I was best friends with a guy since elementary school, and moved out of state after dropping out of college. We stayed in touch for years, would play games together online and chat all the time.

One day, I got radio silence from him. A month goes by and I’ve seriously considered the idea that he died or killed himself, until he finally says something to me. I’m so damn confused, and when I ask him what the hell happened he says that he wanted to know if I’d notice or care if he didn’t talk to me, that he felt like we never talked about anything more than surface level anymore. That I was obsessed with video games and he felt like it was all stuff he didn’t want in his life. Of course I noticed, I tried to get a hold of him repeatedly.

And you know what? I think he was right about those things. I spent and still spend my time getting high and forgetting about anything I could, and video games were some of the only things to get me to forget about the waking horrors of life. That and spending time with him and sharing music with him. But I didn’t care that he might be right, because he never fucking talked to me about any of it.

There was no discussion of concern, no expression of the feeling that things weren’t satisfactory for him, no chance for me to realize these things about myself and repair them for the good of my best friendship I’d ever had in my life. Not once did he consider how the way he just cold shouldered me made me feel, how I worried for his fucking life.

I just stopped talking to him. He was always a weird dude, but that’s fine, I’m a weird dude, who cares. But it turns out that it affected his decision making in such a way that he thought how he handled it was reasonable and he expected me to just let it go. I stopped talking to him.

Months later he hit me up again to talk, and I got on an hours long call with him, only to realize he was cool with me, and I was okay with him, and he wanted to be friends again, but he was surprised that I even wanted to bring up what he did at all, as if I would just let it all go because “time heals everything”. We hung up that call open to talking more and being friends again, but I just never spoke to him again and he didn’t try either.

I realized we could be technically cool with each other all we wanted, but the friendship we had was broken, my trust was broken, he was essentially dead to me. I think, in the end, that if you have a nasty falling out with someone, that if it’s your fault, even partially, you can own that, you can try to fix it. But if it’s their fault and they don’t acknowledge that part, it’s just not worth it, because the friendship you had doesn’t exist anymore, and clinging to it won’t fix that.

It took me another year after that to get over losing him, I don’t really have many friends, and that was a major blow to me, socially and mentally, for a long time I’d see things and want to tell him about them, and getting past that was tough, but I did it, and I’d rather be here now, like this, than have caved and reconnected with some empty shell of the friendship i used to have.

there’s almost 8billion other people on the plenet, go to events, meet people, move on with your life, it’s for the best x

My best friend of many years. We had even lived together in college as roommates for 3 years. Never fought, not even once. We did everything together. When I moved away for a summer internship, we wrote emails but also physical letters (this was before email was what it is now, it wasn’t “everywhere” and it wasn’t weird if you didn’t have one).

The 2nd semester of our senior year, I began dating someone and she……didn’t like that I guess. We never really talked about it or fought, she just became very distant.

A few months later I had to transfer schools to better specialize in my degree field, and she still had 1 more year left before she graduated. She stayed at that school and I never expected the friendship to just “end”, but that’s what happened. The time it took for her to reply to my emails became longer and longer and eventually they just stopped. So we never got to really talk about it. Never saw each other again.

To this day I have no idea what was at the root of her problem. She didn’t even come to the funeral home when my Dad died 9 years after all this transpired, and they knew each other very well. She didn’t send flowers or a card. Or a fucking email. Nothing. That’s what finally did it for me. That hurt. That really hurt. It was one of the lowest points of my life and she just didn’t care. She knew - her parents stopped by. She just didn’t care. She couldn’t put some stupid thing like that behind her for 10 minutes and send an email that said “I’m sorry.” That’s it. That’s all she had to do.

I came to terms with everything for good after that; if there was any hope before that we would ever be on speaking terms again, it died along with my Dad.

Happened to me a long time back. Was really close with my cousin until he molested my sister.

Obviously, that relationship never recovered. My whole family disowned him, and afterward he pretty quickly fell into what appears to be some kind of schizophrenia paired with alcoholism.

There’s a part of me that almost feels bad for the guy, especially since he had a really rough upbringing, and was doing really well for himself before all this came out. But on the other more important hand, fuck that guy.

