message and reply something saying sorry, got busy, .... I also think that if one forgets the message, if they somehow think of you one day, they would open the messaging app and would see that they never answered something.

If I have nothing else to contribute to the conversation or someone sends some info that doesn't require a full answer, I at least acknoledge with some thumbs up or a heart or whatever.

By the way, I am very busy myself by the way, with kids, work, renovations, etc. I just think it's the polite thing to do.

So when friends just see my message and then never reply, it bugs me, especially when it happens several times. I obviously don't throw a tantrum or say anything, but it turns me off and makes me less motivated to start a conversation again. The worse is that it happens even with my close friend who's strong on manners.

I even changed hairdressers after I sent one hairdresser some info we discussed during the haircut and told her how my husband loved my hair. She ignored my message (she's very active on facebook and I could see that the message was seen), I found another hairdresser.

AIBU? How others react to their messages being ignored?

Poodleville people are awful flaky now. Finding it alot with people

You're way too sensitive OP. It's not about you.

Do you ever think maybe the hairdresser read your message, meant to reply, then something happened that was more important, and she forgot to reply.

I didn't say that they don't deserve any response, just that they are non urgent and can be replied to as and when. The sender passes the responsibility of deciding the priority to the recipient.

So... I'm someone who usually will reply at a decent time and messages that don't require a reply I will put an emoji reaction to.

But there are some people who will constantly keep replying even when I've just put an emoji reaction, they see it as a thing to reply to! So I have to just go quiet to end that particular chat. I sometimes wonder if these people just want to be messaging all day. No thankyou

No, I lied about having kids and work and renovation LOL. I mean, seriously?
You have no bandwith to reply to friends, but you have bandwidth to reply to strangers on a forum, so that just shows what you find important.

What's bizarre are the assumptions here.
I wasn't married to the old hairdresser. The new hairdresser was recommended by several people as amazing.

I find your response unbelievable. Writing a long text explaining how non professionals couldn't cut hair. I meant ANY HAIRDRESSER LOL.
You don't know what familiarity I had with her, you don't know what she noticed. All you want is to judge a stranger on a forum. 😂

Then you're confirming what I'm thinking, no point in sending messages or acknoledging messages since nobody cares.
About my sensitive soul, nobody knows about it other than my husband and the strangers here, so no need to be rude, busy lady.
It's funny though that you do have time to reply to strangers on the forum despite having an overload of messages.

I couldn't be friends with someone like you either, someone who judges people she doesn't know and who doesn't know the difference between between sharing a QUESTION on a forum and throwing a tantrum to friends for not replying (something I don't do). Seriously? What you I care about who you want to be friends with?

I'm another who thinks it's rude. But I was ostracized at school so it probably triggers abandonment issues or something. It is basically being ignored, but it seems that this is the 'modern way'. I'll probably get told I'm a sensitive snowflake but I can't help how I feel. And what are you supposed to do.. double text? Leave it hanging?

Right exactly. I only gave a few apparently bad examples, but it's the overall picture of people not replying even to questions. And by not replying, I mean not replying at all. And even if they forget, if they remember me (it's a friend so I would imagine that they do from time to time), they would open their messaging medium and see that there was a message from me.
I scaled down on messaging, but the thing is that people are so used to it, that they almost don't call LOL.

For all it's worth, I don't expect replies from older people (except for my mom, but she's into tech). And of course, it's not reasonable to feel hurt when you know that the person is ill. I hope you feel better.

🤔 - non urgent and can be replied to as and when regardless of the content?!

I think you’ll understand why PPs took a dim view of delayed responses to news that they were very ill.

But can you can be arsed answering me, whom you don't know and more than once.
I never even said that friendships are broken because someone didn't put a heart, my title even says feeling sensitive, not fighting with friends over texts.
And by the way, not everyone thinks I'm needy, several people think like me. What part of the body do you even use to read and process information?

It's funny you mention ADHD, because I have it too. Right now I'm supposed to be working and I'm on a forum just to change while reading an article and shopping for Black friday. Precisely with ADHD you can do it all.
My sister has dyslexia and while her answers sound like a telegram, she's very able to reply when she's interested or contact me.
But yes, I realize that people are different. I guess it's similar to when people are in a relationship and have different needs and even if you understand that the other doesn't have the same needs, you still feel sensitive about it.

