This Completely Broke His Trust
“My best friend since kindergarten. The first friend I made in my new town.
Freshman year of college I was home for a break and he was over my house with another friend. I went upstairs to talk with my parents and left them downstairs in the den. When I came back I couldn’t find my phone so I checked upstairs again, then when I gave up and came back downstairs I noticed it poking out from under the couch. Sweet.
They leave pretty soon after, and pretty soon after that I get a text from my college friend (who has the same name as the other friend that was over) saying, ‘Hey uh, your GF is pretty but I’m not sure why you sent me a bunch of undressed pics of her. I’m gonna go ahead and assume it was by accident and delete them.’
Turns out my ‘friends’ took my phone, found my GFs nudes, sent them to themselves (tried, anyway, they picked someone else with the same name), then deleted the outgoing message, hid my phone, let me look for it, then planted it where it could be found. The only reason I ever found out is because my (very gay) friend from college was open enough to message me about it.
I never talked to those other two again. I have a primal rage when I think about the pathology it takes to do something like that. They’re not my people.”
The Dominator
“I was best friends with someone for 12 years and we did everything together. Well, everything that SHE wanted. It was always about her and her schedule, never compromising for me. I went to every event she had, even her parent’s anniversary dinner.
One year, my mother had just passed away and I was home alone. I asked her to come over and she said she was going to a friend’s house to party because she broke up with her boyfriend. We haven’t spoken to each other in probably 2 years. One of our mutual friends still invites her around and she ‘all the sudden’ has to work or so-and-so’s party that she conveniently forgot she was going. I can’t keep expecting her to change so I stopped worrying about her and focused on my life. Still, what hurts me now are the milestones. I thought she would be in my wedding, be an aunt to my children. Nope. Such a shame how ugly people can be. It’s devastating to know that someone who you truly care about does not return the feelings.
What’s worse is that the group of friends I have act like she isn’t selfish. Everything she says is gold and they act like what she is doing is alright, because they don’t want to confront her. For example she had her birthday dinner at a tapas restaurant downtown. Some people only came for drinks but because it’s her birthday they were all supposed to pay for her. It was something to the amount of $200 a person (drinks, dinner, presents). Then she wanted to go to a club afterward and get bottle service. I’m glad I didn’t go to that I would have been furious.”
He Took Himself Out
“He bought me a $3000 computer set up, then the following week his parents called me to let me know he committed suicide.
At the time it didn’t make any sense and was seemingly out of the blue. I had known him since elementary all up until we graduated college and he was quite literally the best person I knew and, to be honest, I looked up to him. He carried a charisma that drew people to him but was never arrogant, one of the most if not the most selfless guy I knew and was always considerate/inclusive of others.
Handsome dude that was committed to maintaining good fitness, so it always seemed like he had his stuff together. Since he happened to be a total fantasy/sci-fi nerd (and funnily enough the best gamer out of us), was in great shape, and had such a humble personality, we had jokingly nicknamed him the unicorn for being a human being that shouldn’t exist.
Our first night ever drinking he drank enough to totally blackout, as he started to sober up he started crying about how worthless he felt. First and last time he ever blacked out and looking back afterward he had always been methodical in how he drank. This was the only time I had seen him in such a vulnerable state, and we had all just laughed it off that night thinking he just happened to cry while wasted. The recalling of that still makes me cringe.
Makes me wonder if I ever had the right to be his best friend if he was suffering I had never known. I miss him.”
He Just Had To Chop People Down
“I cut him off after several years when I just realized I always felt awful about myself after leaving his and his family’s presence.
Our mutual friends had a saying ‘it’s not a trip to (my friend’s) house until you get criticized. From the clothes you were wearing, to how dirty your car was, it just a barrage of trash.
The final straw was when I was dating my now-wife. We went to go hang out at his house, and he immediately pounces on my appearance (I had been wearing a hardhat all day so my hair looked a little funky), then handed me a bag of aluminum cans for me to recycle ‘and put towards my house fund,’ as I was in deep saving mode for a new place.
