AITBF for refusing to be the designated driver anymore after one too many 2am parking lot waits?
Some context first. I don't drink. Never really have, not for any dramatic reason, just not my thing. Within my friend group this has historically made me the default driver for basically every social event involving alcohol, which I was fine with for a long time because I genuinely didn't mind and it felt like a fair trade for not paying for drinks.
The arrangement started breaking down gradually. The issue was never the driving itself, it was the waiting. Our group has maybe eight people who show up to these things and there is a core of three or four who cannot leave anywhere on time under any circumstances. Last October I waited in a parking lot outside a bar for an hour and forty minutes because two people were "just finishing their drinks" and then got into a conversation with someone they met inside. It was 1:45am. I had work at 8. I texted four times and got back "5 more mins" twice and then nothing.
I told the group chat the next day that I was happy to keep driving but I needed people to be ready when they said they would be or I'd have to start leaving without them. This was treated as a controversial statement somehow. One person said I was being rigid and that the whole point of a night out is that it's unpredictable. Another said I knew what I was signing up for when I became the driver. I did not recall signing anything.
So a few weeks later when the next outing came up I said I wasn't going to drive this time. Not that I wasn't coming, just that I wasn't driving. Two people got noticeably quiet in the chat. Someone asked if everything was okay, which is a fun way to respond to someone declining a logistical role. The night happened, people got rides from each other and an app, everything was fine. But now there's this thing where I get described as "not really being down for the group anymore" which I find interesting becuase I still show up to everything, I just don't want to sit in a parking lot at 2am waiting for people who don't respect a basic timeline .
I'm still coming to stuff. I'm just not the bus anymore. Is that a buttface move or is this just what happens when an arrangement that was never formally agreed to stops working for the person doing all the work.