I wanted to get some opinions about whether or not I am being unreasonable to distance myself from a group of friends from university.
We've been friends for 20 years since uni days and have managed in the chaos of life to still have regular catch ups. Some of us are closer to others in the group but overall we are all good friends.
It has recently been our 40th birthdays and for the first couple of birthdays I made a really big deal of the friends who birthdays it was. Travelled down to see them (3 hours each way), took a balloon, cake and nice present.
However, when it came to my birthday it was a completely different story. Out of a group of 5 only 1 came to my birthday catch up ( which was planned months in advance) and both of the ladies who I’d traveled to see and taken presents didn’t come to celebrate with me and worse than that they didn’t even send me a card! One of them didn’t even reply to the message about whether she could come (so I actually paid for her to come to the activity) and to this day has never replied. The other one I text two days before and she sent me a long message to say she was going to have to cancel but genuinely if I hadn’t text her I think she would have just not shown up.
Now I get people are busy and have busy lives but to not even send a card or communicate about catching up or not to me is rude. I think what makes it worse is the effort I put in to then have absolutely nothing back has really upset me.
Am I being unreasonable to take a step back from this friendship group? Like people say perhaps some friendships are not for a lifetime and I just don’t mean as much to them as they do to me?
I should add it’s now been a year since this happened and noones been in touch to have a belated birthday catch up and it still is really really bothering me (which I do wonder is a me problem)