One time in second year, I was sat towards the edge of a circle in Kelsey’s, sandwiched between Megan and a girl called Becky. Becky was a friend of a friend who I’d never met before, and the rest of the circle was filled with my entire social group. In what was an undeniably rude move, I basically ignored Becky, who seemed to want to talk to me, in favour of everyone else, maintaining the logic that I had enough friends at this point that I didn’t need to get to know anyone new. There were a lot of people I knew in Kelsey’s that night.
Earlier today, I was talking to Oscar and his friends Reece and Phil about tomorrow, and how the party will be filled with all these people that I will, in all likelihood, never see again. With that in mind, I don’t see that there’s much point in really getting to know them in favour of spending time with Oscar, Christina, Beth, and the other two. These are people who I actually want to spend time with, so spending hours chatting to people who are destined to remain strangers seems largely pointless.
That might be short-sighted and anti-social, and I imagine had I been in Becky’s situation I would have been very pissed off – as I said, this was undeniably rude and I wouldn’t say I’m proud of it. Either way, I’m pretty happy to stick to my guns on this one, because however nice a chat I have with people tomorrow, they’ll never be more than ‘people I met at parties’, while there are other, longer-term relationships that I’ll have the chance to build on.
Ali Jones 