If you have ever come home from a hard friendship moment and thought, “Why does this keep happening to me? Why am I always the one who ends up hurt?” I want to offer you a reframe that I genuinely cannot stop thinking about.
It came from Molly Menning, who was on last week’s episode (EP191) talking about how she built a weekly drop-in play group for local moms from scratch. In the middle of that conversation, she just… casually said it. “The price of community is disappointment.” And I immediately knew I needed to sit with that, because she is SO right.
This episode is about friendship disappointment: what it actually means, why it shows up everywhere once you start looking, and why the sting of it might be the best evidence you have that your friendships actually matter to you.
Why “The Price of Community Is Inconvenience” Never Sat Right with Me
You have probably heard the phrase “the price of community is inconvenience.” It is everywhere right now. And I want to be clear: I do not love it. I made an entire episode about why. If you want the full argument, go listen to Episode 146, Moving Past Inconvenience and Leaning into the JOY of Helping Our Friends. That episode is where I laid out exactly why that framing bothers me.
But when Molly said “the price of community is disappointment,” something clicked that the inconvenience framing never did for me. Disappointment is about caring. And once you see it that way, the whole thing shifts.
Every Kind of Friendship Disappointment You Have Probably Felt
There is the friend who did not show up when you needed them. Maybe you were going through something hard and you told them, and they said “I’m so sorry” and then… nothing. No check-in. No follow-through. You got to the other side of the hard thing and realized they were basically absent for it.
There is the canceled plan. The last-minute bail. The person who floated an idea and then never brought it up again. This one shows up a lot around big events: the bachelorette trip someone cannot afford, the baby shower someone misses because they are sick. There is disappointment on both sides of those situations, by the way. The person who cannot go AND the person who wanted them there.
There is the friend who DID show up, but it was not what you needed. They texted every day, but you needed someone to actually come over. They offered advice when you needed someone to just listen. They were THERE, technically, and you are still a little… off about it.
There is the slow burn. Not one big moment, but a quiet accumulation. This one is sneaky because there is no single thing to point to. It just rewrites the friendship slowly, over time, until one day you realize something has shifted and you cannot trace it back to a specific event.
There is the left-out feeling. Even when you are the one who encouraged your friends to hang out without you, there is still sometimes a small pang when they do. Both things can be true at once: genuinely happy they are getting closer, and a little sad you were not there.
There is the birthday disappointment. Your friends did exactly what they always do: your favorite restaurant, your favorite cake, the same formula that has worked for years. And you are sitting there thinking… I think I am past this. I wanted something different this time. They did not do anything wrong. The disappointment is yours, and it is about your own shifting expectations.
And then there is the one we do not talk about enough: the disappointment you caused. The times you were the one who did not show up the way someone needed. I was supposed to go to a baby shower recently and had to cancel because I was sick. I am disappointed that I disappointed my friends. That counts too.
Listen to the full episode at friendshipirl.com/episode192 for the complete list, because once you start seeing all the ways friendship disappointment shows up, you cannot unsee it.
The Opposite of Disappointment Is Not Joy. It’s Apathy.
Most of us treat disappointment like a warning sign. Like something is wrong with the friendship, or wrong with us, or wrong with how we are doing this whole connection thing. We want joy and closeness and fun, and disappointment feels like the opposite of that. So we try to avoid it. We lower our expectations. We stop caring so much. We keep people at a distance so there is less to lose.
But here is what I kept coming back to this week: the opposite of disappointment is not joy. It is apathy.
Think about it. We all have relationships where someone has let us down and we just… shrugged. A coworker you barely know did not stand up for you in a meeting and you thought, “whatever, we’re not that close.” You walked away and forgot about it by the end of the day. No sting. No lingering feeling.
Now imagine your closest friend did the exact same thing. That one would stay with you. That one would hurt. And the reason it hurts is because you CARE. The relationship matters. You are invested enough to want something from it.
Disappointment, then, is actually proof. It is the receipt for caring. You cannot be disappointed by someone you do not care about. So if you are sitting in a lot of friendship disappointment right now, the most honest thing I can tell you is: that feeling is evidence that you are building the thing you actually want. It means the relationships around you matter to you. That is not a malfunction. That is the whole point.
What to Actually Do with It
Okay, so disappointment is proof you care. That does not mean you just sit in it and suffer. Here is what I actually do when it shows up.
I let it sting. I do not rush past it or talk myself out of it immediately. I sit with it. I try to get clear on what I actually wanted and why.
Then I ask myself: did I communicate that? Because a lot of disappointment lives in the gap between what we expected and what we said out loud. If I wanted my birthday to feel different this year but I never told anyone that, the disappointment is real AND it is also on me to have that conversation. Not a blame thing. Just a practical thing.
Sometimes I talk to the friend about it. Sometimes I do not. That usually depends on whether I communicated clearly in the first place, how significant the disappointment is, and whether this is a pattern or a one-time thing.
And then I try to appreciate it. Which I know sounds strange. But I genuinely try to remind myself: the fact that I feel this means the relationship matters to me. The fact that I feel this means I have something worth caring about. That is not nothing. Caring is the point. And feeling disappointed by someone is actually a sign that you are connected enough to want something from them.
When Disappointment Becomes a Pattern
I want to be clear about something, because I do not want to use this reframe to tell you to stay in situations that are genuinely not working.
There is a difference between the small disappointments that are just part of caring about people, and the big, repeated, pattern-level disappointments that are telling you something important about a friendship. I have had some of those too. The people I cared about the most have sometimes been the ones who disappointed me the most, and that is not a coincidence. The more you care, the more there is to lose.
If you have tried to reflect, tried to have the conversation, and this is still a pattern you cannot move past, it is okay to walk away. I am not here to tell you to stay in every friendship forever no matter what. Some disappointments are a one-time miss that deserves grace. Some are a boundary that has been crossed that you cannot go back from. You get to know the difference.
Disappointment Means You Are Doing It Right
So here is where I land on all of this, thanks to Molly.
Friendship disappointment is not a sign that something is wrong with your friendships. It is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is proof that you care. It is the cost of actually being invested in the people around you, and the only way to stop feeling it is to stop caring, which is a far lonelier life than the disappointment will ever be.
The next time a friend cancels, or does not show up the way you hoped, or you feel that familiar sting of wanting something and not getting it: let yourself feel it. Sit with it. Reflect on it. Maybe have the conversation. And then remember that the feeling itself is what caring looks like. That is what friendship actually costs.
If you are in a lot of disappointment right now, I hope this episode makes you feel a little less alone in it, and a little more certain that it is worth it to keep going. Go listen to the full episode at friendshipirl.com/episode192 because I go deeper into what to actually do with the big disappointments, the ones where one conversation is not enough and you are genuinely wondering whether to stay.
