I have been friends with Leslie(name changed) for over 7 years and met her during a very rough patch of my life. Ending an emotionally abusive marriage which ended in financially disaster. Over the last 4 years I’ve slowly picked up the pieces of my life and started over. Started therapy, made new friends, paid off debt, started a new career and met a healthy loving partner.
We used to be best friends and she had always struggled with relationships but so did I. We were there for each other after every breakup and bad relationships. Finally after realizing how I was picking terrible partners and lot of therapy I met my current partner. This has been my first healthy relationship and I was for the first time in a very long time excited about my future.
During this time our friendship changed a lot. She stopped putting in the same effort in our friendship and she even said some really hurtful things to me after our first real fight. I was deeply hurt but I continued to put in effort as I still cared about her. She still struggled with relationships but she was soaring in her career and even finished an impressive educational program. I was proud of her and thought we were both growing in different ways.
I stopped talking about my relationship as much as she would always say negative things. At some point I stopped sharing as much about my life since she didn’t seem very enthusiastic about it or would get angry at me about not telling her everything.
We recently went to dinner together to catch up and she made a comment about sharing my boyfriend and he can date both of us. It made me very uncomfortable. She also made comments about how he is only with me because there is something emotionally wrong with him(he has a learning disability). I have stopped talking to her and have not answered any calls or texts. My other friends are saying I’m wrong to throw away such a long friendship and I’m overreacting at her humor(she is known for making dark jokes). I feel she is not being a friend to me anymore when paired with her lack of effort in the friendship. How do I proceed from here?
47 comments
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Your friends can eat it. You’re an adult. You choose your friends.
I’d dump the friendship. Sounds like she’s jealous and was only “there” for you when you were on a downer and it made her feel better. Now you’re happy she can’t handle it.
You don’t need friends like this. Ignore your other friends. Let them take her on if they think she’s so marvellous.
You’re not wrong. This woman isn’t your friend anymore. Unless there’s genuinely something wrong with your bf that justifies her negative comments, she simply can’t be happy for you & actively wants to ruin your happiness.
She’s not your friend. Punt kick her out of your life. Ghost the bitch.
What a crappy person. Letting this “friend” go is a wise choice. People often prioritize time as a factor over other more healthy metrics.
I just want to congratulate you. I’m genuinely glad that you are healing and happy.
So one minute she wants to share your bf and the next she’s trashing him. She’s jealous and a bitch. Drop her. Your other friends suck if they think you should stay friends with someone like that. They can be her friend.
OP, please do yourself a favor and block her, she’s just awful
End the friendship, that woman is not a true friend.
You leave her. There are rules. Unspoken maybe but rules. You don’t joke like that about someone else’s partner. Because more than likely. There is always some truth in there. She only liked you when she could look better than you. She isn’t a friend.
Cut her out of your life, she is jealous and it sounds like she will take any opportunity that comes up to try to ruin your relationship with your partner.
Trust your intuition.
In my friends group, we’ve made jokes about me being shared between partners (I’m the only single one right now) and it is all in good fun and everyone laughs. What your friend is saying is not that. Your friend is just being a rude asshole. If you want to de-friend them over this, then I see this as being a valid reason for doing so. I wouldn’t even say this is over a joke, this is over some rude comments.
I’m infertile. One of my male friends said he would help my gf at the time get pregnant. For 4 hours, he said he would help and kept getting into detail about how he wasn’t going to fall in love with her or how it wouldn’t mean anything to either of them. I get it. Stop being friends with her if you aren’t comfortable with her anymore.
I had a friend like that once. She also always made fun of my boyfriend. I have then also always felt super uncomfortable and insecure. I wish I had ended the “friendship” earlier. Such people are simply poison.
Explain to me how it’s funny to say that your bf has emotional problems?
Just sounds like this was the final straw. It’s not just the comment, it’s everything leading up to it. She doesn’t support you, she envies you.
The thing I tell my kids.
