My boyfriend muting a group chat has somehow turned into a friendship-ending fight.
By @ashactually · Friends
He muted the chat because he gets up for work at 4am and doesn't want his phone buzzing all night. Now one of the other girls in the chat is accusing him of being selfish and antisocial, and it's blown up into a huge drama.
The full story
We have this group chat with three other couples. It started so we could plan a camping trip a few months ago, which was fine. But the trip is over, and the chat has become a 24/7 meme-dump and gossip line. I don't really care, I just glance at it when I'm bored. My boyfriend, however, gets up at 4 AM to be at the worksite by 5:30. He’s a welder. He needs his sleep. His phone buzzing at 11:30 PM because someone sent a TikTok is not it. So he did the logical thing: he muted the chat. He didn't leave, he just silenced the notifications. He'd still check it a couple times a day. Apparently, this was a cardinal sin. One of the other girlfriends in the chat, let's call her Sarah, sent a message last Tuesday night asking who wanted to go to trivia on Thursday. My boyfriend didn't see it until his lunch break the next day, by which point the spots were full. they replied "Ah damn, missed this. Have fun!" they replied back to the group, "Oh, you would have seen it if you didn't have the chat MUTED." The all caps was a nice touch. He just replied "?". And she went off. they wrote this whole paragraph about how muting a friend group chat is rude and a sign that you don't care about the friendship. How it's isolating and sends a message that you're better than everyone else. they said if the notifications bothered him so much, he should use the 'Do Not Disturb' feature on his phone at night for ALL his apps, because muting their specific chat was a personal insult. I jumped in and said he works a physically demanding job and is in bed by 9, and the constant buzzing was waking him up. And that he needs to be able to get emergency calls from his family or his boss, so a full 'Do Not Disturb' isn't always an option. they said that was a lame excuse. Now she's given her own boyfriend an ultimatum that HE has to leave the chat if my boyfriend is going to be so 'disrespectful', and another one of the girls is agreeing with her that it was a petty move. It's a phone setting. This has gone way, way too far, right? We're all in our late twenties, not high school.
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