Ever get the sense that you're being slowly phased out?

Of a relationship? A friendship? A job? A freelance arts writing gig?

Whatever! Tell.

no comment ;-)

In all seriousness, I think this happens with jobs more than any of the other things, although I am young and have yet to experience erosion of truly close friendships.

just wait, man. just wait.

:(

this is like irl suggest bans

all the time

more often in relationships than friendships, and it hurt worse in the friendships

(xxpost) at least when you reach 51 SB's, you get some kind of definite notification. IRL you're often just left hanging.

Yes, hmm. I got phased out of a friendship once, but I forced a discussion/confrontation about it, which resulted in us having a friend break-up, at which I cried in public. I have definitely broken up with boyfriends less painfully.

I just patiently wait for the time someone chooses to fade me in...
Otherwise, I've always just been warming the bench, so to speak.

growing older = the ultimate phasing out

The work type of phasing out is annoying. You get given more and more menial/duplicative/pointless tasks, because the boss is hoping you're going to get fed up and quit rather than him having to make you "redundant". In quotes because the boss wants to immediately hire someone else to take your place.

i am avoiding phasing out by moving.
ok, not really.
well, maybe. sort of?

While considering the timeline of me vs the friendship version of this feeling, justified and otherwise, I just had a horrible feeling that all my friendships since getting this bad a couple of times in school have been a futile attempt to not feel phased out by phasing everyone else out ahead of time. Which was a bummer. So now I'm going to drink more and not think about it. Hooray!

Theresa, anything specific? Yowch.

Bump.

(I couldn't stand watching Beatrix' thread slowly sink down the page)

a best friend of mine had a colleague that started hanging about with us a lot. Over the course of a year or so he became one of our closes friends, then he did this gradual fade out with both of us and now we're not even in contact. It was weird. Not that hurtful since it had only been 18 months or something, but just strange that you would cultivate two friendships and then just drop them altogether.

Only other time this has happened to me has been with girls i've been dating. Got to the state where we'd been out a a dozen times or so, had sex a few times or whatever and it's that stage that it would tend to cement into something steady but then they call you less and less and you get the gist. Really the most decent way to blow someone off I think. Never been that hurtful since I've never been too smitten with any of the girls who have done this.

stage even

and decent way to blow someone off not the best choice of words.

Wow.

This thread took off a lot more than I'd expected.

In my experience, friendship phase-outs are really sort of benign in most cases - the folks doing the phasing-out aren't totally aware it's happening. Then all of a sudden you realize, "hey, my homie never returns my emails anymore and he hasn't returned a call in like three years." (Yep, that actually happened. Dude was the best man in my wedding! Go figure, right?) In another case, a female friend got married then dropped off the face of the fucking planet. None of her friends hear from her. Just, like, gone.

It's weird to read some of the experiences upthread, in large part because since graduating college I've kinda lost the ability to make and cultivate in-person friendships, so all the quick growing-close-then-fading-out stuff is totally foreign to me now. I've got a handful of old friends and then, you know, various folks I've met online but never talked to or met in person.

As for the work phase-outs, never had this happen on a day-job level, but over the last 2-3 years it's been happening on a freelance level. Not maliciously, I don't think - more like I guess if I don't live in the town where certain editors are and can't drop by the office I don't exists cuz they're all caught up in blogging/office politics/cost-cuts, etc. (Disclaimer: this last bit is total conjecture on my part.) It sort of works out though, because the amount of freelance I do now is exactly what I can realistically handle.

freelance phase-out happens the exact instant that you stop pestering your clients with the fact that you exist - i found that part utterly exhausting after awhile which is why i work full-time now

phase-outs for me have usually been sort of mutual, usually due to changing circumstances -- somebody moves or gets a different job or whatever. a fair number of casual-level friendships are based on convenience. only really close friendships survive the loss of convenience. (tho facebook now allows at least the appearance of a continued friendship, even if you never see the person.) there was one guy who i eventually came to think of as sort of a manipulator/social climber -- he hung out a lot to get to know the social scene, then moved on to other people who were in various ways more advantageous -- but i didn't really care. i have more friends than i can reasonably keep in touch with anyway, someone coming or going at the margins doesn't affect me much.

workwise this has never happened to me, but my whole department at the moment is starting to feel a little like this tbh. they keep trimming away at us, and it's to a point where they're going to start to affect the ability to just do the basic work. but it's not like they want to get rid of us, exactly -- they just want the work we produce to not actually cost them anything.