With every group I join, there's a degree of uncertainty that kills me. I know that, beneath the surface of the group, people have their own 1 on 1 relationships, and those relationships are something I can't parse, because they're mostly hidden. The best you get are little hints that pop up during group activities. 

These hidden relationships make me incredibly anxious. I can't ever know for sure if I'm actually important to someone because I can't compare my relationship with them to those hidden relationships. One of those hidden relationships could be 100 times more important than mine and I'd have no idea. I'd just be dumbly going along with what would be obligatory pladitudes compared to those other, more important relationships. I'd be deluding myself into believing I'm important when I am not. That's exactly the kind of hopeful expectation that's dashed when one of the more important, hidden relationships draws the person away from you without explanation. A sudden cold shoulder. It leaves a vacuum of causality that my mind has to fill: "What are they doing?", "Who are they talking to?", "Did I bore them, bother them, anger them?" The cause that my mind always lands on is: "That person made a social value judgment between you and someone else and determined that the other person's social value was greater." or, put more simply: "I'm not good enough comparatively"

I hate DMs because I know because I know they apply to everyone, not just me. They are the digital manifestation of what I described above, those hidden relationships that lurk beneath the surface. I'm completely in the dark about whether my 1 on 1 DM relationship with a person measures up to their other DM relationships. I could be the bottom of the barrel and not even know it.