Fortunately, my wife was a good sport, but what this guy was trying to accomplish? To embarrass me in front of someone I’m interested in for no reason at all? We walked out after that and I never looked back. I cut him out completely. He never reached out once, which made it even easier to cut the cord. He even went so far as to instruct his wife not to talk to me or respond when I wished a happy birthday to their daughters (she told me that before cutting me out). He told her he didn’t want his daughters ‘hanging around a liar’… not really sure where that came from or what I ever lied about.
We still run into each other at mutual friend’s parties a couple times a year, but he usually camps out in a separate room or opposite side of the yard from me.”
In The End, Her Boyfriend Was Cooler
It was a lot of things individually, but on the whole, it came down to selfishness.
I moved in with one of my best friends at the time. We’d lived together in college and we were about a year or so out from graduation and had an opportunity for a really cheap apartment. I moved in with her and her boyfriend. Very quickly it became apparent that she was gonna be treating this place as her Barbie Dream House, complaining about anything I brought into the space as ‘going against her vision’ and trying to get me to throw in on the expensive furniture she wanted to buy. You could never say anything negative around her or she’d start going on about how much ‘negative energy’ you put out and was always very quick to remind everyone how many hours she worked and how no one worked as hard as her. She was constantly complaining about everything, EVERYTHING. Going out of her way to start fights because it was her way or the highway. Just generally unpleasant. I don’t know how her boyfriend put up with it. I tried to just ignore it as best I could and play Good-Time Charlie.
Then she joined an MLM scam.
One of those health and wellness product lines. She was pushing that down EVERYONE’S throats. Hard sell, 24/7. You couldn’t escape it. She forced her boyfriend to sign up. She started taking over the living room as her ‘workspace’ i.e. ‘TV off, radio off, no talking because I have to listen to this conference call of people waxing poetic about the wonders of this scam company for the next two hours.’ We’d asked her to do it in her room if she needed space but she said she didn’t want to feel excluded, even though she was excluding herself.
She had started to distance herself from me because I was skeptical about the whole thing. She kept trying to convince me. She started guilting me. Eventually, she made it clear that the only way to stay friends with her was to join the thing. Stupid me, I joined the thing. It was only to save what little friendship was left, which was stupid in hindsight. I lost a LOT of money.
So we’re nearing the end of the lease, and she’s talking like she wants to renew and all this stuff. Then like 3 weeks before the time comes, she decides she’s like bored with her boyfriend or something, and she just takes off. Like straight up dips and has no contact with either of us. It turns out she’s taking mental health days from work to do substances and go cavorting around the city with one of her other friends who’s been putting her up because she didn’t want to be around us. She left her two cats with us to take care of. Her now ex was frequently away as well (with good reason though) so it fell to me. Shoveling cat poop was not something I wanted to add to my now frantic to-do list as I was trying to secure a new place to live all of a sudden.
So during all this, girl’s ex-boyfriend is a MUCH better friend than she is. Seriously, total bro. I mean the guy is going through this nasty break up and yet he’s calling to check in on me because he knows I’m freaked out about suddenly having to find a house. Good kid. So the two of us work it out and decide we’ll figure it out together. Meanwhile, suddenly girly-girl shows back up because she’s got to go back to work. She’s acting like a total martyr, no one can complain because ‘it’s hard for everyone, okay?’ and this is all something that’s happening to her, not something she caused herself or whatever the heck her rationale was. She just needed to do something new with her life and we needed to be understanding. Which is fine and all, but doesn’t give her free reign to be a total witch.
Obviously, we weren’t too ready to be all friendly with her, but she was all ready to hang out with us and ask for puffs off our joints and stuff like that. Afterwards she asked me why I was so ‘standoffish’ and I was just like, ‘are you kidding me? You pull all this nonse and complain about how this place is toxic for you and then show up and demand we try to make you feel welcome?’
After that I think she got it and kind of withdrew. She went back to flopping around the city until the time came to divvy things up and go. She sent me a message asking to still be friends and I sent her a list of all the reasons I couldn’t do that. I ran into her once since then and it was VERY awkward, but civil. I do have one old mutual friend who is bent on fixing our friendship but I think I’ve made it pretty clear now that it won’t be happening.
Her ex-boyfriend and I are still buddies though. We’re on like our third apartment together. Good times are had by all.”
