Yea that’s definitely possible. I completely agree. But some people just have like a stress cap, ya know? It can put you over. There are definitely multiple reasons why it could happen.

Because politics?

No?

Kids can also completely ruin marriages. I know multiple people who have straight up told me “my marriage used to be great and then having kids ruined it.” Of course kids can also bring tons of happiness! But it’s not universal.

Just ask her to go with you to buy the present. Everything doesn’t need to be a surprise. People have this misconception that every god damn thing (birthday parties, presents, etc) needs to be a surprise. It doesn’t!

2 observations:

1. Wow I didn’t think hexbear was that large. That’s unfortunate…

2. The fact that Lemmyworld is like 40% of the pie is NOT good. People are clearly not understanding or not caring thay the point of the fediverse is to prevent any one instance from having too much power. People need to leave lemmy world and join other smaller instances. If lemmy world were to shut down, imagine how many of the most popular communities would be gone.

Well working remotely helps, ha. But I do have to be on calls constantly with my manager and others. But before when i was office based, it was hard. I had the same struggles at OP. I often just didn’t have the emotional capacity to eat lunch with my team and to engage in bullshit small talk conversations for an hour. It was always the same conversations over and over again. One guy would talk about his kids and complain about his mean wife. Another guy would argue politics. One woman would just talk about other boring bullshit and she was incredibly judgemental whenever I’d talk about my life. The worst was when the COO would sit with us and just straight up brag about the expensive things he owned. No joke. This happened a ton.

I’d eat at my desk a lot. And you can bet your ass that people noticed and some even gave me shit for it to my face.

I may need to clarify this. I didn’t mean to say that I don’t want to speak to anyone at all. That’s just not realistic with most jobs. I just mean that I don’t feel the need to be friends with them, and I’m not interested in getting to know anyone outside of the immediate professional duties we have to perform. I don’t care about their personal opinions or their families. I just don’t fucking care. In fact, I actively don’t want to know about anyone at work. I just want to do my job and leave/sign off and talk to my actual friends/family. I have no room for work relationships. I only have a finite amount of energy and I rather just put that into my work.

I sympathize with OP. I’m an introvert and have never felt even the slightest motivation to be friends with my coworkers. I don’t care about any of them. I just want to do my job. I understand how I may be the minority in these situations. It’s frustrating but I understand why it happens. It’s tough.