Almost every friendship has an initiator
This is the part nobody tells you, and it changes the weight of the whole thing.
In most lasting friendships, one person does the majority of the reaching out. Not fifty-fifty, not alternating politely. One person tends to be the one who remembers, suggests the date, starts the thread, and books the table. If you are reading this, that person is you, in most of your relationships, and you have probably concluded that this means your friends do not care as much as you do.
Sometimes it means that. Usually it means you are the initiator and they are not, which is a difference in role rather than a difference in feeling.
The test that matters is not who texts first. It is what happens after you do. Do they say yes? Do they show up? Are they visibly glad to be there? Do they remember what you told them last time? A friend who never initiates but always arrives happy is a real friend with a bad habit. A friend who is lukewarm the moment you actually get there is telling you something different.
Three things that look identical from where you are standing
It is worth working out which one you are in, because the right response is different in each case and getting it wrong is expensive.
The first is plain initiator asymmetry. Some people simply do not think to reach out, ever, about anything, to anyone. They are not weighing you and deciding you are not worth a text. Their brain does not generate the impulse, and the friendship exists entirely because yours does. This is the most common case by a wide margin, and the correct response is to keep going while dropping the resentment, because the resentment is the only part actually hurting you.
The second is capacity. Someone with a newborn, a dying parent, two jobs, or an untreated depression has no surplus. They are not maintaining anyone, including themselves. What you are reading as indifference is a person underwater, and they often feel horrible about it. This one is seasonal and it comes back, and friendships genuinely have seasons rather than steady states.
The third is that it is actually over, or was never quite there. The signals for this are specific and they are not about texting frequency: they cancel more than they attend, they never ask you anything about your life, the conversation is entirely their material, and they surface reliably when they need something and not otherwise. If that is the pattern across a long stretch, you are doing maintenance on a relationship that is being consumed rather than shared, and you are allowed to stop.
On the test everyone wants to run
The obvious move is to stop reaching out and see who notices. It is very satisfying to imagine and it usually tells you nothing.
The reason is that the other person is not keeping the ledger you are keeping. They are not counting. In a lot of cases they will simply not register the silence for months, and then you will have both lost a friendship you wanted, and you will read the silence as proof of something it does not prove. Withdrawal feels like an experiment and functions as a slow exit.
If you want information, ask for it. One plain sentence, said warmly and once, gets you a far better answer than six months of not texting. The people who respond well were mostly unaware. The people who respond badly have handed you the clarity you were looking for, much faster and much more cheaply.
The reframe worth keeping
Being the person who organizes is not a humiliation. It is infrastructure, and the reason it feels thankless is that it genuinely is undersupplied. Everybody wants the standing dinner. Almost nobody wants to be the one who books it. Whoever does becomes the center of a group of people who all quietly depend on them and rarely say so.
Two things make that role survivable. The first is to stop reading the asymmetry as a scoreboard of how much you are loved, because it mostly measures who has the habit. The second is to make sure that not every relationship in your life runs in the same direction. If you are the initiator in all of them, you have no one whose job is you, which is a different and more serious problem than an uneven group chat, and having no one to talk to is where that leads.
What to do this week
Pick the friendship that bothers you most and decide which of the three cases it is, honestly, using attendance and warmth rather than message counts.
If it is habit or capacity, keep initiating and let go of the tally. Reduce the effort per attempt so it costs you less: a recurring thing on the calendar beats organizing from scratch every time, and a standing monthly date means you only have to do the work once.
If it is the third case, stop paying for it. Not a confrontation and not an announcement. Just redirect the effort into somebody who reciprocates, because that effort is valuable and you have been spending it in a place that does not return it.
And in the meantime, spend some of your initiating on someone new. The skill you have been resenting is the exact skill most people lack, and it works just as well on people who will be glad you used it.