She Got Sick, Her Friends Disappeared
“I got ill and had regular doctors appointments and didn’t have the energy to do lots of activities. All my friends just stopped talking to me and ‘blanked’ when they saw me. I just wanted things to continue as normal and for them to appreciate that now and again a doctors/hospital appointment was bound to clash with a ‘social event.’ We normally met up for lunch and during our free periods. I tried to schedule my appointments during lunch/free periods so as not to miss my classes. One week I had an appointment Tuesday and Thursday and told my friends the week before I wouldn’t see them those days due to the appointments. They took it so personally, as if I’d found something better to do and just couldn’t be bothered to see them
This resulted in me just getting ignored. If I saw them in the street or around college they’d just look straight through me. Acquaintances and ‘friends of friends’ also stopped talking to me and I got horrible glares and looks as if I’d been the one to do something. Naturally, I was upset and hurt but because I was ill, but I just didn’t have the patience to care.
It even starting happening with my old best friend, who took a year off to work after high school, then came to my university. I was starting my second year and she was in her first year. She never even called. I only found out years later we went to the same school when she graduated and her parents put her picture in the local newspaper.
A few years later my second best friend got a part-time job for the firm I work for, albeit in a different department and office. I reached out and asked if she wanted to meet and catch-up and she sounded very enthusiastic about it. I said I was free whenever and asked for her availability. No reply. I waited a few days and thought maybe she wants me to make the plans so I suggested a time and place. No response. This was about 5 years ago. Nothing.
Unfortunately, this made me not very trusting and I don’t form any kind of relationship easy.”
A Blessing In Disguise
“We were completely inseparable through middle and high school and had always planned to stay together through college. She didn’t get into my choice of school, so I, being an extremely dumb and anxious teenager, foolishly agreed to attend a second-rate school with her instead so I would not be alone.
Shortly before the start of our freshman year of college, she informed me she was no longer going to school with me and was instead moving to NYC to live with a guy she met on the internet. She’d known this for months but neglected to tell me until it was too late to do anything about it.
It seemed horrible at the time, but I ended up meeting my husband during the first week of school and am happier now than I ever could have hoped. I got my dream job at the top-ranked hospital in the nation, married my soulmate, had a perfect baby boy, bought a house with a yard for our dog – the whole happily-ever-after cliché!”
She Was Really Obsessed!
“I had a best friend who I really loved and thought of as a sister. Our friendship was great up until I started expressing interest in a man she introduced me to. She started spreading rumors about me and started telling me to my face that I wasn’t good enough for the guy I wanted to be with.
She kept making comments about how it didn’t make sense that men liked me and not her and that it wasn’t fair. I’m not really sure what her issue was; I never believed that she actually had feelings for him. I always felt like she was just threatened that I was getting male attention and she wasn’t. I knew she was deeply insecure about her appearance, and I thought this was part of her insecurity. I thought we’d be able to work through it, but it never ended.
She wouldn’t even acknowledge what she was doing; if I tried to talk to her about it, she’d just insist I was lying to make her look bad. Her behavior escalated to the point where she sent me a text message telling me she did not care about me or my happiness at all and that my feelings and well-being would never come before her pride. I cut her off right then and there.
For years, we did not speak.
After three years, she sent me a message saying she was sorry and she had changed and was a better person now. I tried to give her another chance, but as soon as the conversation started, she brought up the guy from before and immediately started telling me that I wasn’t good enough for him and was not allowed to be near him. I cut her off again.
Over the past year, she’s been trying to contact me in various ways, but I keep blocking her because I just don’t need this in my life. I can’t understand why she’s so hung up over this guy. I haven’t spoken to him in years. And I don’t need someone in my life who thinks she can control my relationships with others or take out her insecurities on me. It’s really sad because I really did love her, but that girl who I thought was my close friend is completely gone. She’s become someone who treats me with jealousy and hostility, and I don’t want that in my life.”
Her Friend Hated Her Success
“She couldn’t stop smack talking me to everyone. She had incredibly low self-esteem and when I met her, so did I. But each step I took towards being more confident in myself, she saw as a threat.
I started working out and losing weight, so she told everyone that I was trying to look better than her. Eventually, that turned into telling people that I ‘stopped going to the gym and just did coke to stay thin.’ Nope, that wasn’t true, I’ve never done that in my life. I was actually attending double sessions at the gym.