It’s okay to grow up. You won’t stay friends with people who don’t grow with you. Friends will come and go. Surround yourself with people you want to be around. Be it a friend, family. Whatever. If they’re toxic people, they bring you down to their level.
Be around people who support and love you. This person does neither.
Her comment about him only being with you because of a learning disability is way out of line. She deserves nothing, no notice, nothing just a blank wall.
Proceed by continuing to not talk to her. She isn’t a real friend, why would she say negative things about your relationship if she was your friend? She is jealous!
Let it go and move on, there are better people out there to be friends with!
She’s unhappy and she preferred it when you were too. Dump her this “friendship” doesn’t serve your best interests. 🚩🚩🚩
I agreed with you. Just let her fall away. She isn’t for all seasons. Some friends can’t stand it when you have something they want. xo
Who needs enemies with friends like that?
This woman was never your friend.
She used you as a yardstick for her shitty life.
Now that you two don’t measure up, she is looking for a way to drag you back down to her level.
Block her everywhere. Expect her to stir up some drama or to create hardships for you when she realizes what you have done, cause this lady sounds toxic as hell.
So your friend is not only jealous, but trying to sabotage your life so she doesn’t feel alone in her misery. She wants you to regress, be the old you. She’s panicking that you changed too much, are in a better place, have a loving healthy relationship that she can’t get.
She needs therapy, not another relationship.
And her comments are grounds enough to cut her off. Why? She secretly wants you BF! Good enough reason to walk away from this friendship tbh.
It sounds like you need a new friend group. Honestly, she sounds kind of like she’s also emotionally abusive. You said that now you’re in a healthy relationship, maybe you should find friends that are also healthy for you.
Nope. Her “humor” doesn’t jive with yours. You don’t seem to have a friendship with much substance tbh-I’d call it a day on that friendship.
Long =/= good
With friends like these you don’t need enemies. In swahili we have a saying “kikulacho ki nguoni mwako” whatever hurts you is from the people closest to you because they know best what hurts you
Edit:, drop the deadweight. People close to you are your support system until they aren’t. Do you want to go through life feeling miserable because of the people who are meant to be close to you
I wouldn’t end a 7-year friendship over one conversation that included a possibly bad joke about sharing my partner. We all say some crazy things now and then.
But I would let a long-term friendship die if the other person was regularly cruel to me, was disinterested in my feelings, and capped things off with a quip about my partner needing a learning disability in order to desire me.
Don’t end the relationship over the “sharing” comment. End it because of all the other shitty things she’s done.
People sometimes outgrow a friend from a darker era…
I had a friend I knew for 20 years let him go. I go gives a fuck about time knowing someone toss them to the trash.
Continue to ignore her calls and texts. You heard her loud and clear. Don’t blow it off. You’ve moved forward and she chooses to remain in toxicity. You’ve grown apart and the friendship is over. Do not keep toxic people in your life.
Nah she’s being weird. That’s shitty stuff to say to a friend. She needs to go to therapy
Yup, kind of in the same boat as you. My friend just has made multiple comments about fucking my bf. I confronted her about it, and now she’s fixated on it. She always turns the conversation back to my bf, how is he doing, what is new, will I be seeing him that day, she saw him driving somewhere, etc. It’s just too much attention and she’s a little too adamant that she’d never do that. I have dropped the conversation all together and don’t talk about my bf to get at all. She is the one that brings it up now and it just makes me super uncomfortable. I wish I’d never given her his number or introduced them.
Well your friends can befriend her then. You don’t have to tolerate abusive or mean behavior in your friendships.
I was all ready to defend her until I read the jokes.
1 of 2 things is happening here.
1) She is jealous and being very spiteful.
2) She is joking using her “dark humor”
Either option is a good reason to end a friendship. Option 1 is obvious, but option 2 is also because of compatibility issues. Just like when a couple doesn’t vibe after a while and splits up, friendships can have the same thing happen.
Your friend is not a real friend. She is jealous of your relationship, especially since it is a healthy one. She rather you continue in shitty relationships like her so she isn’t alone making poor decisions. Basically “misery loves company”.