Do siblings count? I’ve had many, many fallouts with my siblings, and the feeling seemed like it stayed there even after I started doing things abroad, but then I saw each of them for the first time in a long time and the feeling was like “oh hai”.

I had a very close friend who I ended up rooming with at university and her and I were like siblings. One day I text her and ask her if she’s home to sign for a package for me.

She lost it at me, saying I should know her schedule and that she’s at work. No worries I say, but she’s not having it. She comes home later and has a shouting match at me, I get upset because this is totally out of nowhere to me.

Fast forward a few painful weeks later and she refuses to pay her portion of the electricity bill. I ask again and again and finally she scatters several rolls of pennys at my bedroom door. I change the wifi as a result until she pays me her share, she gets her boyfriend (whom I’m quite close with) involved.

He’s confused and feeling awkward but has to stick up for his girlfriend. I tell him I’ve got nothing wrong with him and that I don’t like what’s going on. Some damaged property later and she’s gone.

Disappears, leaves her stuff, is gone for months. Her side of the rent mysteriously is being paid (by her mom) and I’m there in an empty apartment (yay). I never hear from her ever again so I rescue a cat (since I’ve always wanted one). She shows up later and is horrified that there’s a cat there (she’s allergic apparently). She silently moves her stuff out and tries to throw a shoe at my cat.

I won’t tolerate anyone abusing an animal (much less so the one I’m taking care of) so I walk right up to her and she turns and runs down the hall(???).

Never seen or heard from her ever again. Craziest interaction with someone who was not my parents. I thought I knew her but her reaction was an absolute mystery to me and my girlfriend.

It was a long time building up in our friendship and after it all fell apart I can honestly say I’m happier for it finally falling apart.

It was like a great big weight was lifted off my shoulders when I told them that we were no longer friends.

I hope they’re doing well and got their act together but I don’t want to reach out and talk to them again.

Edit: Basically I was friends with this person for a decade and in that time we understood each other quite a bit. I overlooked some of their more toxic traits because I guess I was so desperate for a friend that I was willing to ignore them.

But it all eventually came to a head when they ruined the start to a vacation that they knew I was super excited for.

Long story short, they got blackout drunk in my apartment after I went to sleep before we were to go hiking and camping the following day. They vomited all over my apartment causing hundreds of dollars in damages. The following morning I tried to get them to clean up as much as they could but they couldn’t stop vomiting. They never apologized for it. The last thing I sent them was a bill that they never paid.

sorry for what happened OP

It didn’t. We haven’t talked to each other in a year

I should clarify: I am and I will be ok. I just wonder how the future looks like in such a predicament?

I intentionally ended things with someone I had thought was a close friend recently. They had been flaky and fickle for probably a year or so now (basically every since they met their current partner), never really reached out and when they did it was always some weirdly hurtful way (for example, on my birthday they sent me a message that started with “as you know, I’m in [different country]”, despite not talking to me at all for a month or two)

I had a borderline mini-mental breakdown earlier this year, reached out to them for some support and whilst they were supportive, after meeting me for lunch I jokingly said that “next time we can talk about the stuff you’re probably interested in [i.e. the stuff that was getting to me]” and their response was “I literally don’t care about things people don’t want to tell me about”.

The final straw was when one of the two kittens I adopted a few months ago died very suddenly, and their response after my housemate and our mutual friend told them about it was to send me three tiktok videos (their only direct messages to me for probably a month or more, and based on the timestamps just them wasting time on their daily bus journey). I waited a few days just to make sure I wasn’t missing some context, then lost my temper and told them “I genuinely don’t know what the fuck is wrong with you that you think this is an appropriate response”, at which point they blamed me for not telling them myself and said they weren’t going to be my “emotional punching bag”.

I just decided they’re narcissistic enough that they thought the smallest token of their attention would make me feel grateful, blocked them on every platform I could think of and will probably never intentionally interact with them again.

The worst part is seeing mutual acquaintances treating them like they are good people - either they are and I feel shit because somehow I wasn’t worth it or they’re not and they’re getting the benefits of being a good person without the actual hard work. Hard not to take it as a really personal rejection of who I am as a person either way.