how to stop disappointing yourself with the help of radical acceptance

By: Voupie

08/15/2025

I have been wanting to write this article for a multitude of reasons, one because it is relevant to my recent social situations and the social social situations of my friends, but also to more concretely lay out the way that I see things, people, and forgiveness.

So let me know if this situation sounds familiar to you. You have friends that you wish would reciprocate the things that you do for them, but they just don't. Maybe you invite them out and they never invite you back out, maybe you always ask to hang out but they never return the favor, or even you ask about their day and they never ask about yours. It can be so easy to feel disappointed in that person or maybe in yourself for why they wouldn't respond to you in that way. Here is where the trap of constant disappointment begins. You can ask yourself why all day long and you could even ask the person themselves why they don't do these things, and I've seen some people communicate this frustration clearly and it improves a friendship. Generally though, I think that people are not really looking to use communication and growth to maintain a friendship in the year of 2025. At least not gen Z. Instead, i've been practicing RADICAL ACCEPTANCE.

For all of those unaware, RADICAL ACCEPTANCE is the ability to accept things outside of your control without casting judgment on them. It is so important that you remember the last part, not casting judgment. I think that we forget that other people are just simply different from us and live a completely different life with a completely different point of view on literally everything. There's no way to really know what's going on in another person's head, nor should we really even want to. Radical acceptance allows you to accept the way that someone is treating you or the way that somebody is, not cast judgment on them, but instead realign your expectations for that person. It's so easy to feel jaded and think the worst of people, that it's personal, or that they're trying to teach you some sort of lesson. It's really not always the case. If you have a friend that you constantly come to with major life issues, changes or conversations, and they're generally either not receptive, don't reply in the way that you would like, or simply seems like they don't care, instead of trying to understand why or fix this about them, you can just accept it. I have accepted that there are friends that I can come to when I want to talk about really serious things, and there are friends with whom I cannot. Similarly, I also have friends that love to play video games and love to go out and are just rays of sunshine that can brighten my day effortlessly, and other friends that are not so good in more social settings or they're simply not as consistently positive. That doesn't make either of those friendship less valuable, but instead, it shows that each friendship can serve a different purpose in your life. I do want to say that I think it's also not a great idea to come into friendships with a mindset of seeing how they can serve you, friendship should not be transactional. Friendship is a human connection and human connections are inherently valuable because we're social creatures. That being said, though, recognizing how someone can benefit you in your life and the ways that they cannot benefit you in your life is still very important. Rather than constantly disappointing yourself by expecting the same thing from the same friend when you know they're not going to give it to you, you can accept that that is the way that they are and that friend is there for a different reason.

All of this is way easier said than done, and I think that accepting people the way that they are and not casting judgment is the hardest part. I think that it can be so easy to take things personally and to not try and understand why someone can't reciprocate your feelings in the same way. This is because it is really difficult to try and get on the level of someone who is currently hurting your feelings. They're hurting you without even knowing it a lot of the time, and the world is asking you to try and put yourself in their shoes to understand them, it seems almost counterproductive, but truly understanding or attempting to understand your friendship from the other side and giving that person the benefit of the doubt is so important. Consider that people are brought up a different way, some people just aren't good at conversation, or they might not even know that that's something that you want from them. Additionally, you have no idea what this person is expecting from you and they might be experiencing the exact same thing on the other side. By realigning your expectations with reality and wanting only what your friends are giving to you already you can save yourself a world of disappointment and instead open yourself up to fulfilling friendships in your everyday life

This is a little sidenote, but I also want to mention that I don't think that anybody is inherently wrong for wanting something from a friend. You never want too much, your expectations are not too high, and you're not high maintenance or whatever your brain might be trying to tell you that you are. If you're feeling that way, and your friends aren't meeting your needs, you may just need more friends. Notice how I didn't say new friends, meaning that you would get rid of the old ones, but instead grow your friend web wider rather than trying to change it or cut people out of it. Your friend served you well for a long time, and that doesn't mean that you can't say goodbye to a good friendship, but people grow apart all the time and it's not a bad thing. Going from best friends to just friends is not a bad thing, relationships evolve, and you guys will always carry a piece of each other from when you were very close and it's still is something that can help you guys continue to be friends in the future. We all have those friends that you can grow so apart from physically, you guys will not speak for months or even years, but if you come back together, it's like nothing changed. That's the evolution of friendship, relationships don't always have to evolve to get stronger, or closer, but instead you guys can grow to give each other more room or to understand that maybe you aren't as similar as you thought you were.

