Sleep is a human necessity.
So much so that without it, we die. To make sure we don't do that, our bodies will force us to sleep whether we want to and are comfortable or not.
Every now and then that means having a less-than-five-star sleeping experience.
One Reddit user asked:
What's the worst place you ever had to spend the night?
We expected some interesting answers from more adventurous users who travel, hike, etc. Everybody loves a good seedy hotel story.
What we weren't expecting was a comment section full of bonkers stories about private islands, failed drug smuggling, surviving disasters and unintentionally doing permanent ear damage over some snoring.
Yeah. It's a lot.
Canada Didn't Have Hard Feelings
A bus terminal park bench after being turned away at the Canadian border.
I was on a Greyhound and stupidly tried to bring weed across the border to avoid paying expensive prices in Toronto. I was also pretty drunk as it makes bus rides tolerable.
They found it and charged me $100 to take me back to the bus station in Burlington, VT. I slept on a bench there until the next bus left in the morning.
It's one of the safer bus stations for sure, but cold hard benches suck no matter where they are
Canada didn't have hard feelings and let me in that time.
After A Rafting Accident
IN A TREE!
Had a rafting accident and the three of us ended up spending 18 hours (overnight) hanging on to tree branches in the middle of an over flowing river until we were rescued the next morning by the swift water rescue team.
We took turns sleeping as the other two grabbed on so we would not fall in.
Picture us in no shoes, shorts and t-shirts as the temp dropped down below 50 degrees that night. Made the front page of the local newspaper, our 15 minutes of fame I guess.
The Psych Ward
The psych ward.
Especially when they have to come in every 10 minutes and shine a light into your eyes to make sure you're alive. Or when there are people screaming down the hall all night.
Spent two months in one in 2018. I don't know how they expect you to get better when they keep you from getting good sleep, good food, fresh air, or any social connections whatsoever.
- d24602
Alabama In July With No AC
Used to live with a guy up in Hayden Alabama. I actually loved it, it was peaceful and we had very few neighbors, I took care of the dogs.
Mid July and the a/c goes out, it was supposed to rain all week with about 80% humidity coupled with 95+ temperature outside. The house turned into a swamp, we opened all the windows and doors, turned on every fan we could find and still it was just awful.
The bedroom was so hot we couldn't use it so we slept on the couches which were so soaked by the end of the day that you could press your hand into it and your hand would come up wet.
It was so bad, we walked around stark naked in a last ditch attempt to beat the heat before we broke down and called a repair service.
With Wet Toilet Paper In My Ears
I slept in a hotel bathroom with wet toilet paper in my ears once when I was a stupid kid.
I was sharing a room with my dad and my brother, both of whom were terrible snorers (my dad at least has a CPAP now and my brother's estranged, so two problems solved). I couldn't sleep, couldn't handle the snoring... so I went in the bathroom, wadded up some toilet paper, wet it, jammed it in my ears, and tried my best to get some sleep.
Wouldn't recommend, did some long-term damage to one eardrum from a bit of toilet paper that was stuck on there for years afterward.
A "hOsPiTaL"
My mom had a heart attack in one of the highest 'criminals per capita' cities in India, Etawah.
Some relatives took her to a hospital. I arrived the same night.
They showed me to the room she was in, and I don't think I've seen a more depressing room in my life - and I grew up here in India, in not a rich family.
The walls had spits EVERYWHERE.
The bedsheet had stains older than me.
The medical equipment was outdated.
Rats and mosquitos everywhere.
The walls had cracking paint.
The floor was filthy.
The bathroom was so bad, I took one look and I went outside to piss on some bushes.
When I asked where could I sleep, they flung a thin @ss dirty AF mattress on the floor, no pillow, and told me that's my bed. There was on fluorescent lightbulb giving off a feeble, 'vibrating' light that cast most of the room in shadows. The paint on the bedrails was chipped and stained, the small cupboard beside the bed was greasy with accumulated dirt so thick you could write in it.
I was quite stressed over the medical emergency for my mother and depressed because of the room, but I sucked it up and stayed for the night since we were to transfer to Delhi and a much better hospital in the morning. You know; one where you couldn't get infections just from touching the bed rails.
