1.
“I busted his wife cheating on him, so I did what any good friend would and told him. He responded by trying to fistfight me for making things up. We haven’t talked since, and he is on his third marriage now.”
3.
“Talked so much I could just put the phone down and let him keep talking, and he wouldn’t notice.”
4.
“I realized she wasn’t genuinely happy for me whenever I met a goal or accomplished something. I felt like she was sabotaging me and like I had to hide my good news in order to be cool with her. I basically felt her jealousy and disdain with me unless I only focused on the negative things that happened to me. I decided she was too toxic and was making me unhappy, so I stopped hanging out with her or texting her.”
5.
“Best man at my wedding, but never picked up his suit from the tailor (I had to do it for him). He never planned a bachelor party for me (I didn’t have one). He caused me to be almost a day late driving to our wedding destination (luckily, I had planned to get there three days ahead). He didn’t prepare a speech for the reception despite several reminders that he’d be giving one. He got wasted and yelled at the venue manager and made her cry. He was too drunk to be our designated driver after the reception as planned (I had to stop drinking early when I noticed and drove us all instead), and then he hasn’t reached out since to apologize, smooth things over, anything. He was indeed not the best man. I haven’t spoken to him in four years as a result.”
6.
“Friends for 14 years. He got married to a woman who LOVES multilevel marketing (pyramid schemes). They invited my wife and me over for dinner, and they started the hard sell of signing up tonight. No brainer for us — we both abhor pyramid schemes. As the evening came to a close, his wife told us that if we didn’t sign up tonight, then they would no longer be friends with us. I looked my buddy in the eye and asked him if he agreed with his wife, and he angrily said he did. I told them goodbye, and we left. Greed makes people do funny things.”
7.
“A few years back, I had to end a friendship of 17-plus years. It sucked, but it was necessary. I was tired of her taking me for granted. Never being thankful for anything I did for her. Then her being angry at everything all the time. She blamed everything that went wrong in her life on everyone else but herself. I couldn’t take it anymore. I ended the friendship, deleted her number, and unfollowed her on social media. My life is much more peaceful now.”
9.
“She was a classic manipulator, the perfect idealization-devaluation-discard cycle. I thought it was normal behaviour because my mother was like that; I just thought this is how people are. After therapy, I realized it wasn’t, so I was halfway out the door already. The last straw was when she ‘uninvited’ me to her wedding. I got an invite saying I was NOT invited, but here’s a link to send her a present — it was a donation fund for their honeymoon. Blocked and forgotten.”
10.
“I introduced them to my friends and then began trying to hang out with all of them and not including me.”
11.
“A mutual friend confided in me that he had been pressuring and manipulating her into doing things she knew she shouldn’t, but was in such a vulnerable state mentally that she believed the things he was telling her. And then once she realized what was happening, he used what he had already done to blackmail her into continuing until she reached this point where she decided she had to tell someone. I thought he’d been my closest friend for 15 years; he was basically family, but this showed me I had no idea who he really was. I supported the mutual friend and encouraged her to go to the police, but she had bad experiences with the police previously in similar situations, so she didn’t want to go that route and asked me to deal with it.”
12.
“They refused to take no for an answer. They were sure they knew what I needed better than I did. They refused to stop buying me things I could not use. Not things that I didn’t like, I mean, I had no way to use the things. Think: Buying cool-looking shoes for someone with no feet. That kind of silly thing. Then they decided I needed something expensive I couldn’t use. I repeatedly said, ‘No, I don’t want this.’ I cannot use it. They went behind my back and crowdfunded other then-friends to buy the thing. Then, they presented it to me at a huge party. That was when I realized they and the others saw me as an object of pity that they needed to fix, and feel good about ‘fixing’ me. They didn’t see me as a human with the right to live my own life.”
13.
“I went through three tragedies (a shooting, cheating fiancé/a called-off wedding, and the death of my sister-in-law) within three years. She told me that I had changed so much and said I wasn’t like I was before because of what I went through. Uhhhh, no shit, Sherlock!!!! Because trauma and grief change a person! I told her she never had to worry about hearing from me again! I’ve been at peace since.”
14.
“I paid her and her boyfriend’s rent for a year after they got into an awful car accident, and she forgot my birthday twice and never asked me how I was doing.”
15.
And finally, “They went really hard down the right-wing rabbit hole.”
Is there a particular reason why you needed to dump a long-time friend? Tell us what happened in the comments or anonymously in the Google Form below:
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