Break-ups happen every day. Everyone always talks about how sad breaking up with a boyfriend or girlfriend is, but what about a friendship break-up? There's no denying it can be incredibly painful for both ends. Especially if there's no concrete answer given as to why it happened.
People on Reddit share the reason why they decided to 'ghost' a friend. Content has been edited for clarity.
Friendship Immediately Terminated
“Had a friend who stayed at my house all the time, loved her to death. Then I went away for a weekend, and she got to stay in my house in exchange for dog sitting. Got back, and my dog was stuck on the balcony and money was taken from a spot only she knew about. She swore she didn’t take the money, and the dog was only there for 30 minutes. Could not forgive her for that, and ended up ghosting her.”
She Did Her A Favor, And For What?
“This girl I knew accused me of breaking into their house and stealing things. I came home from school one day, and saw their cat was in the road, (which is not normal) and realized he must have gotten out. They showed me where they kept the spare key on their porch, so I opened the door to their house and let their cat back in. I then closed the door and put the key back. I never set foot inside the house, mind you. She had said to put him in the house if he ever was wandering around.
A few days later, I came over to her house and told her what had happened and initially she thanked me. I guess later though she changed her mind and made up some story about me stealing things inside her house. She said I stole her DS or something. I was only 13 at the time, and had never stolen anything in my life. So I ghosted her over her being a liar.
A few weeks later she asked if I wanted to hang out.
I told her, ‘I don’t hangout with liars.’
She tried to say she was kidding around, which was funny because she had gotten her parents involved. They didn’t seem to think it was a joke. Needless to say, we were no longer friends.”
Don’t Ask Her For Lotion
“I ghosted her because she treated me like trash, and was just over all a rude and awful girl. I just thought she was blunt at first, until the comments got more and more rude.
For example, she would always invite me to the gym with her as her free guest. She eventually started chewing me out, stating I needed my own membership and to stop using her for hers (she invited me so she wouldn’t feel alone).
One day after a shower at the gym, I asked her for some lotion. She blew up on me, literally screaming that she’s ‘not a lotion dispensary,’ and she’s tired of giving lotion out to every one. I was so taken aback I just apologized at the moment. When we got in the car to go back home, she apologized profusely and forced lotion into my hand after I declined. I decided that day I was done having her feelings taken out on me.
She called me literally every single day for a month, messaged me constantly, and kept tagging me on memes but I just blew her off completely. Not worth my time or energy.”
He Had One Goal In Mind
“Every time we made plans to hang out, he would stand me up. I took the hint and made him a peripheral friend. The kind of person you might hang with if you bump into them, but never make plans with or drop anything for.
Eventually, something he considered horrible happened to him (someone he was mooching off of decided to rid herself of the parasite, and kicked him off her couch). He spammed my Facebook messages ‘to hang out.’ Conveniently, he only wanted to talk about his trauma at night (so he could crash at my place. Yeah, dude, your parasite butt was obvious). I finally said that he could help me get to a few places in the early afternoon, and I could hear what happened to him.
He stood me up. He stood me up at a meeting he demanded that we have for him.
He then resurfaced at 6pm, to tell me that ‘Today was busy, but in a good way.’
He also wanted to know ‘What my plans were for tonight at 9:30pm?”
Yeah, he thought he might make a play to get his worthless butt hosted after standing me up on plans we made at his request for him.
He seemed stunned that I was finished. And mad that I ignored him. Textbook NPD.”
She Didn’t Pick Up On The Hints
“She repeatedly ignored every boundary I tried to set with her in regard to having a Platonic relationship, despite telling her I only wanted to be friends.
If we went out to dinner, she would try to call it a date.
The night my partner got kicked out by their abusive parents and I spent five hours on the phone with them calming them down and creating a game plan, she had a massive mental breakdown in my living room the moment I was off the phone.