I fell asleep around 4 am, tired as f*ck. I could hear the rats scratching in the bathroom and see cockroaches on the walls from what little light came through under the door once the lights were out in mother's room. It's so vivid in my memory I can recall every single silly disgusting detail of the room.
And that is the story of the worst place I ever had to spend the night in, a "hOsPiTaL".
A Chartered Boat To A Private Island
I had a boat chartered to drop me off on a small island, and was scheduled to pick us up the next day.
As it turns out, we weren't able to get off the beach onto the actual island because of a razor sharp barnacle wall surrounding the whole area, so we were trapped on a sand bar until the next morning.
So unfortunately, as night fell, the tide started rising, and only a tiny sliver of the sand bar stayed above sea level. The ground was soaking wet and sopped through the tent we were sleeping in, but to add insult to injury, turns out the sand bar was also a huge horseshoe crab mating ground, so the entire island was swarmed by horny horseshoe crabs.
So the rest of the night we basically were wet, cold, and being swarmed by horseshoe crabs f*cking against our tent.
Truly one of my worst nights
The Doll Room
80s horror GIF by absurdnoiseGiphyMy aunties house. She collects dolls. Antique, creepy @ss dolls. Her guest room doubled up as one of her doll storage rooms.
Imagine being in a room with hundreds of creepy dolls on shelves all around the room, all staring at you. Didn't help that her house is Victorian and weirdly laid out. Her living room was ground floor, and then you'd go down a steep set of stairs into the basement (which is where the guest room was..) this led out to her back yard, weird house built on a weird slope.
I couldn't move from fear, I literally lay there all night terrified to move incase one of the dolls moved. 😂 Branches hitting against the window and the rattling of her heating pipes helped make it a very horrific night.
I refused to ever sleep there again, so she introduced me to the other guest room (that I didn't know existed) and this room was first floor, zero dolls, pretty pleasant place to sleep. Wtf did she torture me with the doll room 😂😂
Triple Locked Doors
Some crummy motel in Montana.
We had started a road trip and I couple tell I was the only person of color to come through that place for years probably. The maintenance guy followed me into my room and gave me some story about checking to see if the cable was working. Other staff and guests were sizing me up.
I triple locked my door and the window, and I slept with my pocket knife under my pillow that night
Maybe Max Knew
Llano State Park in Junction, TX.
I was five months pregnant and enormous (twas a 12+ lb baby boy) ... it was Memorial Day weekend and we decided to go camping. We had the one baby in the oven, an 18 month old "Max", and a ten year old "Jake".
Why we thought this was a good idea, I'll never know. Chalk it up to rose tinted glasses. We live in the Houston area. The drive alone was arduous enough.
We get there though, and it's lovely and wind blown and wild. We set up camp and the balmy ninety degree temps take a nose dive. We had sleeping bags but this cold was relentless. Plus it was windy.
Max kept crying and crying, something he never did. He was always a chill child. But from the moment we set up camp he had become clingy and fussy and now that night had fallen he was full on wailing.
We didn't know how to handle a crying child. Hand to God, he had never cried like this before. We never had to comfort him. We had no clue what to do besides hold him close and rock him gently.
He didn't seem to be sick. No fever. He wasn't prone to ear infections and his ears didn't seem to be bothering him. He was dressed warmly, unlike the rest of us.
It was full on dark, just past nine, when a park ranger rolled into our campsite. He said he was going to have to ask us to leave if Max didn't settle down because we were disrupting quiet time.
So we gathered our things and bundled into our truck. As soon as we were in the truck Max stopped crying.
He began baby talking and leaned into me and snap! fell asleep. We waited a beat and then moved back to the tent, which we hadn't dismantled yet.
We had just begun to settle down when he woke and began to cry again, this time with renewed vigor. We went back to the truck.
I told my husband he and Jake should go ahead and sleep in the tent and I would stay in the truck with Max, the screamer. Quietly, they did just that. A couple of minutes later Max woke up screaming again. He didn't settle down until my husband and Jake got back into the truck.
