If a friend went cold on you and you found out why…

[Okaaaay]

… what was the reason? Relatively light hearted really - feeling very sore about this happening to me and it would be nice to feel that I’m not alone. Plus it might prompt me to understand what I did / said that was so wrong.

I had a good friend suddenly cut ties - I have no idea why. It was a mum friend who I’d know 3 years - we’d bonded and would text every few days and see each other once a month or so. Nothing majorly intense but she was super important to me in a world where neither of us have much of a support network. Then one day, at a usual meet up at a DC club, she just didn’t want to talk and avoided me. She’s polite now but set a clear distant boundary (which I have respected). I’ve analysed every text, what I’d said or done and can’t work out what it was. But it was definitely something. I’m not a terribly difficult or offensive person but must have said or done something she found really unpalatable. I’ll get over it but feel gutted - it’s hard making friends and this one made my life happier.

Asserting basic biological reality is not bigotry, it's common sense!

I also have had health issues in the last year which I talked to her about

im chronically ill and people have faded in the background/stopped connected just because of that.
i rarely talk about my health to anyone now. It seems to be a sure way to frighten people away. :(:(

Sounds like she has some bad kind of a personality disorder. These people just seem not to be able to see and understant that their behaviour is off. Even if you tell them.

I had a friend who I had known for around 15 years who ghosted me after I gently (I think but of course I could be wrong) spoke with her about a couple of things that she was doing that did not sit well with me morally. Anyway, to cut a long story short, blocking my number and ignoring me was how she dealt with anyone including her own sister who challenged her.

This happened to me about 10 years ago. A good friend I met through baby groups when our first DCs were babies, we became close and our daughters were best friends. They moved out of our area but we maintained good contact and visited them often, and they us. We both had second children within a few months of each other. A while after they moved (maybe 2 years) she stopped responding to my messages. I sent birthday presents and cards from my daughter to her daughter but never heard anything. Eventually after about a year of being ignored (messages being read, but not replied to etc), I sent her a message to ask what the problem was, why she'd cut contact, and that I was sad for our daughters. She replied to say she couldn't explain it, and she hadn't meant to hurt us. I left it at that, suffice to say that was the end for me and we've not spoken or been in touch since. I know it wasn't anything I did. She had quite bad depression and was on medication for it, but periodically came off it for a while, so I have told myself it was to do with that rather than anything I did. It hurt for a while but my daughter is now 18 and barely remembers how close they were.

@4YellowDaffodils I actually could have written your post, it's almost spooky. I was also new to our village when we became friends, I was really grateful for her friendship as I didn't know anyone. She also physically manoeuvred someone away from me at an event when she was in the midst of trying to extricate me from the group. I actually thought I must have imagined it. The bizarre thing is that I still see her very occasionally and she will act like we are friends. I am polite and civil and she is most definitely not my friend, nor will she ever be again. I have often wondered what goes on in her head that she doesn't realise that she has been through so many friends.

Another reason I sometimes distance myself from a friendship is when someone has very limited social skills and relies heavily on me to look after them in group situations.

I often really like these people, but I cannot be responsible for them in the way they expect me to be, and I grow tired of being stared at with pleading eyes from across the room or sulked at if I’m not always by their side smoothing their way into conversations and introducing them to people.

It is sad but often people who struggle with relationships can’t recognise that they are expecting others (friends, colleagues, school mums they hardly know) to rescue them, or to take care of them selflessly like an unconditionally loving parent. And that is not the same thing as friendship. That is care work.

I did this to someone because she was just so negative about everything all the time and never did anything to improve it. Realised later she just never told me any of the good stuff on her life, I was basically her misery sponge. If you want people to be there for the bad stuff you need to share the happy stuff too.

Not what people of my generation were led to believe in in the 70s ,you were led to believe you owed them .

Oh I've one of those too - pain in the neck. Total main character syndrome, feels like walking on eggshells in case I say the wrong thing and actually complained about someone telling her she's very sensitive. She's always in a huff with one or other friend who she doesn't feel has been supportive enough (regardless of what might be going on with them). Feels uniquely hard done by for some reason and always expects favours. Currently I'm out of favour I think for some imagined slight - suits me fine tbh

Family relationships are not the most important for everyone; surely you know that?

I was never made to believe that. Same generation. Luckily, my family were/are lovely.

