The Group Chat

I want you to picture the most functional relationship currently active in my life. It is not a marriage. It is not even a friendship in the traditional, face-to-face sense. It is a group chat, and it has been diligently ‘planning dinner’ since March. We are closing in on a full calendar year of achieving absolutely nothing, and somehow it remains the single most consistent commitment on my calendar.

The Group Chat Has One Job and Refuses To Do It

Here is what nobody warns you about before you get added to one of these things: it is not a tool for communication, it is a monument to indecision with a notification badge. Ours started innocently. Someone typed ‘we should get dinner sometime’ and within four minutes we had a poll with six restaurant options, none of which anyone actually wanted, all of which somebody vetoed for reasons like ‘too loud,’ ‘too far,’ or ‘I dated someone who worked there in 2019 and I am still not over it.’ Forty-seven messages later, we have narrowed it down to nothing. Zero restaurants. Zero times. One increasingly aggressive thumbs-up emoji war. I used to think the goal was dinner. I now believe the goal was never dinner. The goal was the discourse.

Somewhere around message thirty, someone proposed a third poll, and I want to be clear that a third poll is not decision-making, it is a hostage situation with better formatting. We polled the neighborhood. We polled the cuisine. We are one message away from polling whether we even like each other, and honestly, at this point, I’d vote yes just to keep the streak going.

Every Group Chat Has One Friend Who Is Somehow Always ‘Driving’

There is a scientific law, unwritten but universally understood, that at least one member of any planning thread will respond to a simple yes-or-no question with ‘can’t talk, driving’ and then post four more messages in the following ten minutes. I do not know where these people are going. I do not think they know either. I think ‘driving’ has become a spiritual state, a way of being perpetually almost-available while contributing zero actual logistics. Meanwhile the rest of us sit there, refreshing, watching three dots appear and disappear like some kind of cruel digital seance, hoping this is the message where someone finally commits to a Tuesday.

And look, I’ve tried to be the responsible one. I’ve tried saying ‘let’s just pick the first suggestion and go,’ and I was met with the kind of silence usually reserved for asking someone to split a bill evenly when they only had a salad. Nobody wants to be the one who decides. Deciding means owning it if the place is bad. Silence is safer. Silence is, historically, our whole group’s love language.

The Group Chat Will Outlive Several of Our Actual Friendships

I say this with love and also total confidence: two people in this chat have not spoken outside of it in months. One of them switched jobs. One of them got a haircut I have only seen in a badly lit selfie posted for feedback that nobody gave. We know these things because of the thread, not because of any actual hanging out, which means the thread has quietly become the relationship. We haven’t had dinner. We’ve had updates. We’ve had a slow, ambient awareness of each other’s lives delivered entirely through reaction emojis and the occasional all-caps ‘WAIT WHAT.’

Honestly, if the chat ever got deleted, I’m not sure some of these friendships would survive the transition to real life. We’d have to make actual eye contact. We’d have to decide on a restaurant in under a week, using our mouths, in real time, like animals. I don’t know if we’re built for that anymore. We’ve evolved past it. We are group chat creatures now, built to scroll, to vote, to reschedule, and to never, under any circumstances, actually eat the meal.

So no, we still don’t have a reservation. We don’t have a time. We barely have a restaurant. But we have forty-seven messages of pure, unfiltered commitment to a dinner that may never happen, and honestly? That’s not dysfunction, that’s just what modern friendship looks like now. The chat isn’t planning the friendship anymore. The chat is the friendship. I’ve made my peace with it. I’ve also, quietly, started a poll about dessert, just to keep things moving.