We resigned ourselves to a long, uncomfortable night cramped in the truck. I needed to pee, but didn't dare leave because I thought Max would wake up crying again. Max slept through the night.
As soon as dawn broke we packed up the rest of our stuff and in the midst of doing that my husband saw fresh, large piles of animal scat behind the area where our tent had been pitched.
Now there haven't been bears, wolves or mountain lions in Texas in decades. But that was one big pile of sh*t.
Maybe Max knew something we didn't know. In any case... that was THE most uncomfortable, long night ever.
10% Off
On a drive to Florida, my dad pulled into a Super 8 in Tifton, Georgia. I had misgivings from the get-go, as the place didn't look great, but it was only one night. Only one night, you can live through anything, right?
For some reason, my father was adamant that no one but himself enter the lobby to check in. We absolutely had to stay inside the car at all costs. This was the first clue that perhaps something wasn't quite right, as this rule was not so strictly maintained elsewhere.
Upon opening our room door, a moldy smell immediately hit our nostrils. Stepping into the room gave a strange sensation on our feet, which quickly revealed itself to be caused by the stickiness of the carpet. Oddly, the carpet had also been cut up and laid back down repeatedly. A quilt carpet. One does so wonder why.
The entire room was covered with a layer of dust - some surfaces moreso than others. The nightstands, for example, only had a light, but visible coating; the beer cans crumpled and stashed behind the television, on the other hand, boasted a good quarter- to half-inch. The walls had a odd sickly yellow tone, as though they'd been plastered with successive layers of smoke, dirt, and general bodily fluids.
My emotions ran so high that I felt as though I simply was too overwhelmed to respond. My mother, God bless her, did that for us, by throwing a protest, but my father pointed out that this place was cheap, and it's not like we could stay anywhere else on such short notice if we abandoned this place. Further protests were met with a firm refusal to allow us to stay elsewhere. It was only one night, after all...
We attempted to make the best of it. I went to brush my teeth, but found myself unable to do so when the water from the sink faucet was brown. Attempting to procure water from the bathtub produced the same result. At this point, I realized I had few options outside of simply going to bed and hoping to fall asleep and wake up and get the hell away from this horrible, horrible place.
I pulled back the bed sheets, which had the texture of laundered sandpaper, and immediately noticed an odd type of circular hole I'd never seen before. "Cigarette burn," my mother said. She also warned me not to look at the underside of the bedspread, or inside the nightstand drawers, or behind or underneath the bed, with the implication that this had been done during my fruitless attempt to procure clean water in the bathroom.
I didn't sleep. We arrived in Florida the next day. My father sent off a lengthy, angry email of complaints to the Super 8's management, and in return, received a tepid apology and 10% his next stay in response. "Screw that," we responded in unison.
Or so we thought.
A week later, guess what parking lot we pulled into in Tifton, Georgia?
While my mother screeched and I fought tears, my father shouted about how they'd given him 10% off.
The Astrodome
The Astrodome during hurricane Rita. I got to take a shit in a trash can with an audience of dozens and that was one of the nicer parts of that week.
The smell in that place must have been dense.
Wow, that's just miserable sounding. Glad you survived it.
An Italian Cave
Ironically in Italy's beautiful Cinque Terre.
But we were sleeping in a cave by the beach that we didn't know was preoccupied.
Me and my brother were travelling with basically no money and decided it would be super fun to sleep on the streets instead of spending money on a hostel.
Our Mother had gifted us this trip for our birthdays and paid and planned the whole trip. Most nights she had booked us a place to stay but some nights she planned for us to find our own accommodation. She didn't know this but we had no spending money as we were broke as hell. One night we decided to spend the money we did have on booze instead of a hostel.
We searched the day for good spots to sleep and found a couple of good options. We stumbled across a cave by the touristy part of one of the beaches. There are five famous beaches that are extremely crowded during the day but at night everybody returns to the hotels and restaurants leaving the area clear. The cave we found was out of the way slightly enough and nobody goes there at night time.
Once it got late enough we headed over to the cave with different bits of cardboard we found in a dumpster. We set up two cardboard beds are drank Italian wine while watching the beautiful night sky over the sea with waves crashing. We thought we were in heaven.
