They Went to a Different Bar

I've been running a Friday night thing. Nothing fancy. Just a bar, a time, an open invite. Show up if you want.

Some nights people come. Some nights they don't. That's how it works and I get that.

But there was one night where a bunch of people I know, people I'd personally asked if they'd come, arranged to go somewhere else instead. Same night. Same general area. I saw them doing it. Not after the fact, not secondhand. I watched them make the plan.

They didn't cancel. They didn't say they couldn't make it. They just chose something else, right in front of me.

I don't think they did it to be cruel. I don't think they even thought about it. And that's kind of the point. It didn't register as something worth showing up for.

Three things happen at once

There's the rational response: maybe we're not as close as I thought. Maybe my expectations are off. Maybe this is just what adult friendship looks like and I need to adjust.

There's the self-doubt: am I bad at this? Is the event not good enough? Am I not good enough at putting it together? Should I have sold it better, followed up more, made it easier?

And then there's the little kid. The one who says: they don't like you. You're not part of the group. You never were.

That voice is the loudest. And the hardest to argue with. Because logically I know it's not true, but the feeling doesn't care about logic. It just sits there.

The survey nobody filled out

After a few weeks of low turnouts, I sent out an anonymous survey. Really basic stuff. Why haven't you tried the app? What would make you use it? No names attached. No judgment. Just tell me what's going on.

Almost nobody filled it out.

I don't know what that means exactly. Maybe they didn't see it. Maybe they didn't care enough to spend two minutes on it. Maybe the honest answer is something they didn't want to say even anonymously.

I kept checking. Refreshing the responses page like I used to refresh the waitlist dashboard. Waiting for something to appear. Nothing did.

The ones who did show up

On the nights when people came, even two or three, it was good. Genuinely good. Not because of the numbers but because those people chose to be there. They didn't have to come. Nobody was making them. They just showed up.

One person came three weeks in a row. We didn't have some deep conversation every time. Sometimes it was just a beer and some small talk. But they came back.

I still notice the empty chairs though.