Being surrounded by outgoing, loud and crazy friends all of the time can be great. It can bring your out of your shell and push you to fight for what you want to say, but it can also be incredibly overwhelming at times. As the quiet friend, it’s really hard to get your opinion heard, even though a lot of the times it’s the most well thought out opinion because you don’t say the first thing that pops into your head. When everybody is shouting different things over you, you have a tendency to not share your opinion at all because it’s just way too much effort to shout over everybody else. By the time things have calmed down enough for you to say what you want, the topic has changed about 20 times.
This kind of behavior leads you to feel ignored - a lot. And everybody out there knows it’s one of the worst things in the world to be ignored by people that you value and care about. We know it’s not necessarily on purpose, but it would still be nice if someone occasionally put in more effort to hear what we have to say. And we, of course, know we need to put more effort into being heard.
One really good thing about having us as friends, though, is that we’re great listeners. It’s really hard to talk and listen at the same time so odds are if you have a quiet friend they’re probably a really good listener. Having someone in your life that consciously tries their hardest to listen to your very important, sometimes excessive, problems is someone you should value, because, let’s be honest, there are a lot of selfish people in this world. Whether you’re bouncing new ideas off of them, complaining about your ex or talking about really important problems, your quiet friend will devote all of their attention to you. That’s a really important quality to have in a friend.
Being such an attentive listener, though, can also make you feel like you’re in a lot of unbalanced relationships. When you devote all of your attention to somebody’s problems, and then they talk over you or ignore you in other situations because you don’t speak up, is really not a great feeling, let me tell you. What we really want is for our friends to give us a little extra something, because we really do have a lot of good things to say and advice to give. We just need a little more prompting that a more outgoing person.
Being “the quiet one” in your group of friends definitely has its advantages and disadvantages; it’s just really important to remember that every type of relationship takes a significant amount of effort. When you’re the quiet one, you put more effort into trying to be heard, and when you’re the more outgoing part of the relationship, you have to put more effort into listening. Bottom line is, you could both learn something from each other and you both balance each other out.