The first hour was fine but soon enough the novelty and wine were wearing off. We realized the genius cardboard idea wasn't so comfortable after only an hour. Restlessness I can handle. What came next though still has me itching.
Once we had settled, stopped talking and started trying to go to sleep we started to hear little noises coming from within the cave. Squicky little noise letting us know we weren't alone.
I don't have any phobias and am really not scared of much but it's at this stage I should mention my childhood fear of rats. When I was little my father, who was a history teacher, would tell me stories including the history of the Black Plague. The tales of disease caused by rats haunted my young dreams and to this day I can't handle the sight of a rat.
So here we are trying to get to sleep when we start to hear the little noises and footsteps getting closer and closer.
We ended up making it through the night without any serious rat interactions. We were so creeped out by the rats that we resorted to setting up a rat barrier. We had plastic bags that we set up a perimeter around our sleeping area. It wouldn't keep the rats out but if they walked over the plastic bags they would make a ruffling sound notifying us if a rat was getting too close.
All night long the plastic alarms were going off making us jump up screaming and yelling trying scare off the rats. The cave itself also had little tiny rocks falling from the ceiling at random times. These little rocks also started tripping our plastic security alarm.
What we thought was going to be a night to remember ended up being a night to remember.
Not Even My Worst Tinder Hookup
BDSM themed love hotel in Tokyo after I missed the last train home. 3AM. Drunk off my ass with a tinder date.
Neither of us are good at Japanese. Call first place that pops up on Google maps as taking reservations at 3am. Go.
Oh lawd, there is a cage in this motherf*cker, it is in a basement of a very dubious looking building. The "bed" is a hard rubberized block. There are no sheets. There are no pillows. Reception gave us 3 towels to lie down on the bed.
There is the scariest shower room I've ever seen (don't worry, I did not take a shower in there), and no toilet - so if you have to pee, you have to walk down past reception to the shared toilets.
I can hear a lady screaming in another room. I am with a guy I met 4 hours ago and if he wants to murder me, i reckon nobody will come to find out till at least morning. On the other hand, dude didn't live here like I do and was probably thinking I was going to murder him or at least mug him.
In good news, I didn't get murdered. Had an alright time, made fun of badly censored porn that was on the TV, slept on a puddle of towels on a rubberized bed with a stranger as both of us hoped not to wake up with the other one absconding with our valuables, and train-of-shamed home in the morning.
Was my first Tinder hookup. It was not my last one or my worst one (dude was a cool guy, it wasn't his fault, and he took it all in stride and wasn't an a**hole. Also, he is probably on Reddit, I wonder if he will see this?).
Moral of the story: If you are going to hoe, know where to go so you aren't caught out and have to sleep in a cold ass dungeon without a single pillow. Also know when the fck the last train runs if you aren't ready to pay for a room and you don't look like a freaking idiot.
The Death Of Innocence
I went to an all girls boarding school in Africa that was known as a farmers daughter school.
During a time where farmers were being killed to take their land, there was a riot outside of the school. We listened to the mob outside the fence (maybe 100 feet from our room) chanting about the different ways they were going to r*pe and torture us if they got in.
I was 12. I have never been so terrified in my life.
They finally dispersed at about 5AM... and we were required to get up and 6 to go to class. Definitely the day any innocence I had died.
Camping In South Florida
Went camping in South Florida in the summer when I was about 10. My older brother insisted on setting up the tent, and all was great until a massive thunderstorm in the middle of the night.
That's when our tent flooded because he had picked a nice concave spot to set up. Good job, brother!
Commence three kids whining about being soaked, so we all went to go sleep in the car. After the rain stopped it got super hot in the car so we opened the windows...But it being summer in Florida, within about five minutes we were swarmed with mosquitoes and spent the rest of the night wide awake smacking them and itching (and probably bickering and complaining, if I recall correctly, as we were little shits when in close quarters).
The inside of my mom's car the next morning looked like an insane tiny massacre had happened, with bloody mosquito splats everywhere.
The spots were still there years later, and a great way to piss my mom off REAL quick was to dare to mention them, lol.
