People who blow hot and cold

[OnePotPlant]

Interested in advice - how do you deal with people who are always like this without playing games? Why do people do this?

My friend can be very intense for periods, wanting to see me a lot, messaging all the time, chatting a lot etc, but then one day I'll message and barely get a response and then they are always busy for a while. But the cycle always loops back around and starts again eventually and I get lots of messages/invitations again. There never seems to be any rhyme or reason behind it.

I really enjoy the friendships when going well, but have come to realise that the inconsistency is making me a little anxious. I'm back to the part of the cycle when I'm contacted a lot and find I'm not responding quickly on purpose , but now I feel like I'm engaged in a level of game-playing that I don't want to engage in.

Why do people do this? What would you do?

I wouldn't maintain a friendship with someone like that, no matter how much fun the good times are. In a relationship I'd view it as emotional abuse, and it's pretty similar for a friendship.

If it's a true cycle then there are probably mental health issues at play. But if your friend concentrates on other, maybe new friends in-between, she's a flavour of the month type friend.

If you don't want to lose touch altogether, try scaling back, perhaps even more than you are now, so that you don't lose contact but also minimise the stress caused by the manic phase of contact.

Interesting- there are mental health problems at play

Just a thought here.... something similar happened to me and i actually found out after confronting my friend about it, that intact she had feelings for me that ran beyond friendship... Hence the back-and-forthing on her part. She said she would want to say in touch with me and see me all the time, then realised it might look odd so backed right off and tried to play it cool to see if i would go after her. Almost like testing me. Just throwing that out there....

I know someone like this. The basic pattern was I would never hear from her over a weekend or duing school hols. It seemed that when she had a few spare hours, she would ring up and arrange something.
When I became aware of what was happening, I made myself less availalbe. It then turned into her contacting me when she needed something after which I pulled the tide out altogether.
I was begining to feel like a mug and whether or not she did this intentionally, I wasn't happy with it so withdrew. We did enjoy one anothers company but it began to look like I was on the reserve bench. So ...nah. Fuck that.