Never Trust A Drinker
“I let a friend of mine that had a severe drinking problem move in with me since he was going through hard times and was basically homeless. I had to go out of town overnight for a work trip and thought I could trust him. When I came back, he had emptied my change jar (had about $400 in it) from my room and got wasted. House was a wreck, came home to a few guys sleeping in my backyard and bottles everywhere. Kicked him right the heck out.”
Her Life Was So “Perfect,” She Felt Free To Judge His
“I dated a girl for a few weeks in high school. Our breakup was relatively amicable, but we didn’t talk after it. A couple years later (I was 21, she was 19), she got pregnant and the dude ditched her. She didn’t have her license or a job and asked me for help her practice for the birth. I obliged and we started hanging out again, just platonically. I’d go with her to her baby appointments, job interviews, the store, and whatnot, and in general, spent a lot of time with her. She still lived with her parents but got kicked out after the baby was born, and moved into a small studio apartment owned by a classmate’s mom.
Now, during this time, I worked 3rd shift and had a pretty bad sleep schedule that wasn’t helped by spending so much time with her, but I thought it was worth it because I was helping out a friend. One night shortly before I had to go to work, we were at her place and out of nowhere she just says, ‘You know, it’s kind of sad that you still live with your parents when I’m younger than you and have moved out.’ I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just left, and man the second I got my door shut, I couldn’t hold back the tears. I felt like I’d been wasting so much time for someone who didn’t even appreciate it. I hung out with her one last time after that and then just stopped responding to her texts.
Well, I shouldn’t say last, because about 6 months later she, still without her license, offered to pay me to drive her to work. I was out of work and was set to leave in a couple months to join the Air Force, so I figured why not, I just wouldn’t hang out with her. One other time, her dad was over her place, and I went to talk to him since he’s retired Army and I liked her parents. She invited me in to see the baby, and I did, and then after a couple minutes, I just told her I was going to go. The confusion in her voice, asking me why, just made me think she didn’t care or understand why I didn’t want to hang out with her anymore, and that was the last time I saw her.”
She Just Didn’t Want To Be Helped
“She was one of my best friends for about four years, nothing ever physical, but we were very close. She was a bit crazy in the head and had no qualms about going into detail about things nobody wanted to hear. But she had a good heart.
Her relationship with her boyfriend broke down and I was there to try to help her get back on her feet and get some balance in her life again. Unsurprisingly, she wanted to go out partying more which was fine, I’d go with her a few times to keep an eye on her to make sure she didn’t go too mad (blackout wasted kind of trouble).
After she had bounced between her mother and her aunt, she finally got her own place and I’d visit and hang out with her. Around this time I had met my future wife and naturally, I was spending more time with her rather than my friend but it was never a big deal. However, we would go longer and longer without seeing each other with her work and my work hours not being the best.
It all came to a head when one day she sent me pictures of her arm all sliced up and I phoned her straight away and told her to come to stay with me and my wife, that we would look after her. My wife and I had both dealt with depression in our early 20s so we knew that she needed a safe space and I was more than happy to offer her a place to stay so she could get looked after. So she agreed to come and stay and texted me saying she was going to have a bath and pack a bag and come down. So I got the spare room ready, fresh sheets and went shopping to pick up something for all of us to have for dinner. Got home and went on Facebook to kill time while I waited on her coming down and the first thing that pops up is a status from her which was five minutes old, asking who’s up for a party tonight since she’s already out drinking. I was furious! I didn’t want to bother with her that night so I left it until the next day when I asked her if she was coming round or what. She never replied so I didn’t bother messaging her again.
A full year later, she messaged me out of the blue asking if we were still friends and I brought up the party and she just replied with, ‘So?’ So I told her that I was pretty upset about it and then she never bothered to reply to my message for a year and now she thinks that everything will go back to normal.
Again no more messages for a year until one night she started messaging me, having a rant about how terrible of a friend I was that I never bothered with her anymore since I have a wife (she didn’t get an invitation to the wedding since it was a small family only ceremony) and that she didn’t need me anymore and more nonsense. Two years it had been since the self-harming even,t and she had never said sorry for standing me up, so I just told her that we were not friends anymore, since she obviously didn’t care enough about me to even message me in two years.
Still, I see her about and on Facebook and am a little sad we are no longer friends but I’m in a good place right now and don’t really need the drama that she brings.”