You have outgrown the friendship and should focus more on what brings you joy. She will eventually try to sabotage your relationship by hitting on him or trying to sleep with him, or just saying some awful things about you to him in hopes of turning him off of you.
This is a classic case of “single women keeping women single”. Keep it moving, that is no real friend.
Uh nope. Dump her.
If you value your friendship with her still, I would straight up tell her how you’re feeling. Tell her that her comments about your bf are inappropriate and made you uncomfortable. If it’s an important friendship that has mutual respect, she may apologize and change her ways. Next option is to no longer be friends with this person. Obviously it’s all up to you and how important the friendship is to you!
Sometimes we outgrow “friends”
You have grown in life, she has not.
Have a conversation. Be very clear about your concerns and boundaries that were crossed. Listen very closely to her responses.
Any deflecting or discounting your concerns will be very bad signs
What you had in the past, friendship wise, is gone. It happens all the time. We work on becoming better versions of ourselves and the gap between who we were and who we have become it’s too much for some friendships to survive
I give this 0% chance of working out
…she said he was only with you because he has a learning disability? What an evil, cruel, bitter and jealous person. And that’s the nicest way to put it. I would drop her. She sounds like she doesn’t put anything good into your life, just negativity.
She is bitter and jealous of you having a relationship when she does not, so she’s projecting her negativity onto you and hoping to spread her misery. It sounds like she’s always seen you as a competitor, comparing your life to hers and relies on making herself feel better about herself by either “doing better” than you, or by trying to make you unhappy/uncomfortable whenever she thinks you’re “doing better” than her.
She is absolutely NOT a friend. How do you proceed? Block her completely. Your other friends are insane to keep encouraging you to be in contact with her and I question whether they’re worth much of your time & effort either.
As for friends…. You don’t owe people friendship if they’re no longer good ingredients in your life, no matter how long that friendship has existed or how good it was at one point in time.
Friendship is only valuable when it is mutually beneficial, when you feel better for the time you spend with your friend, when you support each other in ways that make you both feel good. Otherwise you’re just being used by someone who knows how to manipulate your good nature to keep you feeling obligated or guilty enough to keep giving them what they want no matter how much it’s a negative to you.
Also, she doesn’t have a “dark sense of humor”, she’s just mean and inappropriate. The “it’s just a joke” is the excuse assholes use to just be assholes out loud. I have a dark sense of humor, I find movies like Triangle of Sadness hilarious. But I’m not an asshole, so I don’t joke at my friends in ways that are mean or make them uncomfortable. If I make a joke that upsets someone, I say “I’m sorry, I didn’t intend to upset you, I will do my best not to do it again” and maybe ask more questions to learn more about what I can do to not come over in ways I don’t want to.
Cut her off. Friends don’t joke about sharing partners and if it’s all one-sided (you doing the work), she is not your friend.
Let me tell you a situation I fell into: I went to a mutual friend of my STBXH and mine – I tell her about the divorce he asked me for NYD, she retorts with she’s known about it since September 2022.
Um.
Came home, blocked her on everything and took her number out of my phone.
A FRIEND would have given me a head’s up. Period.
Eww no she is not a real friend. Set your boundaries and stick to them.
And congratulations on finding a good partner!!
You don’t owe anyone a friendship. If you don’t want to be friends anymore over this, then that’s fine. But don’t just ghost her. Have a conversation first so she knows what happened and can maybe learn from it towards the future. Help her become a better person 🙂
I would be questioning the motives of your other friends too. Real friends respect each others boundaries, they don’t gaslight you when someone has wronged you and blame you for taking it the wrong way. Without respect and trust there is no foundation for a healthy relationship.
it feels like thay joke wasn’t an issue, it’s all the other stuff! like let’s share a boyfriend cus yours is so great and I can’t find one har har har! no big deal lol but the rest of the stuff seems to be the bigger issue. That comment/joke probably would’ve just slid boy if you already didn’t carry this negativity from all the fights, comments, nonsense from her.
Looks like this friendship has run its course.