Reddit user New-Low5765 asked:
"People who work in the airline industry, what are some of the craziest things you have seen?"
Don't Drink And Tow Aircraft
"Worked as ground crew. 2nd day on the job we were issued a notice to gather."
"So when you check in every morning you’re supposed to always take a breathalyzer test to prove you can like you know, ride around the tarmack, use pushbacks on planes, etc..."
"For whatever reason this dude hadn’t taken it/got past without taking it."
"He was not sober."
"He was tasked with pulling a 370 [aircraft] into a hangar."
"He eyeballed it for whatever reason."
"So here we are watching a video of this absolute loon break the whole wing off while damaging the hangar in the process."
"Because he was drunk, insurance doesn’t kick in."
"We were promptly told that Christmas bonuses might be a bit smaller."
~ ProbablyChe
Occupational Hazard
"Someone had the tip of their finger cut off when closing the door to the plane and didn't say anything until the flight landed at the arrival gate and when the door was opened the chunk of finger fell out."
"The staff then said, 'Oh yeah, that's my finger. you can throw it away'."
"I guess he just bandaged and wrapped his own hand."
"It was about 1/4 of his finger including the nail that was cut off. The cutoff portion wasn't particularly bloody and it was really pale."
~ If_I_remember
"A plane I got on once almost left without half of its aircrew on it."
~ BeerisAwesome01
"'Let’s just go, they can meet us there'."
~ InformativePenguin
"Plot twist. That included the pilots."
~ Windyandbreezy
Excess Baggage
"Coffin with dead body inside being left off the flight due to overload without notice either to us or the family and the family realising it by seeing it while the plane was leaving and screaming to us."
~ elenivog
employee of the month ups GIFGiphyNoped Out
"Saw the pilot walk into the passenger area and say 'I'm not flying this piece of sh*t' and get off the plane."
"All the passengers followed him."
~ Jaded-Session8422
"Hell yeah, I'm following the pilot off the plane if something like this happens!"
~ lukaron
Giphy"I had something similar happen, but never got on the plane."
"It was sitting there seemingly ready but they never started boarding."
"Eventually the pilots walk off the plane and a few of us heard them say ‘This junk isn’t going anywhere’."
"Flight ended up getting cancelled a short time later."
~ potatocross
"I was threatened with [pilots walking out] multiple times a week as an aircraft dispatcher."
"Auxiliary power units (APUs) run the air conditioning (AC) in the aircraft and they were always broken down and not fixed quickly, so when the pilots show up it is hot as hell inside and there's no ground crew to connect the external AC."
"So I would get a call from the Captain telling me he is not going to fly this piece of shit because it is too hot."
"Then they'd go on a tirade about how bad the company sucks because they don't do maintenance."
"I would agree with them completely."
Giphy"Then by the end of the call they'd say they will take it but the company sucks and needs to fix the APU."
"Occasionally the captain would refuse it, but then the ground crew would hook up the AC and they would always get back inside and fly it."
"For sure there were issues that popped up where the AC had an unsolvable issue and it would result in a cancelled flight."
~ Winchery
"I’m Dallas-Fort Worth based. No APU/AC in November? Meh, whatever."
"No APU/AC in August in Texas?"
"I’m not going on that airplane. Ground just can’t keep up."
~ poser765
☣️ Bio-Hazard ☣️
"Flight diverted to my airport because a girl in hotpants got uncontrollable diarrhea from the laxatives she took before the flight to help get over her weekend binge in Vegas."
"She sh*t in her seat and down the aisle and all over the bathroom."
"Five other passengers had uncontrollable vomiting because of this and the panic on the plane from the crew and rest of passengers caused the plane to make an emergency landing."
"They ended up having to cancel the remaining leg of the flight to decontaminate the plane."
"Police were sent and interviewed her and her friends and no charges were filed. I don't know if the airline put her on any kind of no-fly list or tried to have her pay for damages."
~ If_I_remember
GiphyHighly Unsuccessful
"There were two suitcases checked in that were full of nothing but weed."
"The police arrested him in the gating area & confiscated the bags."
~ Traditional_Pair4840
"Something similar happened when I was a ramp rat back in the 1960s."