When we drove to Iowa to save my partner from having to live in a homeless shelter and had one of the most traumatic experiences with their parents trying to get their ESA back, she chose to get completely wasted in the hotel room. She then had another break down over me and my partners relationship. We then had to spend the entire night comforting her, despite the horrible ordeal by partner had just gone through. The drive back to Texas lasted almost 24 hours because she kept faking being car sick (my partner who legit does get carsick if a ride is longer than 40 minutes), and would literally mimic my partners exact body language when they started throwing up. Or have to go pee every 40 minutes and would then spend 30 minutes looking around, talking to the cashier and getting snacks.
The day after we got back, I was bombarded with texts about how soon could we hang out and things about her wanting to take over my lease or move in with me, my partner, and our roommate or renting an apartment nearby so we could always be close. The first like month and a half of not talking to her I was still getting messages almost every day.
It was too much and was borderline stalking. So yeah I ghosted her, and I have felt so much more relieved. Do not regret it.”
A Downward Spiral
“When we were kids, and had grown apart, he got involved with gangs in his teenage years. I took him out of the city for a while, and helped break from that. Fortunately, he never got involved with that again, but he did do some light substances, and generally makes dead end life decisions. He got a girl pregnant while she was on disability and he was applying. She got it, they bought a house, didn’t bother to fully insure it, and it blew a pipe. Instantly ruined. They had to move in with his parents.
At that point, there were like seven people living in a Habitat for Humanity house. He got his disability (despite me pointing out that his disability had limited effects on him, and that he could make far more working), and bought a pick up truck. I pretty much told him that his life was set to be incredibly stressful and difficult for him and his family, since they would only ever get around $1,500-$1,600 a month, and asked if he was done with kids. He and his girlfriend said they wanted another. I lost all hope there.
We were going to a steakhouse (my treat, I had just taken a promotion). During that time, he and his two or three year old child were both inappropriately talking about the other patrons openly. At that moment, I realized I love the guy like a brother, but there’s too much of a gap for me to be able to respect his life choices and his behaviors.”
An Incredibly Toxic “Friendship”
“We had been friends since we were really young, and she lived in the same neighborhood. She got insanely possessive as the years passed, going to hang out with other friends was not allowed. I felt like I had to sneak around just to see other friends and family. It eventually descended and almost sounds like an abusive relationship when I tell people about it now. I was watched from when I would get home and would have to go over. When I started dating a mutual friend it got so bad, partially because we didn’t tell her because we knew she would lose her mind. She did. The controlling behavior got so bad, she tracked my phone and would text me asking why I was at my SO’s house in the middle of the night freaking out (keep in mind this was after she found out we were together).
It was torturous, trying to balance my relationship and this ‘friendship.’ I was having panic attacks and vomiting from anxiety. She would threaten to kill herself if I wouldn’t be at her beck and call, and talk about the future saying we had to have our houses connected.
On top of all this, I wasn’t allowed to be upset or scared, have my own feelings or opinions. I was there to comfort her and be her emotional punching bag.
It got to the point where even I, someone who is just a doormat and can’t say no, lost my cool. I freaked out, hit my boiling point and screamed at her for over two hours telling her how she was ruining my life. She was so manipulative and tried to tell me I was upsetting her. I didn’t care. I told her I didn’t want to be her friend anymore, I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it.
She tried to get back in contact after that and used to come to my work. She sent a bunch of texts on and off for months. My SO was so done, she already wanted to lay a beat down on her. She bought me a brand-new phone, helped me block her number, and I switched jobs. I never saw her again.”
Who Knows What His Woman Is Capable Of?
“We met through a local babywearing group (basically, a group for parents who wanted to support others in how to carry their babies/toddlers with different types of cloth wraps). This was 14 years ago, before wraps were as popular as they are now. We had kids similar ages and the kids got along well, we got along well.
After about a year of friendship, she told me she wanted a 5th baby, but her husband didn’t. So, she lied to him about using birth control and was now pregnant. She was so happy about the 5th baby. Their current youngest also had medical issues, which was part of her husband’s reasons for not wanting another child.
All I could think was If you can deceive and outright trick the person you are supposed to love most in the world, what could you do to other people?
Completely ghosted her and have no regrets.
