Where would we be without our friends? They're always there to pick us up when we're down. They're the chosen family we never had. Unfortunately, some friendships aren't meant to last forever. Some friendships drift apart, while other friends were never there for you to begin with. That's why breaking up with a friend is so devastating. Our friends are supposed to be there for us when times get tough, not abandon us. These people tell the heartbreaking stories of why they had to end a friendship. Content has been edited for clarity.
“She Was Jealous Of How Happy I Was”
“My best friend for over ten years is now a complete stranger to me. We met in middle school and had a lot in common. We liked the same music, same books, same shows. As we became closer friends we realized we had much deeper, heavier things in common: abusive families, crippling depression and anxiety. We weren’t just best friends, by this point, we considered ourselves sisters.
Problems started when she went off to college (she was a year older than me) and she was getting heavy into using various substances and dating her professor. I told her I was worried about her and she basically brushed me off as not knowing what I was talking about and I’d feel differently when I joined her. Summer after I graduated, we moved into an apartment together. At first things were great, but she tried to make me break up with my boyfriend because she felt like he was using me or something.
Looking back, I now know she was actually jealous of how happy I was with him while she was miserable with her own life and she wanted me to be miserable with her and if I wasn’t, then I wasn’t her friend. I also have a theory she was in love with me and just couldn’t stand me being with someone else. She eventually kicked us out. I tried reconciling a few months later with a written apology and concert tickets sent in the mail asking if we could try again and the response I got was ‘We’re too different, we’ve grown apart.’
The last contact we had was I sent her an invitation to our wedding. Never got a reply either way. She was my sister, on a soul deep level, and I still miss her very much, think of her often and tear up that she’s not in my life.”
Ten Years Of Friendship Wasted
“She and her husband were renting my basement after they got married. Fully finished basement with bedroom and bathroom for $200/month. I was trying to help them save for a house because a one bedroom apartment near me averages about 850-950/month in my area. My house would rent for between $1400-$1600/month. I was doing them a huge favor and helping them save. Unfortunately he, and therefore they, were the kind of people that would spend money before they got it no matter how much they made. Their rings, bed, furniture, cars, and underwear were all financed to the max.
They both worked full time, but never paid rent on time. There were constant messes in the kitchen and garage. Eventually, I asked them to move out within 90 days. A month before the move out date, they gave me a sob story about not having enough for a security deposit on an apartment. I gave them the last month free to help.
While I was on vacation they went out and bought a FREAKING BOAT. Not a row boat, a Mastercraft ski boat. 2 years old. They still had not moved out by that point.
After calling and confronting them, they quickly hung up on me and blocked me on social media and their phones. 10 years of considering her my sister and even living with her for 4 years evaporated with one phone call. We haven’t spoken since.
They (28 and 30) live in her parents basement now. I still get collection notices for them in my mail.
I blame a lot of it on her husband. She was always into dweeps and she changed a lot when they started dating. He really brought out the worst in her.”
Friendships Don’t Always Last Forever
“I was friends with Sarah since high school and when we got to college she decided she didn’t want to be friends with our friend, Jane, anymore. Instead of telling Jane that, she decided to ghost her. Jane realized she wasn’t invited to Sarah’s birthday and confronted me about it.
There was no way I could lie without it being obvious, so I told her the truth. She was initially very hurt when I had to tell her she wasn’t invited. Then I immediately told Sarah that I had to tell Jane the truth. She was very understanding, said she didn’t care and that she was happy it was out.
Then last minute she canceled her birthday party saying she was sick. I said to her that I was sorry I wasn’t going to see her and wished her a speedy recovery. Then the night of her birthday rolls around and I see on Facebook our mutual friends are posting about being at Sarah’s birthday.
She was never sick, she just uninvited me and a couple of other friends who had ties to Jane. I was so hurt and angry at this person I had always considered one of my good friends. I knew after that I would never be able to trust or want to be around someone like that. So I never talked to her again.