I started seeing this guy who was really sweet and nice to me; she said I was just seeing him to show her what an awful person her boyfriend was.
I was getting a dog after moving out of the apartment; she said I was doing it to taunt her since her new place didn’t allow dogs and mine did (I specifically looked for dog-friendly places).
I’d hang out with different groups of people because my anti-depressants had kicked in and I wanted to be social again; she said I was going out to make her feel bad for not having friends. Except that I’d invite her to come. But she told me she didn’t like those people (whom she’d only met once and was rude the entire time).
I changed my major to business while she was in writing because I found business to be ridiculously easy; she said I did it because I wanted to make her feel poor after graduation.
My parents rented a place at the beach and I invited her along and told her that they’d cover expenses because my parents remembered being poor college students and wanted us to have good meals and fun; she went but later said I invited her along because I wanted to show off my family’s wealth. We went off-season to a cheap place within driving distance.
It got to the point where I couldn’t say any longer that the people telling me these things were lying. It seemed like almost every day I was telling someone they must have misunderstood her, that she wouldn’t say that. But nope. She reveled in being a frenemy and I thought I had a friend. I distanced myself and she went nuclear. I had friends send me screenshots of the insane messages she was sending them about me, completely unprovoked. We haven’t been on speaking terms in almost a decade.”
Abandoned By His Bros
“I dropped two friends at the same time actually. I had known them both since early grade school.
They came to my place and then I drove us downtown. We were bar hopping but ended up at a show. None of us were even tipsy yet so I asked, ‘Hey can one of you guys drive? I wanna take this shot, but I’m not going to if y’all can’t drive.’ My buddy grabs my keys and assured me he’s done drinking and he’ll be good to drive, so I dove in.
Well, I had a bad reaction and got sick. So we left. Once we hit my car, I laid down and blacked out. Next thing I know, one of my other friends who went to the show was knocking on my window.
It turns out they got too wasted, Ubered back to my place and got their cars. Instead of taking me home, they left me blacked out in the back of my car in the middle of downtown. They literally took an Uber to my home and they didn’t take me.
I have not spoken to either since and will more than likely never do so again. These are supposed to be my ride or die bros. If they wanted to keep drinking, they shouldn’t have taken my keys. And once that mistake was made, they could’ve freaking gotten me home safely. But instead, they left me alone and unconscious in the back of my car. I could’ve been robbed, my car could’ve been stolen, I could’ve been arrested, anything.”
His Friend Was Awful To Women
“I stopped being friends with him because of the way he treated women. He started dating the sister of the girl I was seeing at the time. It all started out fine, but then they were constantly fighting with him gaslighting her for things like ‘going through his phone’ when she confronted him about trying (and failing) to cheat on her.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. He doesn’t work and she pays all his bills, he gets mad at her if she doesn’t cook his food or clean his apartment. He just sits at home and does nothing while she does everything and he still treats her like trash. She is still with him for some reason.
Even small things like if we were all playing a competitive board game and she did ANYTHING against him, he would lose his mind after my girlfriend and I left. As far as I know, he has never hit her but she is his slave and I can’t be around that.
After I saw how he was treating her, all his stories about how all his exes were ‘psycho’ started to break down and everything started making more sense. It also explained why none of us saw the girlfriends very much. He didn’t want us to find out what was really going on.”
It Was Her Own Fault
“Ally and I were best friends and both in marching band. We went through a lot together and we tried to do everything we could together. I got her and her boyfriend together (they’re still together!) She came for support when I had surgery. I quit band with her when our director accused her of being at fault when a teacher tried to be inappropriate with her. We were tight.
She’s 2 years older than me and when she graduated high school, I psyched myself out. I told myself she’d have cool new college friends and she wouldn’t need me or like me anymore. I stopped putting forth effort in an ‘I’ll stop talking to her before she stops talking to me as to avoid being hurt’-kind of way.
I regret that very much. By pulling away I made my fear come true. She did make new friends of course, but that didn’t necessarily mean I would be replaced, but since I wasn’t there anymore, I was.
We reconnected recently and text every once in a while but it’s certainly not the same.”