We've all been there. An old friend from high school shoots you a message and asks how you've been. They comment on how your kids are growing up or a recent accomplishment. You feel happy to hear from them only to get the dreaded “I wanted to share this exciting opportunity with you" and realize too late it was an MLM trap.
Some closer friends get cut off for far more though. If you had someone in your life who isn't supportive, tried to undercut you, or harm people, you wouldn't want to stick around. One Reddit user wanted to hear others' experiences with this.
Redditor KingBean_ asked the community:
“What's the moment you realized your close friend was an a-hole?"
There were some intense stories from other users who encountered major friend letdowns.
Ghost friends...
“The moment I couldn't be available whenever they needed, they lashed out and disappeared off the map, only to reappear recently because they wanted to crash at my place. No way.”
“or, yeah, just disappear for months and then text you "Hey! what's up? Miss you!" and then you realize they actually just need something from you...maybe that's not as close of a friend as I thought, I'm realizing.”
Some tricky toxicity.
“When he propositioned my girlfriend to have sex with him under the guise of making sure she was being faithful to me.”
“So if she accepts, he gets free sex. If she rejects, he's the "hero" for testing her virtue. Brilliant plan. What could possibly go wrong?”
“what he had tried to do made him no better than a rapist.”
“He tried to abduct a lost, drunk woman from a bar. We were getting ready to leave a crowded bar one night and my friend went to use the restroom. When he came back he was supporting a woman who was so drunk she could barely walk.”
“He said that she had lost her friends and we should take her back to our hotel room. I told him that we should help her find her friends and asked her for her name. My friend looked pissed and said that we should just go.”
“She managed to slur that her name was Amy. I then went to the DJ and asked him to announce to the bar that Amy had lost her friends, needed their help, and to come find her at the bar. During this my friend tried to walk Amy out of the bar, but security stopped him at the door.”
“Luckily Amy's fiends immediately came to the bar to get her and got her away from my friend. Afterwards my friend was pissed, because ‘I had ruined his good time.’”
“I told him that he was disgusting, that taking that girl back to our hotel would have been abduction, and that what he had tried to do made him no better than a rapist. I stopped hanging out with him after that.“
“Now he's got a girl he barely knows pregnant...”
“Everytime he broke up with a girl he would go on and on about how crazy she was. Everytime he got a new gf he would force every member of the friend group to be friends with her, which was really awkward because we knew how the story would end. Didn't help that he had a history of cheating.”
“He also liked to talk about who ever wasn't in the room. Once he started getting passive aggressive with my wife I blew up at him. Now he's got a girl he barely knows pregnant and they're both unemployed. F**k em.”
Power trip much?
“When he complained and got a server at Texas Roadhouse ‘fired’ over a $2 shortage...and was laughing and bragging about it. Like, it made him feel good / important that he cost someone their job.”
“As a side note, we are no longer friends and, about 2 weeks later, we (me, my wife, and daughter) had the same server at the same Texas Roadhouse.”
Taking responsibility is part of being an adult...
“When I realized I was her last close friend left. Shortly thereafter I started to open my eyes and understand why that was the case. A lot of it was that she is a master at justifying her own bad decisions. Nothing is ever a big deal to her.”
“When her electricity got shut off, it was because ‘stuff happens.’ When she got fired from her fourth job in a year, it was ‘ok, I'm going to cruise on unemployment and give myself time to focus on art.’ When she forgot someone's birthday, it was because birthdays triggered her anxiety.”
“And when she was served with divorce papers after refusing to attend marriage counseling, she insisted she had done everything in her power to save her marriage. She is never wrong in her eyes and is the only adult I've seen consistently regress in life because of it. In the end, a 12 year friendship devolved into an absolute nightmare for me.”
If your dog doesn’t like them, there’s your sign...
“I told him I liked a girl and he told me he liked her, too. No big deal, except he then pretended to ask her if she liked me just so that he could lie and say 'yeah bro she doesn't like you.'"
“He also sabotaged someone guy's relationship so that he could date his girlfriend, only to dump her a week later. A mutual friend casually said it was because the guy was a d!ck, and so he deserved to have his relationship sabotaged."
“He's also been telling me that random people 'really don't like me' even though I have literally never interacted with them, have hardly seen them, and mostly keep to myself. Even if it was true, how would he know? Why would these people who apparently hate me be talking about a guy that they've hardly ever met?"
“It's interesting because when I first brought him to my house, my dog kept growling at him. I brushed it off at the time."
Girl bye!
Bai Girl Bye GIF by Originals
Giphy
“he told me that she'd been thinking about it and there was no way the baby I was carrying could be by my partner, I must be lying to cover up sleeping with another man. She said she'd added up all the dates and it just didn't work. Then when I asked her to stop talking about it (because it wasn't true!) She told me I didn't have enough friends to cut contact with her. Wrong. See ya."
“I distinctly remember her bragging about how she lied..”
“Had a friend in college who would occasionally lie to get off work or make up a reason to seem more interesting is and then. I didn't think that much of it until I distinctly remember her bragging about how she lied to someone just because she could and how funny she found it that the person believed her and was making fun of them for it (when it was a ‘believable lie’) and I was sort of baffled that she thought her lying made the other person dumb and didn't just make her immoral or scheming. Due to this and other things we didn't remain friends for very long.”