When I stopped talking to Sarah, it was pretty funny because she was suddenly mad at me and tried to pretend she never hated Jane. She blocked me from Facebook, unblocked Jane and actually changed her profile picture to an old picture of her and Jane. We still laugh at that today sometimes.”
Think Twice Before Hiring Your Friends
“I vouched for him so he’d get hired on the project I was on. I saw a bit of myself in him in his struggle to find a job and all, so I thought that’d be a chance for him to pick up a few things.
As I learned way later, we aren’t allowed to discipline the team in anyway, so…
Turns out he was terrified of messing up, and preferred to sit by his desk, not really stepping up to the plate whenever a task was being brought up. He viewed himself as an easy going nice guy, but by the end, people eventually despised him as he’d take days off or walk out for the rest of the day for his own leisure. In January, he settled for ‘I’m not cut for this job, so I’m going back to school. In August.’ The leads knew about it, but couldn’t really do anything about it, other than keep trying to break him out of his shell. It became a waiting game, dealing with spreading the workload, knowing that he can’t pick up anything. If you did assign him a task, then he’d latch onto the lead with the uncertainty of a 1-month old employee, bogging her down.
The days went on, and I’d hear/read the ramblings of other coworkers/leads about him. I ended up meeting with HR because at that point, I felt like absolute crop because I was the one that got him in. They couldn’t deal with him, other than trying to nudge him forward, so they instead promoted me to make up for it. That really didn’t change the situation, so I started breaking down, avoiding him entirely.
In the end, he left, thinking that people liked him. But if I recall the various rants, this is how people would describe him: A very insecure, lazy, and self-centered individual.
He stuck around long after he decided it wasn’t for him. Just the irony of him going ‘I don’t want to be a burden to you guys’ and then do just that. He didn’t try to pick up things just a little while bidding his time, he really sat while we had to do his workload.
Things are bad when the following week after you leave, you’re used as an example of what not to do when training new guys, and the main impersonation of you from you old colleagues is ‘Hey guys, I’m feeling tired, I think I’m gonna go home.’
He was never a dweep. He was simply not someone who had your back, no matter how much he tried to have himself be seen as someone friendly. That eventually turned into a delusion that people maintained so he wouldn’t actively be self-destructive.
That’s why I’m not friends with him anymore. Because I don’t want to break it to him about how it actually was at work. I already tried nudging him smoothly at least so he wouldn’t keep his habits into whatever path he wanted to take. That was over the course of months, and that went nowhere.
I should have seen it coming, really. Lots of red flags over the course of 7 years, which boiled down to him not being able to put effort into anything, including personal projects and relationships.”
They’re Clearly Not Up For Mom And Dad Of The Year
“They’re horrible parents.
A couple we know and have been friends with since before they were even a couple went and had kids well before we did. I always thought they were pretty good parents because the kids were quiet and well behaved.
Around the time they had their 4th child we had our first. Like a lot of people, our lives changed dramatically once we became parents. Eventually we realized that these friends of ours were terrible parents. They fed their kids nothin but junk food and all they did all day was look at screens. They were quiet and ‘well behaved’ when they were younger because mum and dad just let them play video games and watch TV all day. They were zombies.
The parents still get wasted and stoned all the time and they never go out and do anything as a family. They don’t go for plays at the park, to the beach, camping, fishing, bike riding or even just play in the backyard. Their two year old stays up until after midnight watching TV while by himself! Every night! Apparently it’s just too hard to get him to stay in bed so they just let him stay up. They find him asleep on the couch every morning when they wake up and move him to his bed where he sleeps until around midday.
The mum says she really likes it as she gets her mornings to herself.
They even leave him alone each morning while she takes the others to school! Sometimes he wakes up while she’s gone, but he just sits back on the couch and watches TV by himself.
The eldest, a girl, is 16-17 and has dropped herself out of school (she was failing everything anyway) and has moved out of home into her boyfriends house.
The parents are fine with this because apparently she was a nightmare to live with.
We almost never see each other anymore and I don’t want my kids having anything to do with their kids.”