She Finally Found A Sign
“I put up with years of my younger sister’s constant put-downs, insults, and abuse. Family never stood up for me or put a stop to it. They thought there was something funny about the older sibling being bullied by the younger one, but they punished me if I retaliated in any way. I had no self-esteem, was diagnosed with depression and anxiety, and I was hurting myself. I ended up in counselling, where they classified my sister as an abuser. I told my parents this, and they laughed at me.
The final straw came while we were on holiday last summer. We were in the pool playing ping-pong and she was screaming, literally screaming, ‘God, you’re so pathetic! You’re so stupid, you can’t even play ping-pong right! You can’t even use the right hand for it! (I’m left-handed for sports) Mom, swap out with her so I can have a match with someone who can ACTUALLY play! Get in the pool now, she’s useless! Go away, you’re so stupid!’
While she was ranting, I saw these sisters that had arrived at the hotel the day before grab some deck chairs. They were chatting and joking together and at one point one asked, ‘Do I look alright? I feel fat,’ and the other replied, ‘What?! No! You look right nice, that bikini really suits you!’
It was so simple, but my sister had never spoken to me like that. She was still mid-rant about how pathetic I was. Seeing the other sisters being so kind and normal to each other put it in perspective how messed up her treatment of me really was. I lobbed the paddle at her face and told her to shut up. We haven’t spoken in a year, and it’s been the best year of my life.”
A Drama Queen Wears You Out
“I recently had to end a friendship with someone I’ve know about eight years. She was in an abusive relationship and her kids were taken from her. She didn’t try to get them back, instead she got into another abusive relationship, had more kids. Lost them. She lost her place because of the abuser. I stayed by her side as a friend still.
She was single awhile, got a new boyfriend who was more abusive than the last two. Now she’s pregnant again. One day this boyfriend is ‘perfect,’ the next day she’s crying about how bad he is. She’s had plenty of opportunities to leave him when he’s been in jail, even had a caseworker offer to help her relocate and get housing. She doesn’t want to leave because she is in love.
I felt like her living, breathing journal. She never asked about my life, her drama was way too much for me. I had to cut her off.”
Discovering His True Colors Ended It
“My former best friend of 15+ years started acting terribly towards me after I came out to him. It didn’t happen right away, but slowly.
He’d start making nasty anti-gay references that I just sort of brushed off (I live in PA, homophobia is the norm here so it wasn’t unusual), he then cancelled on a Fourth of July party we were both invited to all because he saw some tv show where two guys kissed and it offended him and he decided to call me (not the party host) and cancel because it ticked him off. That party would have been the first time I saw him since his wedding that I was in over two years prior. (And no, the 4th of July party wasn’t in any way gay-themed and I’d have been the only gay guy there, it was just a normal party).
The snide homophobic comments kept coming but the straw that broke the camels back was when I texted him being excited about the sequel to The Last of Us coming out (a game we both loved) and he sent a nasty response about the ‘wussy snowflake leftist, shoving gay garbage in peoples faces all the time.’ I didn’t even realize that there was a lesbian kiss in the trailer, I only saw a clip of the gameplay.
At that point, I realized it’s not worth being friends with someone who is offended by a bunch of polygons and who purposely digs at the only person he knows is gay. Good riddance to trash.”
They Treated Her Like Dirt
“In high school, I had two ‘friends’ who would constantly gang up on me, make fun of me behind my back, ditch me at night, etc.
One night, they clearly prank called me pretending to be someone who knew about something that I ONLY told them in confidence. Literally no one else knew. Even if somehow it wasn’t them who made the actual call, they told someone else which is still a violation of friendship/respect. I called them out on it. And they acted all aghast that I would actually believe they’d do that to me. Um, yeah, you’ve done a lot of other stuff to me, why wouldn’t I think you were behind this? I told them I did not want to be friends with them anymore. They made my life horrible. Constant prank calls, egged my house twice, wrote notes about me in class and wrote my name in giant letters so that it would get my attention, crumple it up and throw it on the ground and wait to see if I picked it up or not. Clearly glad that I made the right choice to end the friendship. But through the prank calls, the egging, the notes…I ignored them 100%. They would get right in my face sometimes and torment me and I would just blank stare them into oblivion.
I’m kind of proud of 17-year-old me for being able to do that at such a young age.