“I found out my dad was dying and I have barely heard from her since.”
“When I spent years listening to her problems giving advice lending money when she needed it (I did get it back) and just generally being there for her then I broke down on her once when I found out my dad was dying and I have barely heard from her since.”
Friendship, like any relationship, has its ups and downs but it's important cut toxic people in your life. Friends celebrat each other's accomplishments, and also hold each other accountable when they've down something wrong. This is how we grow. Cheers to the positive friendships in life!
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Love is crazy. I've finally come to that conclusion. And marriage, you take your life in your hands and just throw caution to the wind in hopes of survival with that step.
When love falls apart, things can get real messy, real fast. And I've always been stunned by people's behavior when love subsides.
More often than not, it's like they become different people. Sometimes people are beset by tragedy and grief and sometimes people smile wide and move on. It's a coin toss.
But my favorite post divorce personality has to be the sudden super villain. Oh honey watch out for them!
Redditor u/hyperyog wanted to hear all the tea from the divorcees out there by asking:
Divorced Redditors, what is the craziest thing you or your former spouse did after divorce?
I once had a friend who burned her ex's house down when he wasn't home. He had started seeing someone almost immediately, so she thought, lemme set their sparks. Yeah, she wasn't well. Whatever happened to just a quick goodbye?
Swiped
dean winters crying GIF by MayhemGiphy"She removed the retaining clips for my windshield wipers, but put the wipers back on the arms. First storm after I got my car back from her, driver side wiper flew off the car on Interstate 40. Good times."
Sicko!
"He wrote suicide notes and put them in my kids backpacks for them/me to find. Then he turned off his phone and went to a coworkers house to play crib and have drinks.. all the while knowing I would be freaking out searching for him thinking he was in danger or worse. Thankfully my kids didn't see the notes and didn't know what was going on. This was just one of the many, many crazy things he did. Two years out and he just recently stopped showing up at my work and driving by my house at night."
A Sad End
"Died of a drug overdose. To be fair, her drug addiction was the reason for the divorce, so maybe that isn't too crazy."
"That's so incredibly difficult to have gone through. I unfortunately know the depths of this kind of pain, and while I'm sure the circumstances surrounding it are different, the loss that still happened is a tragedy. My condolences."
Bye Girl
"Stalked me for 5 years. Would make fake social media profiles to try to follow me (which I would block endlessly) and would try to find where I worked so she could talk to me. This lady cheated on me with 7 different men 2 months after we were married. I kicked her a** to the curb and made her sign the court papers."
"When we had our day in court she cried in the judges office while I just wanted to get this crap done. After, my dad was with me and he threw 50 dollars at her and told her to "change your freaking last name." Good guy Pops. I haven't seen or heard from her in about 5 years, thank goodness."
- Letharos
Take it All!
skin care spinning GIF by Primal Life OrganicsGiphy"I had an ex-boyfriend go through my apartment and take back every gift he had given me that he could find. Then he went in my bedside table and took the condoms. And the vibrator he had given me."
See now, when I'm out... I'm out! I don't want to see you, hear from you or know you. I wish you well in life, but please live it far from me. Anyone agree? Clearly not the people here. Let's continue...
For the Boy
bicycling father and son GIF by NETFLIXGiphy"All I wanted was custody of my son, I gave her everything else except one of our cars. She fought me through 5 hearings, I won. She never came to see him again."
Dangerous Woman
"My ex cheated on me the week my mom died in the hospital. She spent a year and a half trying to get in touch with me. She would call my old work and make fake accounts trying to message me on FB. It was insane. She later sends a certified letter explaining she was sorry that she did what she did and that she aborted our child."
"Wanted me to meet her somewhere so she could apologize face to face. She already married some other guy that she had children with and was still trying to get in touch with me. I never understood her."
- orstius
Be Gone
"After years of telling me she wanted a child, that she wanted to be a mom, that her life's dream was to be a stay at home mom, she got pregnant with the first guy she slept with while we were getting divorced and put the kid up for adoption even before it was born. This was a long-standing thing with her, she always wanted something (car, house, dog, cat, marriage, etc) and the second she got it she immediately hated it."
The "Actor"!
"Called me and pretended he had been hit by a car while we were talking. He even tried to voice the crowd that had gathered around his "body." God-awful acting, but pretty funny listening to him try to mimic a woman's voice. Points for trying to be inclusive, I guess."
"I think he was trying to get me to re-live my trauma of being on the phone with a friend who actually HAD been hit by a car while we were talking. Too bad he didn't realize that hearing the real thing is worlds different than hearing a dumba** try to act it out."
Money Blues
"I was sending 600 dollars a month to support my daughter because she's the only thing I give a sh!t about. My ex texts me and tells me I need to be sending 1200 a month because she's broke and can't pay her bills and I should feel guilty about it. She left me for another guy while I was on deployment I told her to go screw herself--call my lawyer."
Pop Off
Tom Hanks Drinking GIF by The Good FilmsGiphy"Took the sodas from the fridge as he walked out the door. Dumfounded."
See, I blame Alanis Morissette and her "Jagged Little Pill" album. All I'm going to say is... the secret song. I think she gave people ideas. (I love that song) Y'all, seek therapy if you can't shake people. When it's done, let it be done.
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