Clingy Online Friend

Hello, Reddit.

I \[F\] have this acquaintance \[F\] who just started talking to me about a month or so ago. I had seen them before around on Discord a few years ago but I had never really spoken to them. They approached me out of the blue in my Discord DMs to vent about their ex \[F\] who had just broken up with them and was being rather vocal about the breakup.

I didn’t think much of this and offered them comfort, and then we spoke about things we were interested in and there was maybe only one thing I felt we might have both liked but they didn’t like it the same way I did or necessarily share my opinions on it.

After all this, they started consistently talking to me every single day, there were some casual conversations but a good chunk of it was talking about feelings and venting. I didn’t have anything against this at the time because I knew this person had just gone through a messy breakup. They were generally nice and complimented me sometimes but kind of berated themselves often and seem to have a low self-esteem.

I started feeling kind of pressured into comforting this person all the time, they complained about not getting any comfort and how everyone leaves them. I was also starting to get tired of conversations with this person, they generally spoke more about serious things and expected me to do things for them and to be thoughtful in my responses. On top of that, I’ve been busy with my own things and started neglecting them to try to be there for this person.

But this person tries to talk to me every single minute of every single day. They get upset if I get up from a conversation only for an hour or two to go to the bathroom or something and then they ask me if I hate them.

Of course, I tried setting a boundary and pointing this out. I’ve explained that I can’t handle talking to a person so often and like being alone when I work on my hobbies. They wound up acknowledging that they do this but also using their trauma to excuse it, claiming that they were working on it. But absolutely nothing has changed, I haven’t been given any space, and when they said they would they did it in a guilt-trippy way and would come back two minutes later.

I’m getting really tired, I don’t want to snap at this person and nothing that I’m saying is doing anything. They’ve gone through bad things and I don’t blame them for that, but I can’t handle this person feeling like they’re dependent on me and possibly even liking me a bit because I was nice with them. It hasn’t even been that long since I’ve started speaking with this person, they’re essentially a stranger still.

We don’t even have that many common interests so it’s not like there’s a lot of conversations I’m even having fun with, most of it is trauma dumping and saying they don’t receive care and then expecting it out of me. They send me messages nonstop and I’m exhausted, I didn’t want to be rude and ignore them but this is too much and I’m neglecting myself.

I don’t know what to do, I haven’t completely ghosted this person yet but I’ve muted them and blocked them on socials. My sister says I should just block them completely because it sounds like emotional manipulation and gaslighting even if it isn’t intentional and they went through traumatic situations without help. I feel guilty if I outright block and ghost this person, but there’s no possible conversation that can happen to clear things up seeing as that already hasn’t worked out.

If anyone could please give some suggestions it’d be much appreciated.