Who’s Carrying What?
What midlife reveals about effort, roles, and the friendships we keep!
I’ve written before about the kind of friendships that stand the test of time… the ones that can go dark for a while and still feel completely solid when you come back to them.
This is not that.
This one’s about what happens when the friendship itself is still good, but something inside the dynamic starts looking different. Nothing tragic or dramatic. Nobody’s storming out of the group chat. It’s more like one of those slow creeping realizations where somebody suddenly notices they’ve been low-key annoyed for… a couple years.
I keep hearing versions of the same story lately. Different women, different friend groups, same underlying thing.
And often, it shows up a lot around the annual girls’ trip.
High school friends. College friends. Decades of history. The kind of group where everyone knows each other’s business without even asking. Yet somehow, one person ends up running the entire damn thing.
She books the house, coordinates schedules, makes dinner reservations, starts the group text, follows up in the group text, reminds everyone to Venmo, remembers the snacks, tracks who’s arriving when, and generally carries the whole thing across the finish line while everyone else tosses in heart emojis and says “can’t wait!”
Meanwhile someone else just sort of… arrives. She shows up, has a great time, genuinely appreciates the effort, and leaves saying, “We should totally do this every year.”
And maybe five or ten years ago most women would’ve just handled it without thinking too hard about it. Rolled their eyes a little. Made a joke about being “the organized one.” Kept it moving.
But now it hits different. A lot of RGG gals have DM’d me lately with versions of the same realization: they’re starting to notice where they’re doing more than their share and where other people have gotten extremely comfortable letting them.
These roles rarely get consciously assigned. They just sort of develop over years and eventually become the default setting of the friendship.
The capable friend becomes the planner. The emotionally aware friend becomes the mediator. The reliable friend becomes the one everybody unconsciously waits for to make sure everything actually gets handled.
After enough years, people stop even seeing the labor underneath it all because it’s become so normal.
A lot of these friendships were also built during completely different phases of life. Back when everyone had more energy, fewer responsibilities, and less emotional exhaustion before the trip even started. Back when picking up the slack didn’t feel quite so loaded.
Now, the same dynamics just don’t land because tolerance for over-functioning starts changing in midlife. There’s less patience for constantly anticipating everything, smoothing everything out, remembering everything, and carrying things for people before they even realize something needs carrying.
That’s the part I keep hearing women talk about. Things rarely show up as giant friendship-ending fights. Most of the time, it’s a growing awareness of how many relationships, households, jobs, trips, and family systems seem to operate on the effort of the same people over and over again.
And then… the question becomes: what do you actually do with that realization?
Do you say something? Do you divide things up differently? Do you stop automatically stepping in every single time? Do you let the ball drop once and see whether anybody else notices it’s even on the floor?
History complicates all of it, too. Long friendships buy a lot of grace. Sometimes deservedly. Sometimes maybe a little excessively. Things that would feel irritating or unbalanced in a newer friendship become “just how she is” when there’s thirty years behind it.
Again, most of the time nothing actually blows up. The trip still gets booked. Everyone still posts the beach photo. The friendship survives.
Maybe that’s part of midlife too… noticing where friendship still feels mutual and where you somehow became the unpaid cruise director of everyone else’s social life!
#RealGirlsGuidetoMidlife #MidlifeEffort #MidlifeRoles #RGG
We’ve earned every wrinkle. Might as well make more laugh lines together.
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