A love letter to the group chat 💕
Presenting our "Love Notes to Your Bestie" challenge!
Love is in the air, so get ready for a week of the most wholesome content you’ve ever seen, starting with our "Love Notes to Your Bestie" challenge! Have a love letter you’d like to share with your friends? Read on for some inspiration, and head to Diem to share yours. Be sure to post it on Instagram and tag us for a chance to win flowers and chocolate!—Kate
But first, here’s what else people are talking about on Diem:
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Sometime in the last year or so, I stopped really posting on social media. I’ll still head to Instagram to share my latest life update, or a particularly noteworthy picture of my cats (so, all of them), but compared to just five years ago, it’s a desert. I spent my 20s Snapchatting my way through life: No outfit felt worn, meal felt eaten, or sunset felt seen unless it was documented on my Instagram Story. I once live-posted my way through my IUD insertion—that’s the kind of “extremely online” I’m talking about. Today, however, I save all my food pics and gynecological procedures for a different platform: my group chat.
Group chats aren’t new at all. I’ve been in at least one since college, and currently have six pinned to the top of my iMessage. But as Business Insider recently reported, with social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram becoming less fun, the tried and true group chat has come to take their place.
While I’m in a number a group chats, there’s just one that gets all my attention. I can’t tell you what it’s called, because the name changes every few weeks, usually to whatever weird thing someone just said. “Insane party sluts” is one name I remember. “This chat is for Bake Off” is another, solely to differentiate it from the other, equally important group chat: “This chat is for Love Island.” But it doesn’t matter, because in the past year or so, the chat has always been used for the same thing: Everyone sharing all their thoughts, all the time.
There’s seven of us in the chat, one of whom lives on the other side of the continent. She’ll wake up three hours later than the rest of us, and come to find she’s already missed 200 messages. The rest is a gaggle of school friends, work friends, and my sister, all of whom came together via chat to talk about reality TV during COVID, and came out the other side a fully-cemented friend group. They’re the first people I talk to in the morning, and the last before I go to bed at night—which is saying something, because I live with my boyfriend.
In fact, when he and I were recently getting drinks with a friend from the chat and her boyfriend, the subject of the group chat came up.
“Sometimes I’ll copy-paste the same messages I send to you into the group chat,” my friend confessed to her boyfriend, who was aghast.
“Am I not good enough for you?” he asked.
We both explained that no, it’s not that. The beauty of a group chat is, if you’re ever having a crisis or issue, your boyfriend might be away from his phone, but at least one of the other six group chat members will be available to help you. We’ve talked each other through break-ups, career hiccups, office etiquette, and customer service emails.
There’s also no pressure. While I’m about as plugged into it as you can get, sharing every thought that enters my brain and responding in kind, others may dip in and out. You can tell one of us is catching up after a day or two off when the iMessage reaction notifications start piling up. On the flip side, if anyone ever spends too long absent from the chat, one of us will always directly check in.
Some of my first years in New York were the loneliest I remember. I was feeling unmoored from any kind of community and desperately insecure about all my friendships. Almost ten years later, my group chat has enveloped me in a kind of digital hammock, and gentle hug of support that acts as a constant reminder that I’m loved, and people care about me (even though we’re the awkward kind of friends who need a few drinks to say that stuff to each other). But at least once every few days, when someone in the chat makes a joke that causes me to belly laugh in the silence of my living room, or faces a problem that gets me righteously indignant on their behalf, I think to myself how lucky I am to have this entire universe in my pocket. Even when the movie ends, the drinks finish, and the Ubers are called, I know I never actually have to say goodbye.
ICYMI
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