"Law enforcement was going to do the arrest at his destination."
"The weed disappeared before they got there."
~ endadaroad
Stealthiest Catch
"As a baggage handler I once had a shipment of live Alaskan crabs escape their container on the ramp."
"Flights were delayed."
"Turns out those guys scatter when they panic and try to hide under anything and everything."
~ Gregwaaah
"My significant other worked doing maintenance checks on commercial planes."
"This explains why they once found a bunch of dead crabs under the floorboards in the cargo bay. It was a mysterious mystery."
~ Highly_Referential
Avoiding A Strip Search?
"A fully naked woman just walked through the terminal and tried to walk through security like she wasn’t fully naked."
~ Commercial-Chance561
"She was just very considerately trying to make it easier for TSA."
~ TrooperJohn
"They make you take off your shoes but they don't say that's all you can take off."
~ smartguy05
Language Barrier
"I witnessed this in the security screening of a large American airport."
"And to be fair, there was a language barrier as the passenger in question seemed to be speaking mainly French, and struggling to understand the TSA agent's instructions in English."
"Female passenger (tall, attractive, and sophisticated-looking) was wearing a business suit with a pencil skirt and matching jacket, which was buttoned closed, going through security."
"The TSA agent told her she had to remove the jacket. She ignored and tried to go through anyway."
"He stopped her and told her again more loudly (that's when everyone started noticing)."
"She said no. He insisted. She refused again, and tried to walk through."
Giphy"He got angry."
"She tried to explain something but it was unclear because her English was poor."
"It went back and forth."
"They both started getting angry and frustrated. It started holding up the line and other passengers were getting agitated."
"A few people tried to intervene and explain more calmly that she needed to put her jacket through the x-ray machine."
"Finally, near tears, she blurted out 'fine' and removed her jacket, revealing that she was wearing nothing at all underneath, and walked through the screening machine topless."
~ SigmaSeal66
I'm a nervous flyer so it's not something I do often, but I still feel a little cheated that nothing this bizarre has happened while I was traveling.
Has something ever happened during your travels?
Share it in the comments.
A good friend is not always the one with whom you share laughs and fun experiences.
The friendships you want to keep include those who won't abandon you in a time of need or someone who supports you in a variety of complicated situations where not even a family member can be relied upon.
Unfortunately, many of us have experienced a time when a person's true colors revealed to us that the so-called "friend" we've always trusted wasn't one at all.
Curious to hear examples of this, Redditor Aesthetik_1 asked:
"What made you instantly realize This 'friend' is not a real friend?"
These Redditors didn't realized at the time that they were being used.
Recurring Favor
"When he only called me when he needed something. It didn't hit me until much later."
– Queasy-Location-9303
"I have one of those 'friends'. She always gushes about how we're friends but she never initiates contact unless she wants me to do something for her."
– StiffAssedBrit
The Errand Girl
"Several years back, I had a friend who introduced me to this new boy she was seeing. Maybe a year later, their relationship blew up in a fury of bs (whole other story), but by the time they split, I was equally friends with both of them. He and I were both photographers at the time, so the friendship was instantaneous."
"One day we started talking about her, neither positively nor in poor taste, just kind of in general."
"He then asked me 'when she texts to hang out, what does she usually want to do?'"
"I paused. I thought. Holy sh*t, she'd either be asking for a favour or for help with some kind of errand. I was her f'king errand girl."
"She texted me a month or two later, just a 'hey'. I never responded. She never texted again."
"I'm still friends with her ex, though. That dude is genuine as heck."
– ChamomileBrownies
Testing The Friendship
"When you decide to let them be the one to reach out. And you never hear from them again."
– plzdontgetmad
"Yup. Made plans with a friend three times, she cancelled each time. I finally told her to let me know when she was free, we haven’t hung out since."
"She was a good friend for the season, but not a lifetime."
– NoMrBond3
People were shocked to discover the moment they realized they didn't really know who their "friend" was anymore.
The Chaperon
"I had been giving rides to a girl I thought was my friend. To and from school in high school. She wasn’t really suppose to ride with other teens but due to her mothers work hours we could easily pull this off. I thought we were close."