Well, the thinking has changed. You don't owe anyone who treats you like dirt, except possibly a child. It's actually worse when a relative does it because they're pissing on that very expectation. Some people can't depend on the people they're related to, but have others who truly have their back. Those are the ones you nurture.

I've never found out and it eats at me today so I feel your pain!

It’s liberating when you get to the point of being able to shrug it off isn’t it!

Happened to me last year, started taking weeks to reply then ignored me at a party. I just never messaged again, I don't deserve to be treated like that. I've never asked why and don't plan to because I know it's nothing I've done.

I also had to stop chatting to a newish friend on an internet forum when I found her messages too much.
First time round she told me "no yoga, you are ill" as if it was her place to allow me it or not /had an online gentle yoga class, not a power yoga class one hour away ... /
Second time aroung she kept going on about how her boss is an idiot because he does not want to pay her for the day she had spend going to a medical appointment in a different city. /Not in the UK and she is not legally entitled for that/. She only worked a 4day week so could have easily put the time in another day but she didnt want to. She kept saying she is entlitled to being paid even after being told and shown that she is not. The cheek made me feel sick so cut her off.

It’s not selfishness. No one wants to have a mental health problem, and clinical depression can be crippling - even when treated. I don’t think your feelings were either irrelevant or worthless because you were clearly at the receiving end of shitty treatment. But if your friend hurt you while struggling with a mental health issue, perhaps when she was recovering, her way of dealing with the whole thing was to ignore it, hoping you would understand that whatever she did came from a place of distress and wouldn’t otherwise have happened.

For it to be so sudden, you or yur family have done or said something that's pushed her over the line. Otherwise she would be phasing you out.

On the talking thing, it helps to remember:

• you have 2 ears and one mouth, use them in that ratio.
• pretend people are the most interesting person you've ever met and pretend youre interviewing them.
• Dont find common ground by drawing in your experience
• people love talking about themselves so they love a good listener. People will be drawn to you if you ask and listen and follow up.
• tell yourself that you already know everything about yourself and so it's more interesting to hear about someone else.
• pretend in your head that you are mysterious!

Yep, my husband got ill and we found out who the genuine friends were. People still ask me how some friends dropped him for getting ill and I don’t know how to answer!

Then I was widowed and more people stepped up/stepped away, you never know until you know with people!

It is - I miss her - or at least the version of her that was fun and interesting company and that I could have a laugh with. But the constant evaluation of all her friends and who is or isn't being 'so good' to her at any given moment is really tiresome and I'm bored of being cast in the role of cheerleader and sympathiser and listener to her problems and all the parties she's going to and not inviting me to!

Thank you! The thing was, my friend was the most perceptive, insightful, thoughtful, funny, wise, clear sighted person I know- a wonderful listener and a deeply honest observer of life and of human nature. She knew me better than anyone else has ever known me, so this abandonment shook my sense of myself to the core because I trust her judgement- so there must be something wrong with me.

She has a tendency to get rid of people, jobs, homes, even nationalities- to 'clean up' after going through a difficult or transformative time. I had outlasted many such episodes, but Covid and my marriage problems were too much and I got discarded.

She is tolerant of people's different views and beliefs, but at a certain point she decided I was too judgemental. After many months, I did have trouble with her extreme views of Covid and eventually told her so too many times; she was too obsessed with it to be able to put it aside and talk of other things.

I had a friend like this. He told me I was a "shit friend" for not wanting to talk all the time.

I unfriended / ghosted someone recently. She had this habit of commenting on every post of mine on FB. Some of her comments included minimising the problems I had and implying I had shit parents (basically, born with an issue that was discovered recently. She'd never heard of it but asked how my parents missed it - there's no obvious symptoms and many of the symptoms are conditions without a serious underlying syndrome)

I did "ghost" someone who id known for 6 months but only talked once. He demanded to know why I'd unfriended him but never made an effort to talk.

But if you do all this and you’re still just pretending to be interested, and having to force yourself to listen, people can feel this. And you’re still not really giving quite enough of a shit about someone to count as their friend. I think this is what people don’t get: you don’t make lasting genuine relationships by pretending in your mind you’re a talk show host whose job it is to draw someone out. You have to actually care about the other person.

Friendship isn’t some sort of transaction where if you ask the right number of questions and listen for enough minutes you unlock social access to someone on your own terms.

OK. Trying to be helpful with facilitating change. Whay specific actions should OP take, in practical terms, to improve?