Always Playing The Victim
“My best friend moved her wedding date forward 4 months so she and her Christian fiancé could live together sooner in the ‘eyes’ of the lord. She moved her wedding date to four days after my due date and due to it being the birth of my first child, I couldn’t guarantee what state I’d be in. I apologized and declined being her maid of honor after explaining my concerns and stating she deserved a better maid of honor.
Her family started calling me selfish for not putting their daughter first over my body and unborn baby. I realized she played victim and twisted the story and told them a completely different reason. She basically told her family that I demanded I change her wedding date to suit myself better.”
All Take, No Give
“My old high school friends had a way of making things about them and taking advantage of me when it suited them. In a way, it wasn’t a surprise considering they grew up pretty rough and they had come to know that being selfish was a way to get things out of people. My issue was that they were never the givers. They just took.
I can’t tell you how many ‘borrowed’ items I never got back, how many car rides they asked me for without paying me for gas, how many times they’d beg me to buy them things for holidays/birthdays and conveniently ‘forgetting’ to give me so much as a card in exchange.
The last straw was over my 21st birthday. I asked in advance if they wanted to make any plans to go out with me.
‘Party bus!’, they replied.
‘Alright sounds cool! How much can y’all contribute?’
Turns out they expected me to fully fund the bus so they could party on it. I remember being so hurt that I wasn’t going to have a party thrown by caring friends. I was just expected to be a drink ticket.
I ended up goin out to a wing place with my parents and had a spiked apple cider as my first drink. I spent time with the people I could trust to care about me, and put a huge distance on the dweebs who I knew couldn’t.”
He Didn’t Need Anyone To Save Him
“When she became freakishly obsessed with ‘saving’ me from a bunch of stuff that was happening in my life. She convinced herself I was an addict who had ‘fallen off the wagon’ when she found out I was having a few drinks one night. You would have thought I’d tossed ten years’ sobriety away, the lecture I got from her. It was almost as though she wanted me to have a problem. Like I said, she was very obsessed with ‘saving’ me, and she jumped on everything that might be the dramatic issue she wanted me to have.
She constantly made passes at me even though she was in her 40s (I’m in my 20s), and wouldn’t shut up about how I secretly was scamming her.
We initially met online, where larger age gaps are more normal I guess. I don’t know, since I hit my 20s I’ve had friends online ranging from 16-ish up to late 30s-early 40s, so I didn’t think it was that weird. However, it started getting super creepy when she would constantly go on about wanting to sleep with me, before immediately following up with ‘haha JUST JOKING I’m old enough to be your mother, can you IMAGINE,’ which really made me think she wasn’t joking, just pretending to be to save face.
All of this was bad enough, but she also hated my best friend and tried to talk crop about him to me. The first time, I tore her a new one and told her in no uncertain terms that she never said that again. When she did it a second time, I cut her off there and then (after tearing her a second new one).”
Lose One Friend, Gain Another
“She was manipulative. My friends dealt with it for years and just walked on eggshells because she would have these moments. She was a great friend, or so we were convinced.
Then I got a call from her boyfriend. He was crying and asked how many guys she had slept with in the past five years. The thing was, I didn’t know he was her boyfriend. I had been told they were on and off. They hadn’t been. Every time they were ‘off’ was her cheating on him. But she had us all convinced he was the idiot. I literally walked in on her hooking up with a guy and then listened to her cry the next morning while she said her boyfriend had kissed someone so that’s why she did it. I started keeping my distance. I never talked to this guy without her around because she’d convinced me he was a dweeb but also because she probably would have ruined me for it.
When he called I was confused for five seconds, but then I realized she had been dating him the whole time. Or so he thought. I’m not sure. So I asked him what he knew; he’d caught her at another guy’s house. I confirmed his fears.
Now that guy is a great friend. He’s told me all kinds of things she said about me. Maybe we’re the awful ones and she sure thinks so, but it’s so nice not constantly thinking she may be mad at me for blinking funny.”
“I Don’t Need Any More Drama In My Life”
“I’m a guy. I met this girl around middle school, but never really hung out until senior year of high school. We ended up having a class together and hit it off pretty well. We started hanging out after school regularly, which turned into pretty much every day. It was to the point that she was staying for dinner with my family regularly. Probably 6 months of this went by and prom time came around. We both had said we had no interest in going and decided to just hang out that night and watch movies at my house.