They got a reaction out of me ignoring them, though, because ignoring them was a reaction.
I did creep on their Facebook a while ago just to see where they ended up. One girl ended back up with her ex-boyfriend (who just so happened to be the same guy who tried to assault me), so sleazy gets to be with sleazy, they deserve each other. The other ‘friend,’ has actually come out as gay and I think is married now. I hate the female friend because she was just a straight up WITCH but the guy who is gay, – it doesn’t make ANYTHING he did to me right – but honestly, he was obviously going through some things. His family was extremely conservative, and he was the black sheep of his family. As goofy as he was, being his friend, I did see a lot of depression in him, looking back. He seems happier now and it looks like his family is still a part of his life. I’m glad for that, but I still would have no interest in rekindling the friendship. I had run into him in college a few years later and he yelled at me when I didn’t say hi at him and caused a scene. So apart from his struggles of being closeted, I think he still could just be a grump in general.”
“Betrayal Beyond What I Could Have Conceived”
“One of my best friends from childhood developed a pretty severe drinking problem in his early 20s, and he turned into a complete raging monster. Before everything went down, he had been kicked out of his parents’ house in our hometown, so I invited him to come stay with me on my college campus. I wanted to give him the opportunity for a fresh start away from his toxic family. He got a job as a server and devolved pretty quickly into partying hard with his coworkers. At first, I didn’t think much of it. He had come from a bad situation and was just blowing off some steam, he would get his head on straight soon enough. Besides, the rest of my friends and I were always out drinking, so what was the big deal? I neglected to appreciate the fact that we were still going to school, getting things done, and he was literally just going to work, getting blasted after, passing out, sleeping all day, then doing it all over again. Literally all he did was sleep, work, and drink. He rarely helped around the house and didn’t buy groceries. He starts sliding further after a while.
He started drinking away his share of the utility money, then the rent money, getting into fights in bars, trying to drive while wasted. He hit one of my friends (his roommate, no less) after she tried to take his keys from him at a bar. We tried to stage an intervention for him and he stormed out. He retaliated by threatening to kick out one of our mutual friends who wasn’t on their lease, but had been helping to pay the bills. One night at a party, he asked to talk to me and I agreed, hoping (foolishly) that we could work things out. The conversation started off innocently enough: why was everyone so mad at him? I should have seen it coming considering how willfully obtuse he was being, but he got irate when I told him that his drinking was hurting everyone around him, and that more than anything we were worried about him. His demeanor changed completely, and he started yelling at me about how I was in no place to judge him, that I didn’t know the first thing about him.
I told him that I had known him since we were six, and knew him better than most people. Claiming otherwise was nonsense. He retaliated by pulling up some truly painful things from my past, and telling me that it was my own fault that it had happened to me. He had never told me this before, but now he wanted me to know that I deserved the abuse and trauma, that no one loved me, and that he had only pretended to be my friend because he pitied me. To call it a low blow is selling it incredibly short. It was a betrayal beyond what I could have conceived from someone I considered to be the closest thing to a sibling that I had. He knew the worst way that he could hurt me, and he executed it with surgical precision.
I was sobbing, my then-boyfriend was pounding on the door and threatened to break it down, because he could her me crying and couldn’t get into the room. My ex-friend unlocked the door, and threatened to kill my then-boyfriend if he tried to get me out of that room. I ended up having to call the cops on the ex-friend because he was getting violent and threatening to kill everyone there.
That was the last time I’ve spoken to him. It breaks my heart that he went down such a dark path, but you can’t come back from something like that.”
Lucky To Be Alive
“I practically grew up with this kid. We were best buds from age eight to nineteen. As we grew up, he started doing some substances, mostly pot. Not my cup of tea, but I wasn’t gonna stop hanging out with him just because he smoked pot.
Last year, he started getting into pills and powders. I was really worried about him and tried my best to help him out, but he was convinced that he didn’t need help and he was ‘just having fun.’ One day, we were driving out to dinner together and he stopped in a Burger King parking lot and told me to just chill for a second. A few minutes passed and a car pulled up. A guy got out and took out an itty bitty little baggie filled with white powder. My friend pulled out his wallet and some cash. The other guy then pulled a weapon on him and demanded the money. He got it, then bolted out of the car. My friend just sighed and asked if I could pay for dinner now. I demanded he drive me home and I haven’t spoken to him since. A few weeks later, the guy that robbed him is in jail.
