The Consequences of Excluding People From Your Viewing Party

It’s award season, and you know that that means : viewing parties! Getting together with friends to bet on who will win, watch the nominees, and maybe even dress up as major characters from the last year… who wouldn’t want to join the fun?

Well, my cinephile friends will love it, sure, but some of my friends haven’t even gone to a movie theatre this year. They’ll probably turn down the invite, and even if they do come, they’ll probably ruin the mood anyway since they don’t really get it.

Hahahaha YOU FOOL! You really think that? Let me tell you, as someone who was once the kind of person who “doesn’t get movies”, that’s the fastest way to end a friendship.

Let me set the scene.

You’re in high school, hanging out with your friend - let’s call her Emily. You’re chatting with Emily and bring up hanging out on Saturday night. After all, the holiday break ended just a week or so again and you haven’t seen each other outside of school in a while. To remedy this grave tragedy (or at least, what your teenage mind deems a tragedy), you decide that you’ll both hang out at your house on Saturday - after her movie club, of course.

See, your friend Emily is super into film. She dreams of being a director, so she joined a movie club to meet people who shared her passion. No problem! It’s wonderful that she has hobbies, and even though you aren’t a cinephile like she is, you get to enjoy the hilariously bad films they make together. Sure, it gets in the way of you guys spending time together sometimes, but you’re happy for her.

Or you were, until that fateful Saturday rolls around. You’re sitting at home, looking forward to seeing Emily later - she already confirmed with you that morning before heading to her club. She doesn’t know when the club meeting will end, so you wait to hear from her again.

So you wait for her text.

And you keep waiting for her text.

Until eventually, it’s getting pretty late and you just can’t wait anymore - so you send a passive-aggressive “?”. The response comes fast… almost too fast. It turns out she’s not feeling well after her meeting and she might be coming down with a cold, so she wants to reschedule for next week. It’s a bummer, but that’s life, isn’t it.

...Isn’t it?

Well, maybe not, because a few minutes later you tell your mom that your friend isn’t coming over anymore, and so your mom invites you to watch an awards show with her to judge the red carpet outfits.

An awards show? ... A movie awards show.

It all clicks into place.

See, I can’t confirm that Emily ditched me to watch the awards show with her cinephile friends. Even if she did, I wouldn’t really have minded terribly. But I can’t confirm what actually happened because I never spoke to her again, which made our classes super awkward. The suspicion that she was not just excluding me but actively trying to hide it made it clear that somewhere deep inside, I felt like she didn’t want to share that part of herself with me and thought I wouldn’t understand her - in which case, why should I share myself with her? Why should I expect her to understand me?

Now obviously this is some rather extreme high school nonsense, even I recognise that. But the reality is that most people aren’t stupid, and when you choose not to invite them along, they’ll pick up on it eventually. If they find out that you’re lying about it too… well, you won’t have the friend for long. As adults, they might not take the dramatic “I’m never going to speak to you again” route like I did, but they’re going to grow more and more distant until someday, you realise you never see them anymore.

If you’re smart, you’ll realise the distance is your fault, because you never asked them to be close in the first place.

So yeah, the moral of the story is that if you actually like your friends, make sure they know that by asking them to spend time with you whenever you can, including Oscar parties and even if they’ve never heard of “Noolon” or “Scorsizey”. Whether or not they turn you down doesn’t matter - what matters is that they know you want them around.