Around midnight she got up from my bed to put her bra back on (This was a normal thing for her to take it off at my house). Me just there on my phone not paying too much attention realized her climbing onto my lap and one thing lead to another.
My mom walks into my room to tell me she’s going to sleep and what not sees a topless girl on my lap. The girl freaks out and rushes to get all of her things, runs out of my house crying. I end up walking her home and the whole time she’s hyperventilating and telling me, ‘You’re such an idiot. Why did you let this happen? This is all your fault!’
I may have been a little too quick to cut ties but I still think I made the right choice by asking her to stop texting me and I didn’t want to talk to her anymore. I didn’t need any more drama in my life at the time. There was a lot going on and I did not deal with stress well at the time.
She did try and reach out to me later after graduation and even then it still seemed like she hadn’t fully come to terms with taking responsibility for any it. At that point I really didn’t care anymore though.”
Friends Don’t Take Advantage Of Other Friends
“When they try to take advantage of me.
I generally try to help when I can, especially if it means reconnecting with a close friend of mine. Freshmen year of college, I was texting my best friend from high school. He was saying how he just dropped out and was looking for work or a new college to attend. I told him I would help him look for a nursing program for him. We kept in touch for a bit and then that first summer break, he texted me asking for an update on the nursing program.
I told him I hadn’t found anything because I didn’t have that much time between baseball, physical therapy, and summer classes. When I asked how the search was going for him he told me he ‘didn’t have time for that stuff’ and that I ‘needed to look more.’
I have no problem trying to help someone out, but that was just too much.”
The Straw That Broke The Camel’s Back
“We had a friend in the friend group who was on the edge with a lot of our friends. However, we always found some reason to forgive him because that’s what friends do. Then after we started to notice this trend that he started taking advantage of everyone at every chance he got. He was also the type to make sure he was the alpha male at all social gatherings, which meant cheating on his girlfriend numerous times. Many of those times we saw him do it. There were probably times where we didn’t catch him. I guess this raises another question, in this scenario do you tell the girlfriend or let the universe unfold? We all decided that the latter would be better, even though we all felt that he was a scumbag for doing what he did, but I digress.
This next bit is the straw that broke the camel’s back.
During the holy month of Ramadan, he went BEHIND EVERYONE’S BACK and told other people from our community about certain things that we do in private. And we only found out through some other completely random people about what he was saying. Turns out, he said something along the lines of ‘man all these guys do is turn up and do all these bad things’ when in reality he was the guy that did it more than anyone. Yeah we smoke a lot, but during Ramadan we all make a pact to stop. This guy couldn’t last 5 days without giving in. When we found out all of this info and went to confront him, he still lied as if he didn’t know what was going on. Unfortunately he had to get messed up a little bit before his memory came back, but it did eventually.
Needless to say, haven’t talked to him since but we are still cordial in social settings (we have a lot of common friends). Looking back at it, I can’t believe we were friends for so many years.”
He Couldn’t Handle It Anymore
“I had this best friend in elementary school. He had a few quirks, but we were inseparable. As we grew up, he started having more and more mental related issues. Depression and anxiety and a host of other things. He never wanted to go outside to play, or really do much of anything. Then the issues started getting worse. It seemed like I was talking him out of suicide almost every time I saw him. What was worse was that I was dealing with a very close family member who had just committed suicide themselves not even a month before. This was almost a daily thing and went on for months.
One day I just snapped. I couldn’t do it anymore. It was getting to the point that being around him was affecting my mental health. So around 7th grade, I stopped talking to him. I felt guilty at the time, but no matter what I did or said to him seemed to help him. It was almost like he was feeding off the concern we had for him.
I’m much older now, and luckily I guess he kinda grew out of some of the problems he was having. Or perhaps he got a good therapist. He’s doing well now last I heard, but we have so little in common now I don’t think we could ever really be friends again.”