I sincerely don't care, I don't have time to be texting all the time (and honestly can't be bothered). I have one particular friend who I sometimes briefly worry whether they get annoyed as I will go days / weeks not replying to her watsapps but that's because it's just an endless waffly conversation about literally nothing in particular. If it was messages that require a response like to arrange a meet up then I do reply (not instantly but pretty promptly - when I can), but otherwise if I don't leave some messages unanswered I would literally get nothing done as as soon as I reply she sends me another stream of messages - this is literal just chit chat about absolutely nothing and quite frankly I don't have time or any interest in continuing an endless text conversation about nothing. I would rather use it to get to the point and arrange a meet up, and we can catch up properly then.

I agree with PP who said that people CBA to reply to friends but have lots of time for SM.

My adult Dc often have to be chased for responses to messages some of which are time sensitive or otherwise important but yet are tethered to their phones on Tik Tok and other SM.

It comes down to priorities in the end.

I'm sorry this happened to you. It does change your perception of the friendship. Because how can one forget this?
My son was sick earlier this year, another friend's daughter was sick with the same thing. She was only talking about her daughter. I sent her info about chinese herbs, her only reply was: ok, did you try it? Never asked about my son, no thank you. I obviously didn't contact her anymore. We went to a chinese practicioner and the herbs really helped a lot. I didn't communicate with her after that.

Why did you ask for opinions OP when you so staunchly believe you are right?

It’s incredible that you put so much importance on a heart or thumbs up emoji! Why is it so incredibly significant for you to receive this tiny irrelevant validation ?
These things do not indicate how much someone likes or doesn’t like you.
I agree with everyone else that the hairdresser thing is batshit and yes, we all know how many hairdressers there are! Just needy.

I agree with you OP. I think it's rude not to reply to texts within a certain time frame. You don't ignore work emails or work related texts so why would you do that with your friends. It sends the message that you are low priority in their supposedly busy lives - clearly a lot of posters on this thread are guilty of doing this. You don't have to respond to the text with a massive saga, a brief acknowledgement usually does.
My take on the OP's hairdresser text was that she or he sent a nice message thanking them for a good haircut and the hairdresser sounded too rude or lazy to acknowledge it. A brief "thanks I appreciate your comments" would have done. As said hairdresser seems to have the time to be active on social media perhaps they should have had the business sense to try to retain a customer who might have let them use their positive comments as an online testimonial.
I don't think you sound needy at all OP but some of the posters on here sound downright nasty.

I'm with you OP I think it's rude. You're completely entitled to set boundaries that work for you. It seems to be a thing these days that people are too busy to reply. More like too rude and self important.

It seems that for many people just the fact that it's a text makes it less important and optional to reply. No matter the content.

I think, for some of us older ones at least, that we grew up and had our formative years and well beyond when sending messages to friends or hairdressers just wasn't a thing. And so, it can feel like a bit of a chore to make sure you reply every time, especially if you don't have your phone glued to your hand.

Birthdays for example - the last few birthdays, I've spent more time replying to Happy Birthday messages and phone calls, than on actually doing the things I want to do on my birthday. Before the dominance of the smart phone, people would have sent me a card in the post and I wouldn't have felt the need to write back to them to thank them for that!

Times change, things move on, we all need to get with the programme yada yada. But I hope this sheds a small amount of light.

I think the 'seen' function on Whatsapp has a lot to answer for, in terms of increasing people's anxiety levels. I went through a stage of getting very anxious if someone didn't reply to a message quickly. I could extrapolate whole extravagant scenarios in which I'd somehow caused enormous offence with an entirely mundane message. It was only when a friend disclosed similar feelings about messaging that I actually took a step back and realised how disordered my thinking around this had got. What helped was thinking through all the reasons why I might not reply to a message quickly - and then reminding myself that everyone else has all of that stuff going on.
For me, top of the list of reasons for forgetting to reply to a message is that I live near a town where the phone signal regularly disappears down some sort of black hole. You can sometimes receive messages, but you can't reply or make calls, and forget even trying to look at anything on the internet. If I'm in town and I get a message, I'll read it, try to reply, fail miserably, make a mental note to reply later, head home and out of the phone signal blackspot, receive approximately 500 messages from multiple school whatsapp groups, another dozen or so from the village whatsapp group, and one from my partner asking me if I bought milk. This has bumped the original message so far down the screen, that unless it is important enough to have been stuck in my mind all the way home, there's a reasonable chance I'll remember it in approximately three days' time. And then feel shit about it. And extrapolate a whole scenario in which the other person will never talk to me again.
I think this is one of those things where you have to remember that it is quite literally not about you. Easier said than done, maybe, but it does take the stress out of it if you can manage it.