I’ve had friendships mutually fizzle out or go more low contact, that’s pretty normal as you move through life stages and different locations and jobs,
But I’m about to ghost someone who was a close friend because of her toxic behaviour. I’ve recently realised how manipulative and rude she is, after giving the benefit of the doubt for longer than was healthy. She had an explosive temper, can never be wrong and will bully, gaslight and ignore until she thinks enough time has passed, then have a crisis and expect all hands on deck as if nothing happened. She will manipulate, exclude and gossip to support her agenda. This behaviour has made me feel like shit.
I gently confronted her and said I’m sorry if I caused you upset but these are my issues and I’d like to get together to discuss them and save the friendship. She was angry, slagged me off to mutual friends, gaslight and denied and told me I was wrong for emailing and should’ve called her about it as she doesn’t respond well to that approach. I wanted to avoid a shouty confrontation which is why I emailed. She went silent on me for a month and the asked to meet the next day. Lockdown happened but we managed to meet after it ended.
On the day she asked if another friend could join us as she had limited time to socialise with both of us. I said no this is about us and it’s not appropriate she said the friend would be upset to be uninvited but if I insisted. I said it’s her fault not mine that the other friend will be upset, she told me to stop overreacting and that I needed to calm down (I had been calm).
We met up, she talked about everything except the issue, and tried to get me to really divulge all my “sad” experiences of the year. I broached discussing my issue and said it was important to me to talk about it. She said she didn’t think there was anything to say, that we’d both had a hard year, she forgave me for the outburst but was just a bystander to my hard year and I just needed to call her more. I agreed we’d both had a hard year but I felt so shocked that it was just more of the same “deny, exuse, gaslight” I didn’t say what I wanted to, she then asked me if I was going to get on the bus that had just pulled up (we had walked along the road) I felt so dismissed I waited for the next one chatting friendly. But feeing like rubbish. I just wanted an apology and an acknowledgement, and she swept it under the carpet and said going forward I should make more effort and we’d be fine.
I feel like I tried to save the friendship, but is there anything to save when she won’t ever acknowledge any problems? I don’t know where to go from here so will probably ghost her and mourn what I thought our friendship was, while hearing from everyone that she thinks I’m over sensitive and horrible for hurting her.
I’m not perfect and perhaps I’m too sensitive or hard work, but I need to chose people who don’t treat me like that, who I can trust. But I hate confrontation so will now just avoid and breathe easier.