Ralph Realized His Mistake Too Late
“In my early 20’s, I had a ‘friend’ named Ralph. He was a really nice guy, but pretty obnoxious and oblivious. He was the first friend I made after high school.
Every time he came over, he would drink a lot and fall asleep on my couch. He made another friend in his neighborhood, named Jamie, and stopped hanging out with me as much. I invited him to come over to chill and play some Diablo for my birthday, and he showed up with Jamie. They were both super stoned, and it was incredibly awkward.
He and I played Diablo in silence for about an hour while Jamie laid on my floor in front of the heater. Then, out of nowhere, they both get up to leave. Turns out, they had finished off their stash and were just waiting for their guy to text them back. Ralph told me he would come back after they got the stuff, but texted me back a few hours later that he didn’t have a ride, and if I wanted to hang out I would have to go pick him up.
I called him a few times after that, but he never seemed interested in hanging out.
A few weeks later, I moved in with my fiancée, and any time Ralph called or texted, I let it go. He sent me one last message on Facebook, saying that I was a good friend to him and he put his priorities in the wrong person. Come to find out, Jamie had been caught with weed in his car.
I checked up on him recently. Ralph has two more kids, still works at Burger King, and his baby mama kicked him out. Hasn’t posted anything on FB in about a decade.”
Her Reasoning Didn’t Make Sense
“When I was in high school, I bought a ‘special’ brownie for the first time and told my best friend about it. We were both in competitive cheerleading, and we had to shoot a video to enter an upcoming competition that day. She wanted to see what it looked like and smelled like, so I let her. She then took two huge bites out of it and it went all downhill from there.
We parted ways so we could get ready for our cheer video. After about 30 minutes to an hour, she called me freaking out. I rushed over to her house to find her half dressed, waiting for me outside. She kept trying to call the ambulance because she thought she was going to swallow her tongue. After several attempts to get her to stop she called them anyway.
We missed the competition video, and I followed her to the hospital. A few days later her parents contacted my parents saying they were going to press charges on me. She told her parents she had no idea it was a weed brownie, and I poisoned her on purpose so she wouldn’t be in the video even though I wasn’t in the video either. Word spread throughout my school that I poisoned my best friend of six years.”
John, That’s Your Baby, Not Rachel’s
“John and I were good friends throughout high school. Practically brothers. Some classmates even thought we were siblings because we had similar hair color and styles, face shapes and we were the exact same height. Our senior year of high school, we started drifting apart because he started dating this psycho chick he was friends with, and I didn’t want anything to do with that relationship. Yikes.
Then he dumped her and we hung out again pretty often. A few years later, he started dating another girl, Amy, who I became pretty good friends with while he was in another state for school. I wasn’t interested in her and she wasn’t interested in me. Not in that way. When he came back between semesters, I started to see how manipulative she was.
She’d been baby hungry for the longest time. When they finally got married, she ‘forgot’ to take her birth control on their honeymoon and got pregnant. She then started convincing him that he’d told her to stop taking it so they could start a family. We were co-workers at the time and before they got married, he’d told me that he didn’t want kids for a year or two so he could figure out who they were as a married couple before throwing a kid into the mix.
Once Amy was like six months pregnant, John tried telling me to dump my girlfriend at the time because ‘I just want you to find someone like Amy who you can be happy with. Rachel (my then girlfriend, now wife) seems really manipulative and like she wants to pull you away from your friends.’
A couple nights before this conversation happened, Rachel had expressed to me she wanted to try to become better friends with my friends, because she didn’t have any of her own. She had asked Amy if she wanted to hang out with her and some other girls from the group, but Amy turned her down over and over whenever she asked.
Later down the road, baby comes, I got married and I go to John’s house to play some video games with him. Rachel asks if she can come and just read a book or watch them play because she didn’t want to be alone, so I bring her along. She was genuinely content to just sit there and watch us or watch videos on her phone. John and I are gaming with some online friends of ours and his baby is in the corner of the room in his bouncing chair and starts whining. John shushes the baby. First nicely, then not as nicely, then straight up tells his one-year-old child to be quiet. Not rudely, but not nicely.
