14.
“The friendship was great for the first year and a half. We did everything together; her daughters were like my own. I was at her house literally every weekend. Then I got a boyfriend. She freaked out on me. Told me I was moving too fast, and I’m ‘desperate to not be alone forever.’ Like duh? Nobody wants to be alone forever. I was almost 33.”
“For the next six months, she would gaslight me, telling me she supported me in everything I was doing (during that time, I was going back to school; she said it was a bad idea, changing jobs; that wasn’t good because I was leaving her at the other job, met my boyfriend, who even after 6 months she refused to meet him but called him a bad person).
“In the end, I just couldn’t handle the abuse anymore. If things didn’t go exactly the way she wanted, it was my fault. If I confronted her about a problem I was having with her, she said I was just playing the victim. I walked on eggshells around her, and I was sick of it. So I texted her one day and said, “We can’t be friends anymore. Don’t text back. No, why, no thumbs up, nothing. I’m done,” and that’s that.”
—Anonymous, 33, Nebraska
