It stings when you discover you weren’t invited to that couples dinner, industry event or weekend trip with your college pals. Your mind starts swirling, and you conclude that you are a social outcast destined for a life of loneliness. Or maybe you’re convinced that the friend who planned this intentionally excluded you because they’re a terrible person.
Friendship expert Danielle Bayard Jackson has recently come across “a surge of videos” on social media focusing on the latter.
“Oftentimes the tone of the video is very accusatory, and people tend to dismiss the inviters as being bad friends, fake friends, not really caring and as somehow being duplicitous and being exposed in their duplicity,” Bayard Jackson — a friendship coach and host of the “Friend Forward” podcast —told HuffPost. “And I saw less dialogue around other reasons why you may not be invited.”
So she posted her own TikTok in response, listing a dozen other possible reasons for people to consider when they aren’t invited to something. She created the video, she said, to open people’s eyes to different perspectives and “depersonalize” the experience. It has racked up more than 1.5 million views since she uploaded it in March.