Is Your Group Chat Talking About You?

Mean girl behavior is alive and well. But you wouldn’t necessarily know it — unless you find out that you’ve been excluded from a group chat.

“My friends told me that there was a subgroup text created without me by the people from a bigger group chat I was in,” says Marleena, 35. “It was a big mom group chat, and they excluded me because they said I was annoying and sloppy.” She was hurt, understandably. But it affected her in major ways. “As someone who has dealt with body dysmorphia, I became very self-conscious and hyper-aware of my appearance and also how I was texting. It even transferred to how I was Slacking at work.”

Two of her closest friends — who had been added to that splinter group — told her about it months later. “I feel lucky that I had friends that were willing to be honest with me,” says Marleena, who views the whole situation as “epic” in hindsight. “I’m so much better for it all. It was like a sorority haze moment. Those moms are such losers.”

Group chats — text threads that include three or more people, typically friends, family, or travel companions — sometimes spawn quiet offshoots: side conversations that intentionally leave someone out. In an era where a large chunk of friendship happens virtually, the exclusionary threads are the modern-day version of “you can’t sit with us.” It’s social signaling that’s less in your face and more passive-aggressive; a frenemy practice that hides behind screens. And it has real-world consequences.

The Group Chat-To-Side Chat Pipeline

The savagery typically goes like this: Vibes shift in a group chat (either due to a natural drift or a specific offense), one person starts another text chain without the person they’re irritated with, complaints and gossip ensue, and either the OG chat slowly dies or the group becomes strained with secret alliances. It’s the digital version of smiling to someone’s face and talking behind their back. Sometimes, it leads to a confrontation. In other cases, it’s the beginning of the end of a friendship. This is how friendships fracture now.

Alyssa Petersel, a licensed clinical social worker and founder and CEO of mental health platform MyWellbeing, says this behavior is more common than you might think. “It often reflects the complexities of modern friendship dynamics rather than straightforward malice,” she explains, noting that people may create separate chats to vent, process, or plan something specific, not necessarily to permanently drop someone. “The result can still feel deeply personal for the person left out.” While the reasons may vary, there’s almost inevitably some sort of emotional fallout.

A Space For Hot Goss

Whether it’s meant as a temporary outlet or a more permanent shift in loyalty, the side chat shifts the dynamic — even when the excluded person doesn’t know it exists. That’s the case for Ashlee, 36, whose separate group chat continues to run alongside the original thread with the unknowing offender.

“One of my cousins regularly takes weird, nonsensical stances on topics,” she says. “Recently, out of nowhere, she put down my sister’s choice of lettuce on her salad. She felt it was appropriate to say, ‘Umm, iceberg has no nutritional value.’ This is coming from a girl who showed us a pic of her TV dinner with soda the day before. So we gathered in the other chat to talk sh*t.”

Outside gossip doesn’t have to kill the original thread. Rachel, 34, is in a group chat with five other women, and regularly winds up in side conversations “when one starts acting crazy,” as she puts it. Exhibit A: “One of them kept buying, ‘testing,’ and then returning mattresses,” she says. Whenever she realizes there are a few one-on-one discussions, she gets everyone together — minus the person they’re badmouthing. “The side chat doesn’t replace the group chat in the long term. The mattress girl is my least favorite in our friend group, but I’m still copacetic with her.”

Screeching To A Halt

Like posting snarky comments under a Finsta, these breakaway texts are a way to air your grievances seemingly without consequences. Unless, of course, the excluded person finds out.

Theresa, 26, accidentally triggered that kind of drama. “I had a group chat with three of my friends that was really active save for one person, who would chime in randomly — but it was impossible to catch up on everything because she must have had 200 unread messages,” she says. “She would respond to things incorrectly. Like, one time I shared something difficult about my family and she responded with a heart and ‘oh my god, yay.’”

So, the three active members created their own chat. “One day we were having a conversation about how she hasn’t been a great friend, and she asked how often I talk to the other two girls since she noticed the group thread was less active, and I said every day — which was how I basically outed myself. She said she understood, but she drifted and we’re not as close with her anymore,” she says. Her original group chat is dead, and while the side thread didn’t cause the split, Theresa believes it solidified it.

As Petersel says, “When we exclude someone to avoid a hard conversation or to manage conflict indirectly, it can be a sign of emotional immaturity or discomfort with vulnerability.” Secret discussions are the easy way out. They allow you to dodge confrontation.

But they're also a way to bond — a proverbial eye-roll across the table at someone's odd comment. And honestly, if someone's out there buying and returning mattresses like it's a sport, they deserve it.