Eff you dude. You nearly got us both killed over an itty bitty dose of your precious freaking blow.”
Dark, Traumatic Spiral
A close friend of mine lost her father abruptly and I was there for her the entire time, helping with funeral arrangements, coming over to her house to cook meals if she didn’t have energy, etc. Over the following months, I noticed her attitude changing to something very cynical and negative. She could no longer be happy for a friend’s success. She saw no opportunities in the work field. Nothing made her excited anymore. Conversations were draining because all she talked about was how bad life was. I broached the subject of depression and got shot down.
I waited for another few months, but it got worse. She leaned on me so much it was wearing on me too. When a mutual friend and I approached her about seeking therapy to deal with this, she lashed out at us. Our mutual friend had lost her mom after seven years of battling early onset Alzheimer’s, so she tried again later, but got told that she didn’t know what loss was because, ‘At least you had time to say goodbye.’
This was when my patience started wearing thin. In the meantime, her money was running out, so she had to find a job. I sent her job ads and helped with her resume. But she didn’t want just any job, she wanted to work in the movie industry. She got rejected a couple of times and talked about how she was never going to get her dream job. I tried to listen and console her, but got told I don’t know what it’s like to miss out on my dream job when she knows full well that I took flying lessons for years in prep for trying to become a pilot. Then I got rejected permanently for medical reasons. But that didn’t count because I, ‘Never had a chance of landing that job anyway.’
By now, almost a year had gone by. I was exhausted and nothing I did was good enough. I told her that I would forget she said that because she was my friend, but that if she was competing in the most-miserable-lives Olympics, she could get in line behind the refugees who saw their entire country get blown to bits. I told her I was done with her putting her friends down, and that I was tired of her complaining about her life while refusing to seek help to improve it.
She kicked me out of her house after that and refused to speak to me again. The next thing I saw from her was a Facebook post about how friends leave you in time of need. I tried contacting her again a couple of times, but only got met by more yelling. That was when I decided enough was enough. I told her that her friends left her because she stopped behaving like a friend herself and hung up. That was three years ago.
What I learned from it is this: going through a tough time is never an excuse to treat your loved ones so horribly. I kept giving her passes and she kept putting me and others down. Don’t let yourself be treated like garbage by the people who are supposed to love you.”
Kind To His Face, But A Knife In His Back
“I had a roommate who I caught in a series of lies. It started because he kept telling me he had no intentions with this girl I was pursuing and that he wanted to help (and, he did give her lots of advice about it, but bad advice). That was pretty humiliating.
But the last straw was when he said to my face that he didn’t say something he had texted me earlier that day. I just asked him what he meant by something and he told me he never said that. And he changed his story several times within that conversation and ended in a personal attack on me for something unrelated.
I can’t be friends with someone as deceptive and manipulative as him, so I haven’t spoken to him since, even during the month it took me to find a new place to live.”
To Top It All Off, They Were Thieves
“Not justone person but a group of ‘friends.’ I just was tired. Picture the last year of high school, they were never my friends but they did pretend a lot so I would help them with school and stuff. They would constantly steal girls from me, put a bad word in school about me and stuff like that, I didn’t really see any of that because: ‘Come on, they are my friends! They would never do that!’
The final straw or the thing that made me see everything that they did was in a field trip we did to the beach, I had a brand new Blackberry (I feel old now) and one of them stole it from me and blamed it on the cleaning staff. I found my phone later in one of their bags. I just took it back and didn’t say a thing. It was an, ‘I’m done’ moment, didn’t even feel like confronting them or anything, just enjoyed the beach for myself and left a little earlier.”
He Was A Fool For Thinking His Friend Would Change
“I grew up with this kid. It started off with weed, which we would mess with sometimes. I went to college and he stayed home and began selling it. Eventually, he started to do blow and pills while I was gone. He just about swindled/robbed everyone he knew (including his own mother) except for me. I gave him money and bought him dinner after he was robbed one night while trying to sell a lot of blow. I didn’t have money to give. I was a broke pre-med student. I believed him when he said he would change. He didn’t.
