I don’t know why someone would do this in a friendship that both parties genuinely valued equally, and thought was super close and working well. 🤷♀️ Presumably though it’s not working well for everyone if one person withdraws.
In my experience, when I’ve withdrawn from a friendship, it’s been because it was not working well for me, and the other party was very clear that they were too sensitive to rejection to be able to hear this and respond in a mature way.
I’ve had a couple of friends who I liked perfectly well and thought were lovely people, smart and funny and good company and all the rest - but they were very intense, and I could only really handle them in small doses. They were people who talked a lot and didn’t listen very well. They wanted to depend on me emotionally in a way I didn’t have bandwidth for, and it began to feel suffocating. And if I wasn’t in touch as much as they’d like I’d get little guilt tripping messages saying ‘I miss my buddy ☹️’.
In both cases these were people who struggled with relationships generally, and habitually felt that people weren’t giving them enough attention. They were single without DC and had more time and social energy than I did, at a time when I was dealing with a full-on job and complex intergenerational caring responsibilities, and pretty burnt out in general. But they couldn’t seem to take this into consideration in terms of their expectations form the friendship.
What I was able to offer them wasn’t enough, and they let me know that in not being as available as they wanted me to be, I was causing them tremendous hurt and feelings of rejection and abandonment, etc.
But I had never signed up for that kind of responsibility. We were friends - I wasn’t prepared to be a surrogate parent and major attachment figure.
They were communicating pretty clearly that it would devastate them emotionally if I asked for more space, given that I already wasn’t seeing them enough and that was so hurtful. And they didn’t know how to give space in a relationship anyway, as they had demonstrated in countless friendships and relationships before where they’d driven people away by being too clingy.
I had been trying gently to manage expectations in these friendships, but they just kept pushing and pushing. And finally it got to the point where I just couldn’t do it anymore - giving all I could and getting little back but guilt tripping. I felt totally trapped.
These people probably would have counted me among their closest friends. But I did not count them among mine - they hardly knew anything about me, despite all the time we spent together, because it was always all about them and their needs, and there was no way to renegotiate the terms of the friendship without a massive emotional fallout.
I was raised in a family with very guilt-trippy, demanding, emotionally volatile people who weaponised their fragility - so it’s possible I assume people are less able to be reasonable than they really are.
But I also do tend to be a magnet for the very intense, possessive, guilt-trippy crowd, and these days I put a lot of effort into avoiding that dynamic.