Perpetual Initiator Syndrome: What it Is and How to Tell if You Have It

In friend groups, people often settle into roles. There’s the comedian always cracking jokes, a mother hen always taking care of everybody else, the gossiper always dishing out the latest chismis about other people, the silent type who rarely ever comments about anything but is keenly observant about what’s going on beneath the surface, and so on. 

Lately I’ve noticed there’s another role that some people find themselves in. I don’t know about the dynamics in teenage or young adult barkadas these days, but for older friendships, there’s always that one person that’s the first to suggest get-togethers, triggering everyone else to chime in with their available schedule. They’re the ones taking the time to set-up the logistics of the friendly hang—a quick lunch, a long dinner, drinks at the favorite watering hole, or a coffee meet-up at a place convenient for everybody. It’s that one friend who essentially keeps the friend group together because he or she is the one who cares enough to make sure everyone gets to see each other regularly, as opposed to just exchanging memes or talking smack about other people in the group chat on (insert messaging app here).

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I did a Google search and even asked ChatGPT if there’s a name for these unsung heroes of familiar societal bonds among everyone from casual acquaintances to tight-knit, decades-long platonic friendships, and there doesn’t seem to be one. So I’m hereby coining a term for the phenomenon of possessing that vague personality trait of constantly instigating the friend group assembly; the condition of regularly corralling everybody when they’re all just busy living their own lives. I call it the Perpetual Initiator Syndrome or PIS.

The definition is pretty straightforward: if you’re the person who’s aways the one messaging the group things like, “Uy kita naman tayo!” or “Coffee tayo next week!” or “Kelan na next get-together?” you most likely have PIS. If you’re consistently extending invites to friends to see each other to share a meal, drinks, watch a movie, go on a shopping spree or even travel together to anywhere farther than a few hours’ drive, you definitely have PIS. 

Perpetual initiators, I feel, are more common in older friend groups, and there’s a simple explanation for it. Younger people—teenagers to young adults—more often see each other in school or in other social situations, such as sports practice, theater rehearsals, dance class, etc, so there’s hardly a need for constant reminders to go on real-life hangs. Adult tribes are complicated by real-world issues such as romantic relationships or raising kids, work that demands hefty amounts of focus and time, even other friendships that they deem are more important and for which they allocate more attention.

If you’ve ever been in a close-knit barkada from school, a previous job, a common-interest group (such as sports team, a church or volunteer group), you’ll understand that, in time, intense feelings of camaraderie and attachment often fizzle out. No matter how strongly you feel kinship with someone or a group of people, it eventually dies if you don’t talk or see each other on a regular basis. And when seeing other is no longer tied to a regular schedule, that bond can only be nurtured and strengthened by a purposeful desire to seek out each other’s company; to actually carve out a schedule and make time for each other. 

In other words, you’d have to actually want to spend time together. In this case, that age-old Filipino saying holds true: “Kung gusto, may paraan, kung ayaw, may dahilan.”

It's only logical then, that PIS manifests in the people who carry this desire the most in friend groups. We can’t reasonably expect everybody in our clique to possess equal levels of affection for everybody else. If they do, that’s a good thing; that just means higher chances of more frequent get-togethers, keeping the group intact. But if they don’t, perpetual initiators play an important role in ensuring the survival of friendships. Their actions—from expressing the intention to spend quality time together, to figuring out the when and where of the meet-up, to constantly following up and making sure everybody’s onboard—signals that someone cares enough in the group to keep the fires of friendship burning. 

And this isn’t even limited to groups. PIS is also present in one-on-one friendships, and if it’s not there, you can bet that bond is headed for extinction.

Why am I suddenly keen on PIS? Perhaps it’s because that, in some of my own close relationships, I’ve figured out that I’m the one who has it. I’m a perpetual initiator based on the countless messages of dinner or movie invites I’ve sent out over the years. I have different friend groups, and in some of them, I’ve realized I’m always the one asking if they want to catch up in person over coffee, ramen, ribs, or beer. I have PIS because I never got tired of asking friends to spend some quality time together. 

Until now.

After you reach a certain age, it’s true that you start caring less about what others say about your words and actions. Often you put self-preservation ahead of thoughts like, “Will they like me less if I speak my mind?” or “What’s she going to say if I stopped inviting her to hang out?” Eventually you reach a point where you just get exhausted being the person always sending out the invites and not getting the invites yourself. You realize that friendships are a symbiosis, an evolved give-and-take. It’s not about giving it your all and getting little to nothing in return. 

They might have varying personal limits, but perpetual initiators will undoubtedly reach their breaking points sooner or later. And when that happens, expect to see the slow crumbling of a relationship architecture carefully built through the years. If you don’t feel that badly about it, then that’s not an issue—you were probably never meant to be in each other’s lives in the first place. 

But, if in some distant future, you suddenly experience a tinge of sadness or regret when you suddenly remember that friend or barkada that you haven’t heard from in ages, spare a thought for the perpetual initiator who eventually gave up long, long after you or anyone else in your friend group ever did.