Fast forward a few months and he was selling A LOT more blow and sent pictures to me of wads of cash, saying stuff like he would pay me back for helping him when he was down if I ever needed it. I was short on student loan payments at one point so I asked him if he could help. He, of course, said yes, but would ghost me for days/weeks until I figured out the payments on my own. This cycle of him saying he would change continued until one day he made me drive him to go bowling together and he tried to make a sale without me knowing. I stopped talking to him after that.
He has since checked himself into rehab across the country and he called me to apologize saying stuff like I’m his ‘only friend who wasn’t only interested in doing substances with him.’ We talk sometimes, but it’ll never be the same.
Honestly, it wasn’t even me who decided enough was enough. The guy was like my brother. I vented to my girlfriend about it and she basically told me I was being a naive idiot, and that my good nature was gonna get me into trouble. I can remember multiple times he would act sketchy when I went out to eat or do something with him. In hindsight, he probably was on and/or had stuff on him. I mean, if I ever got pulled over while he had stuff on him, it would ruin my whole future.
I have been threatened/chased by random people who had problems with him solely based on our association. The only physical fights I’ve ever been in have been to defend him from getting robbed (and in one instance from getting STABBED). This kid could have ruined my life, and I stuck around because I cared about him. I look back and cringe at my stupidity for ever believing he would change.”
No Room For Bigots
“There were a lot of reasons but the straw that broke the camel’s back was transphobia.
I broke up with my girlfriend because she just absolutely refused to call my best friend by his preferred pronouns, and tried to use that as a comparison because I complained one time I didn’t like how he cooked my steak for me. She said because he didn’t cook my food the way I liked (one time out of many times of making me dinner), I shouldn’t use his proper pronouns and stuff like that. She went out of her way to misgender him to me and it absolutely awestruck me, then and there, that I had just been ignoring that for so long. She used to do that a lot, even when I corrected her, but I just kind of chalked it up to be an adjustment.
But then I realized she really was just… Transphobic. She also said she wasn’t going to try and use mine either (I’m nonbinary, I prefer they/them but I don’t mind others) because it didn’t matter. It matters to me! A lot!
So yeah, it just kind of broke the rose-colored glasses off my face for me. We’d been dating for about three-four years by that point and I just couldn’t deal anymore.”
Facebook’s Supposed To Bring People Together, Not Drive Them Apart
“My childhood best friend.
We did everything together as kids, but then she went to a different school and I never heard from her. Sure, she kept up with a few other friends, but not me. Even after a close family member died and I called her to have someone to talk to, I never heard back from her.
Until I was in college and she friended me on Facebook. I thought, ‘Great! We can reconnect, maybe be friends again!’ So I shot her a message. A simple, ‘Hey what’s up, how have you been?’ She never replied. I shot her another the next week, thinking maybe she got busy or didn’t see it or meant to respond but forgot. She never replied to that one either. I waited a month before sending her one last, ‘How have you been? Let’s catch up!’ and she once again did not respond.
So I stopped trying, I kept her as a Facebook friend but never messaged her again.
And then, out of the blue, she messaged me several months later.
To ask me to vote for her friend’s band in a contest.
I gave her one last chance, asked her if we could chat and she blew me off saying she had so much work to do she couldn’t talk right now. So I closed the chat box, didn’t vote for her friend’s band, waited a month and then quietly unfriended her. That was well over ten years ago. Haven’t heard from her since.
It sucks to not be as important to the people who are important to you.”
She Was Incredibly Ungrateful
“I was there for her during some bad times. Putting down her cat, her dad dying, etc… I’d drive an hour every couple of days to help her grocery shop or pick up her daughter from school or whatever. She didn’t have a car, so we always ended up going to her place and her end of the city to hang out. I’d take off work when she needed help with something. I thought we were best friends.
Yeah, turns out when I needed something, she couldn’t be bothered. She also kept trying to fix me and my twin sister up with guys as well, since she had so many casual guys around, she thought we should, too. My twin and I are close, but not super close even though we live together. We don’t involve each other in that part of our lives.
She (the ex-friend) kept bringing one guy to events and telling him to choose one of us. Like we’re interchangeable. I found that highly offensive.
And then when my sister and I moved far away (a few thousand kilometers), she insisted she’d come and visit. Sure, cool. The apartment’s all ready for a guest. Two days before she shows up, we haven’t heard from her. She’s ghosting us. Finally, we hear from her. She’s only two hours away with other friends and her family but had changed her plans to not come to see us and didn’t even bother to let us know.”
