Drama between friends, lovers, colleagues, and family is a fact of life. The same can be said about group-chat drama. Try as we might to avert all miscommunication, it’s bound to happen in a medium where inflection, facial expressions, and all those other subtle real-life cues are boiled down to a limited number of emoji. Sometimes meaning is lost and people get mad. Plus, group dynamics are hard! No two relationships are the same, and it’s completely normal for one person to feel as though they’re being isolated, even if that’s not the other chat members’ intentions.
For Glamour’s group-chat package, we conducted a short, informal survey about readers’ group-chat preferences. From the things that make them tick to the gestures that make their hearts smile, readers got candid about all things group chats—including some of the wildest moments they’ve experienced.
Below, 12 anonymous readers share the group-chat drama they’ve endured.
The Group That Ghosts Together
Our “large” group chat of 12 is now on iteration 3.0, which we put in the name because we’ve made the mistake of adding people to it too early into the friendship. Rather than have the uncomfortable conversation that comes with removing them, we’ve just started an entirely new thread without them on it.
The NSFW Jar Jar Binks
When I started dating my ex, he saw me texting my group chat enough to get curious. I told him it’s mostly jokes. One day I woke up next to him and checked it and started laughing hard. I showed him. It was a pornographic image of [Star Wars alien] Jar Jar Binks. He regretted looking. It kind of disturbed him. He never read the group chat again but brought it up a few times to our friends in later years, describing it as a place where certain sides of my humor/personality could rip freely, parts that even he as my partner didn’t really want to know about or see.
Beware the iMessage
I sent a screenshot to my friend group about my sister’s good sex with her new boyfriend, and her soon-to-be ex-husband went on their son’s iPad and found it.
Saved by the Android, Destroyed by Dad
I was planning on surprising my fiancé by flying to see him on his birthday while we were staying separately with our families for the holidays. His family and I had done SUCH a good job keeping it a secret, until his grandma texted the family group chat that she was excited to see me later that day. The twist is, because my fiancé is the only Android user of his family’s group chat, he doesn’t always get the messages and didn’t get Grandma’s. Surprise saved! But his dad, assuming he saw the message, spilled the beans to him to his face only minutes before I made it to their door.
Devoted Friends
I am part of a group dedicated to monitoring an actor we know from high school’s Wikipedia page. We periodically edit their birth year to the correct one, and somebody on their team keeps changing it and making it a decade later.
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