He then turns to my wife who is absorbed into her book, ‘Rachel, he’s hungry. There’s a formula bottle in the fridge and you can change him too. His diaper bag is over by him now.’
Then, he turns back to his stupid video game instead of taking care of his own flesh and blood.
Rachel tells him that she’d be happy to hand the baby his bottle, but she didn’t feel comfortable changing him.
So John huffs and rolls his eyes and stands up, saying ‘Fine. I guess I’ll do it all then.’
Rachel and I haven’t spoken to him since we left shortly after that. We’re happily married and I’ve looked back at the toxic person he was and how he took advantage of me while we worked together. I was part-time, and made half of what he did and he would still degrade me when I refused to work Saturdays and Sundays with him to finish our work for the week because he wanted to sleep in most days.”
This Girl Was Never A True Friend
“When my best friend and I were in high school, I admitted to her I had been assaulted. Being young and very inexperienced, I was confused about what had happened, most especially some of my body’s unwanted automatic responses.
She responded by screaming at me in front of most of our grade, that it was my fault, that I hadn’t ‘actually’ had anything bad happen to me, that when I was finally ‘really assaulted,’ I would deserve it. She called me all these horrific and ugly names, and stormed off.
I spent the next four months, until I moved and transferred schools, being bullied on the daily by pretty much everyone. Girls shoved me into walls and lockers for looking at their boyfriends. Guys approached me with requests for dirty favors, usually for money. I heard a lot of inappropriate and awful names coughed when I walked into rooms.
I realized that anyone who was actually my friend would never have done something so brutal to me, so I stopped talking to her completely.”
Not The Type Of People a
“Two of my good friends from junior high simply stopped contacting me. I sent them birthday messages for their milestone birthdays just days apart, but got nothing for my own. Then crickets. I ended up just deleting them on social media.
It’s too bad, because I used to be really close with the one. He would invite me over two, maybe three times a week, and we’d drink and play video games. We got really close.
I was friends with the other guy for the same amount of time, but never got close with him. They were best friends, but this second friend would sometimes be rude and full of himself. He’d punch me hard if I messed up when he taught me a game, like Liar’s Dice, wouldn’t let me sit up front during any part of a five-hour trip to my trailer because he had seniority, and always acted better than me.
Even when my mom died and my friends from that group ‘took me out for a drink,’ they mostly talked amongst themselves, had fun and made me pay for myself. Not only that, but friend number two reminded me I owed him for a bottle from years prior. Why? He wouldn’t take payment in installments. (I rarely saw him, didn’t carry cash and if I ran into him I’d try to give him the cash I had.)
The only reason I owed him money was because of a small get together. I went to the other friends and got told friend two and another guy were coming over. My friend had drinks for us, and it was his turn to buy for us. However, the extra guy was notorious for drinking everyone else’s drinks and eating others’ food without chipping in. So my friend asked me to buy a bottle too, so that there’d be enough, and friend two just so happened to be going to the store on his way there.
The other friend didn’t buy anything and drank our drinks.
The first and main friend had a baby with a girl he slept with, then her parents bought them a house. When my mom died, the girlfriend was really nice to us and made us food, but she would be standoffish in person and didn’t seem to like me. He and she would say they worried about my mental health and were there for me. Also, they’d thought about having me committed because they were worried. Not long after, nothing.
In previous months, my friend would invite me over out of the blue, and accuse me of lying if I said I wasn’t up to it or felt sick due to my depression. He’d expect me to come over on a dime, drink and then spend tens of dollars for a cab home because I couldn’t stay over there
I saw her at a fish and chips place, with their daughter, when I was eating with my grandparents and immediate family. She ignored us.”
She Was Flat Out Told, And Still Doesn’t Get It
“I’ve told her multiple times that I’m not interested in being friends with her anymore. Our personalities just don’t blend, she’s a very sweet girl but her sense of humor just isn’t compatible with mine and it’s often impossible to mirror her energy.
She continued to contact me, despite me requesting that we cut ties, so eventually I just stopped replying. I still follow her on social media, but for the most part she’s stopping trying to message me.”
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