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.

I'm.contemplating taking a step back from a friend of almost 20 years. We met at.ante-natal classes & continued to a toddler group where we met a wider group of mums. T of us have been great friends for all of these years- WhatsApp group, meeting 4-6 times a year. I really respect these friends & we're always there for each other.

BUT I'm seriously thinking of cooling off on some meet ups. It'll upset me not seeing the others, but since peri-meno I have far less tolerance for crap behaviour. She talks incessantly about herself / her ex-husband/ her kids / her sister. Yes, she's been through the mill with a bad break-up, but we've all had tough times over the years.

She never asks about my youngest who has serious health issues & significantly ASN. All we hear about is her & her next, lavish holiday/ the last one, with zero cognisance of how upset I am about never being able to go on such trips due to our son. It's ALL about her. And whether that's due to low esteem/ up-brimging, I simply don't care. I find her so superficial.

I think that you shouldn't assume it's something wrong with you. If you did something terrible, you'd know. So this is your friend's problem, not yours.

That's how I feel about my friend/ex-friend. It's a her problem, whatever it is. It still hurts to be ghosted but I try hard not to let it affect my confidence.

Maybe you and she were just not meant to last. Sometimes friendships have their seasons. Maybe something changed for her and she no longer has space for this friendship. I wouldn't assume you've done anything wrong or been a bad friend.

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@taylorswift1989 friends have their seasons - love this. Thank you.

@Puffalicious that sounds reasonable - exhausting to be friends with someone like that. I hope your DC (and you) have the right support in place - that’s really hard.

I did, and I really miss her. But the toxicity and blame game was too much.
I could never speak to her about anything without her taking it as a personal attack.
It all ground me down in the end.

I cut ties with two friends. They were arguing for months anbout something I wasn’t at all involved in and I was piggy in the middle. It really upset me and both wanted me to chose a side.

It’s sad but I’m dreadful with conflict and it affected my mental health. I was going through too much stuff to deal with that too.

I cut one tiens out because she was diabetic and coeliac and didn't follow the required diet. It used to stress me so much going out and her almost falling asleep as her diabetes so unmanaged. I told her she would die and I can't watch her do that. Then cut her out after it happened a few more times. Mutual friends told me she didn't understand why I cut her out and was devastated. She died a few months after that and I do feel bad but it was horrible to watch that play out.

I e been cut out loads of times and never understood why. As an adult I've been diagnosed autistic and it makes a lot of sense why my friends don't stick around.

One friend I do still see occasionally but have massively stepped back from is just a bit too much. She's clearly some type of neurodiverse but she massively over shares about her ex/child's father and is just so out of touch with how the world works seeing her is hard work. I see her because I know she's lonely and desperate but I need that space she's just too much amd anything I tell her about myself even mundane stuff is spread to everyone else I feel like I have to be careful what I say around her it's not nice.

I think my friend would say she dropped me for talking about myself and not being positive. But she was a strange friend in that she just asked questions and wouldn’t give much away about herself, she wanted to get the measure of people and know things about them. I was a bit unhappy for a while, during covid and some family problems. But things started looking up and that’s when she dropped me.
In hindsight I should never have given her opinion much weight. She’d say that I spoke about myself too much and was negative but there was more to it than that and she had her own issues with jealousy that I’m not sure she would even admit to herself.
In short it’s a shame your friendships ended and it’s upsetting but it’s only one persons opinion of you and they bring their own baggage/issues to their opinion

She put a man before her children, married him despite knowing that he was being investigated for a sex crime and tried to drag my family into it by demanding character references etc. Her kids lives are ruined and, to this day, she has me down as disloyal.

I cut ties because she was a total Debbie Downer and extremely needy. She was very judgemental and quite direct and rude with it and demanded levels of loyalty and attention I just didn't have. The only topic of conversation was her and everything was a drama despite breathtaking level of privilege.

Another friend cut ties with me because she decided I was a horrible bigot because I have gender critical views.

She stopped talking to me because she can't have children. We were both trying when I had my first DC. She started drifting when I had my second DC. Never heard from her again when I had my third. Gone from social media, won't answer texts or anything.

I made friends with a new neighbour who has a child the same age as mine. She brought her child to my house to play, I took my child to hers, she invited me to register my child for football alongside hers, she invited me to join her for a day out with the kids. I thought I had made a friend.

Then suddenly she just started avoiding me. Whenever I texted to ask if the kids could play and would she like to have coffee, she was busy. At the football she would raise her hand and nod from a distance when she saw me but she wouldn’t approach. I approached her and asked if the kids could play during the holidays, and she was falling over herself to say “well I don’t know, I mean we’re busy, we’re busy aren’t we DH, we have to go to that thing, we’ll let you know if we’re free”. Really obvious that she didn’t want to.

So I left her alone. No idea why she was like that. But it happened immediately after DC got upset at football and I disclosed that he’s on the waiting list to be assessed for autism, and she said do you think he has it, and I said yes because I’m autistic myself. So I assume it was disability discrimination. I don’t think she had realised I’m autistic and maybe she didn’t want a disabled friend, or didn’t want her DC to have a disabled friend?

My best friend dumped me hard when I decided to put my child with SEN and learning difficulties into an independent school that has excellent SEN provision.

She does not 'agree' with private schooling. It is immoral and she did not think I was 'that sort of person'.

