My friend says he likes to prioritize one friend at a time

Me (21f) and my friend (20m) have been friends for a little over a year. We met online through a game and really hit it off, becoming best friends over night.

A couple months pass, me and him are messaging daily, talking about our lives and we grow super close.

He says he likes me, and i liked him too, so we dated for a brief moment in time (2 months). How we broke it off was he told me that he “only ever thought of me as a friend and just realized it.” This made me sad so I didnt talk to him for a couple days with the reason that I needed to think things through. Once I had, I came back and we agreed to be friends.

We didn’t have any issues until, 3 month later, i found out he had dated his other online friend (19f) not 24 hrs after breaking it off with me and broke up after a month of dating her.

This girl is extremely toxic. I had played with her and my firned together on multiple occasions and I always got the feeling that she didnt like me. Id always have a bad feeling when i talked with her. She always commented on how jealous she was of me and how my friend would pay so much attention to me. She messages me one night telling me the truth of how she and my friend had started dating and ended thing, so i confronted him about it. Since it was in the past, i just got mad for like a day, and continued on with my life. She later that month messages me saying she never really liked me and that she no longer wants to talk to me so i just said ok 🤷🏼‍♀️ and left it be.

This is where things started upsetting me. I noticed my friend started to talk to me less and less and less. I talked to him about this, and he said “I like to focus on one friend at a time. Its how I balance friends.” This weirds me out and I tell him thats not how friendships work. You dont need to balance them, you just need to be there for them. Then later on, his friend messages me out of the blue, pulling a Mean Girls style prank on me that annoyed the heck out of me, so i tell him what i think of her and he says “why are you always egging her on?” I was so pissed when he said that. I have been dealing with this girls crap for months, letting her get away with it, and one time I do soemthing about it, he says I’m egging her on. That its my fault. (Every time i bring up an issue he makes me feel belittled and at fault in a “caring” type of way).

Now he rarely talks to me and cancels on me, saying hes going to play with her instead. Just yesterday we had plans to play a game together and he tells me after 3 hours of me waiting for him that he was playing with her instead. I feel like I’ve been put on the back-burner as the second option. That backup for when he has nothing else to do. This really hurts me, and ive talked to him about it. He says he’ll fix it, and just talks to me for a day and then goes back to never replying.

I’ve talked to him about this so many times its making me sound whiney. I’m so tired. I want to break things off with him, but I dont want to ghost him. How do I tell him, without me sounding like a whiny girl who wants his attention? I want to make him know that this is why I stopped being his friend. I want to end things maturely and cleanly, so he knows exactly what he’s done to hurt me.

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**TL;DR;** : my friend (20m) has put me on the back burner after months of treating me like a best friend with the reason that he “wants to focus on one friend at a time.”

How do I tell him maturely, that I no longer want to be friends?