"One day while on the way home my brakes went out. We were about 2 blocks from her gated neighborhood. I managed to roll in safely and parked at her house to call a tow truck."
"She flipped. Told me I couldn’t stay. She knew my brakes were not working as she had also been terrified when we couldn’t stop. She said she wanted to go to a movie that weekend with other friends and her mom would ground her if she saw me at the house. I offered to lie and say I only stopped there as my car malfunctioned on my way home. I had to pass her neighborhood on my way home anyways."
"She refused. Started to scream at me. She didn’t care what happened I had to go. Started to call the guard at the front gate to tell them I had broken in and was threatening her."
"I left her and that friendship that moment. I managed to roll my car slowly to a mechanic not too far away but never forgot the shi* feeling of knowing I could have been seriously hurt and she wouldn’t have cared. She wanted to see a movie. She had the nerve to sheepishly call and ask me a couple days later if I could give her a ride to school. Told her I was too busy and no longer had time… after all I wanted to help her obey her mom's rules. She rode the bus til she graduated."
– Duffarum
Unwilling Companion
"I had this friend in school. Each year there was a funfair in our city, all students received vouchers for a drink and something to eat. This friend complained the whole day that she had no one to accompany her to the funfair. So, stupid me offered to go with her."
"Once we arrived we met another friend of hers. And another, and another... until we were a group of 5 or 6 people. I didn't know anyone and was basically just walking behind them. This friend took me aside and said, 'My friends think you are annoying, and we would like you to leave.'"
"It was a pleasure to see that she failed her exams a year later."
– Auldale
There's the spirit of competition, but when it's taken seriously, we're no longer game for these friendships.
I Can Do It Better
"Constantly 'one ups' me. A real friend is happy for you."
– Complex-Half8338
"That one time I got a fake bag but she doesn’t know and then 2 weeks later messaged me that she also bought a luxury bag… Then when I got a bf, she also went to get a bf within 3 months which is TOTALLY fine but she constantly messages me for us to go on a double date. Anyways, sadly they didn’t last long :( I mentioned that I wanted to go to Cuba, she went ahead and bought herself a ticket to Cuba but I didn’t end up going lol"
– Hot-Coffee-8465
Never Steal The Spotlight
"When they loved the idea of me shining, but behind their shadow, I could never do or achieve anything above them, and when I did, they would get jealous."
– Jasssin23
"Yes! I recently ghosted a friend because of this kind of behavior. She was trying to compete about EVERYTHING. Like she bragged about how her mom’s car accident was more traumatic than my elderly MIL’s - which is not even an appropriate thing to compare. She would also try to 'outshine' celebrations of my milestones and was mean to several of my friends for no apparent reason. She was a loose cannon at best."
– thefifthtrilogy
All About Me
"ALL she talks about it herself and her problems. Granted she has a a lot but never asks about me or my life until she realizes she just bypassed my attempt to want to talk about something in my life bothering me and continued to talk about herself."
– PokemomOnTheGo
People can just be so rude.
"When I got really sick. Very few came to help."
– Tofflus1
"Same here. I got cancer and everyone I knew was over the top supportive for the first six months and then all but three of my friends just vanished. I saw one of them at a Halloween party while I was going through chemo and she told me that my bald head made people uncomfortable. I was dressed as Captain Picard, it was awesome and she ruined it."
– CatGoNoTail
Not Missing High School
"At lunch, she was sitting with her boyfriend, I was sitting with our friend circle. She came up to me, guilted me into sitting with her and her boyfriend, and then proceeded to ignore me for the rest of lunch."
"She didn't care about me, she just didn't want me talking to the friend circle that she had abandoned for her boyfriend. When I pointed this out to her, she called me a jealous b*tch."
"Ah, high school. How I don't miss thee."
– Symnestra
These examples actually served as a good reminder for me to take a moment and assess my friendships.
Not so much about how I've been treated but more about checking myself to see if I'm respecting the people I call my friends.
We've all been guilty of casually mentioning future plans to get together. I embarrassingly wait for people to initiate something, which is terrible.
Show up for your friends. Make them feel important like the individuals they are.