The fact she played fast and loose with catchments and renting for a bit to ensure her kid got into an excellent school is, apparently, more moral.

I was hurt for a long while - years- but actually now feel such contempt at her hypocrisy that I consider myself better off without her friendship. We are loosely in the same circle of friends (A venn diagram really of a couple of friendship groups overlapping) and she is also now playing the game around what she designates as her main home (currently the BTL she owned) as she wants to sell it without incurring CGT.

So yes I would say we have a very different understanding of what honesty is.

Edited to add ... I have no issue with people minimising tax in ways which are perfectly legal. What she is doing isn't that.

And my best friend moved house in the middle of the night and never contacted me again.

To be fair, we were 18 and I was away at uni, and when I came back at Xmas she was gone. Did a midnight flit because her mum had a ton of debt they needed to run away from. No forwarding address. Upsetting after we’d been best friends for over a decade.

It was before social media and mobile phones, my parents didn’t have a landline either. I presume she didn’t leave an address in case the debtors found out where they went. But she could have popped back at Christmas and seen me, arranged to meet etc. I just never saw her again.

We reconnected online about 10 years later when Facebook was invented. Turns out she only moved about a 30 minute bus ride away. It still makes me so sad that she just cut me off, which is why I’ve never gone to see her, or attempted to connect beyond liking photos.

This has happened to me a few times in the past few years and I think I do know why. A crime was committed against one of the members of my family and i think I talked about it too much and it bored various friends. I like to think I was also still their friend and didn't only tall about the situation but it did affect some new friendships - we had moved to a new area around that time. It has left me feeling very apathetic and cynical about bothering to make any new friends. I work from home and have accepted that I am alone apart from immediate family and a couple of old friends who live far away. When I was young friendships meant a lot to me but I've not been able to find the kinds of friends I hoped to in the new area sadly.

Friend of over 25 years has ditched me after taking back her cheating partner. I'd been quite neutral about him despite all the red flags and she would just offload about him constantly. Then she fought out he'd cheated and said it was over but she ended up taking him back. She's ditched other supportive long term friends over this guy too, I think there might be one she's kept but otherwise she's only been seeing casual acquaintances. Not sure if he's controlling who she sees or if it's her decision to not be around those who know what happened.

It's all happy faces on FB but I've seen some comments he's left when she's been doing things he's not involved with (occasional nights out etc) and he seems to be a jealous, controlling type.

I got a birthday card from her and she'd put his name on it too despite me never meeting him. It's been almost a year now since we hung out and feels like a breakup. I don't know if I'll see her again now unless they split up again. It's sad.

I really recommend the book time to think by Nancy Kline. It's really helped me understand why I need to shut up.

I cut ties with someone who I suddenly realised was so utterly totally selfish she didn't fit my moral values and general approach to my life and family and the people in it. She is at gray pains to tell everyone how happy she is, but if she looks in the rear view mirror she will see a broken marriage, an insecure child, and multiple lovely people she could've been friends with but isnt because she only cares about herself.

She thought I slagged her off on MN but it was someone close to me writing under my name (they had access to my device) out of pure malice.

She didn't believe me.

I tried to reach out to her but she said she wanted no further contact.

It hurt a lot but I have to put it out of my mind.

Odd behaviour from your friend

She stopped taking her anti depressants and "saw clearly" and decided I had been selfish, unsupportive, and unable to empathize with her because she was unhappily single whilst I was in a long term relationship.

She and I are odd so we did actually have a final conversation but I wasn't able to change her mind nor did I feel it was my job to. In reality the friendship was getting stale due to her situation never changing so I hope this benefits her - but it hurt a lot either way and the friendship was by no means dead on my end.

I'm sorry about your friend. Perhaps she is going through something similar. The bit that hurts is the shock and not being the person they want to talk about things with anymore. I sent my friend a final message that I missed her which prompted our final (incredibly weird) phonecall. I'm not sure how good it was for us but it did help my curiosity.

Edit to add that I have other friends who see me totally differently, so it's her, not me.

I dumped a friend when I found out her DH had been messaging my teenage DD with inappropriate personal sexual content. She couldn’t or didn’t want to believe he could behave like that and inferred that my DD had started it. He was 53, she was 16. He had known her for over 10 years, our kids had all grown up together.

I went cold on her. She just pushed her luck once too often and I had a sudden realisation that i don't need to deal with her shit.

Mine was after I became widowed. I worked really hard not to become a recluse and develop a life in my own, where I could carry in living a bit. A friend was offended on DH's behalf that I wasn't sad enough. She, of course, had no idea what I was really feeling, only knew that I went "out" a couple of times a month and she disapproved.

I was (and am) so furious and I know DH would be too, that my response has been good riddance.

I have been in your position. A wise friend said I knew too much about the circumstances of her marriage breakdown. This was confirmed by another friend of the dumper, saying something similar. Very messy but I still miss her a decade on.

I am sorry for your loss.

I have a dear friend who was widowed at the age of 58 after 40 years of a really happy marriage. It's been quite astonishing to see how some people have reacted to her. She was devastated but decided that her own life could not stop and she worked really really hard to get herself out and still active. The criticism she got. Extraordinary. (I won't get into how she was also crudely propositioned at her own huband's funeral by a longstanding 'friend').