I also want to touch base on the fact that placing a lot of expectations on a person without telling them is first of all very dangerous for the friendship, but also shows that you may have some work to do in either providing for yourself or creating a larger web of friends. I don't believe in having one best friend that you go to for everything, I think that that exists for so many people, whether it be your romantic partner or a platonic friendship of an extreme strength. That does not mean that these should not exist or they don't work for other people, but I think it is so important that each person has a web of friends that they can depend on when one person isn't there. I think that the way that we're brought up and our society sets up our expectations to find the one whether it be platonic or romantic, and we should share everything with this person and depend on them for everything and similarly they can depend on us for everything. This just sounds really exhausting to me and it's never really how life has been. Humans have always lived in communities and only recently have we become more and more disconnected, socially. By creating a web of friends with diverse abilities, strengths, weaknesses, and connections you can rest assured, knowing that when things go south in your life, you have more than one person to depend on. Especially if the thing going wrong in your life, IS that person. I also think that having friends that are very different from each other can allow you to see so many different perspectives on the same issue. Just think about telling all of your friends about a breakup and each of them pointing out something that you would've been blind to without their point of view. Your friends allow you to get a full picture on your life, and you shouldn't take everything they say as fact, but it can help you paint a fuller picture of the life you're currently living.

I don't know if you've ever witnessed this, but I think that there's something that I would like to call THE FIRST LOVE EFFECT. When someone experiences their first love, oftentimes they push away all of their friends and dedicate all their time and attention to their partner, and it's a rite of passage I think that so many people go through it and while not everybody does it is something that affects so many people that are trying to understand how to balance friendship, romance, and your emotional needs. You may not have personally experienced this as someone in the relationship, but you can also recognize it as a friend of someone who was once single and is now in a relationship feeling like you got pushed away, it's really a tale as old as time. It can be so easy to depend on one person for everything, but once you get out of that relationship, or if you ever do, you then realize how much you've pushed all of your friends away and became dependent on this one person for everything. Then there's the person who just got out of a relationship and is now reconnecting with all their friends again, again it's a rite of passage a lot of people go through it, but I think that the lesson to learn from it is that you should've had that web of friends the entire time. If your partner or best friend is not allowing you to have a web of friends because they are insecure and do not think that they can depend on anyone outside of you for their emotional needs, they are ultimately hindering both of your growth as humans. In any relationship, you should both be able to go and see friends for the things that you cannot provide for one another. Also, simply for the sake of painting a clear picture like how I mentioned before. Speaking to one person every day and getting their opinion can make you feel like you have a very solid world view based around a mixture of your own and that person's opinions. All it takes is a conversation with a friend to really make you reconsider the way that you see things, it takes the opinion of a very different friend to poke holes in a worldview that you thought was completely concrete.

I also want to quickly mention that not every friendship is worth saving. I think that you can definitely realign your expectations and instead of asking yourself why someone did what they did, you can just ask yourself what you're going to do about it. That doesn't always mean that you have to save the friendship and accept them as they are and let them continue to treat them treat you the way that they treat you, you can decide that the way that they're treating you just doesn't align with the things you want from a friend. You can accept someone as they are and when you decide what to do next, you don't have to keep them around. It can be so easy to hold onto a friendship simply because of how long you guys have known each other or because of how much you guys have depended on each other in the past. When you really think back though, was it really them or could it happen to anyone? Now that you know that you guys are different, what are you going to do about it? Don't cast judgment and don't ask why, you're gonna spiral trying to answer a question that they might not even know the answer to. Accept them, realign your expectations, and act.

If you are constantly finding yourself disappointed by the way, that your friends treat you or the things that they failed to do, maybe instead of casting judgment on those friends, try and put yourself in their shoes. Ask instead if they are the kind of person that can or even want to provide that for you in the first place. Maybe consider if they even know that you are wanting something like this, and also consider just making new friends that you don't have to fix to feel loved by. Everybody loves in their own way and it can take a little time and effort for you to be able to see the way that your friends love you, even if it's not the way that you'd wished. Nobody is wrong for being different from you, they're just different. with someone different from you there's always something to learn, and maybe something that you hate about them is really something that you wish you embodied more yourself. Food for thought.

Accept reality as it is, do not cast judgement, and decide what you're going to do about it. Act.