To ask why you finished a friendship?

[hahahayoumustbejoking]

Seems a lot of friendships going to the wall on MN. Got me thinking of ones I've ended.

1. When I was 19 and poor I showed an older and well off friend at college a bag in a shop I adored. Said I was saving up for it and even though it would take another few months I had my heart set on it. She turned up with it at college on the Monday, breezily swinging it on her arm. Never the same after that.

1. Had a niche holiday planned with a friend who then changed her mind and we cancelled and the whole thing fizzled out. Found out later she'd gone with others to the same venue instead.

1. Saw friend coming on to my then boyfriend (now DH). He was oblivious but I'd seen her do this to others. Desperate to be the most sexually attractive person to every man. Just thought 'can't be arsed with this anymore".

Anyone else got examples worth sharing?

I found out she was having an affair, and she asked me to lie to her husband by saying that she was with me when she was with loverboy.

She shouted at my kids and, on reflection, was massively critical of me at every encounter. Clearly had a fixed idea of what I thought and that I was less intellligent blah blah etc. She was supportive during my divorce, but she also victim blamed me quite heavily at a time I needed to be kind to myself.

Was friends from 14 until 30.I ended it because I finally realised just how emotionally unavailable she was.

I've only consciously ended two friendships.

The first was a lady called J. We met in college as mature students and became close. She would often ask for help with college material or to borrow money. I didn't mind if I could help I was happy to do so. I then became sick, could no longer work and couldn't help. She repeatedly asked for loans and I noticed aligned herself with new friends who were better equipped to help her with her coursework. The final straw was when I was in hospital having undergone huge complications in surgery and had just found out I had cancer. She turned up and after I told her my news she asked to borrow some money. I told her I had none. She asked for my bank card to go to an ATM. I said no. She asked for a favour. I said I was too weak to help, I could barely sit up, nevermind get my laptop out and concentrate. She left and never bothered to check in my medical developments while I was in hospital. When I was discharged and could think clearly I blocked her everywhere and never looked back.

The other was a friend who was coming to visit me when I moved to another city. She kept asking me what the plans were and what she should wear. I felt very pressurised as she kept asking where we were going and who would we meet. I didn't have much money but she clearly wanted some fun nights out. I organised a dinner out with a couple of female friends in a nice restaurant the first night and got us tickets for a local concert the second night. When I told her she said she didn't fancy spending the night with women she had never met. I apologised for the mix-up (I thought she would enjoy) but said it was organised now and we would still have the rest of the weekend together. She lost her temper and said if she was just an add-on to my existing plans she wouldn't bother coming. I insisted she wasn't, I had made plans for her arrival but she wouldn't hear it. She hung up on me but messaged me later to say she wasn't coming but I owed her the price of her non refundable bus ticket. I was really upset until a mutual friend contacted me to tell me she was always pulling these stunts, a guy she liked asked her out on a date, she didn't want to visit me anymore so she pretended to be offended. I blocked and deleted her.

I remembered how badly she had treated me when we were at college.
We had been out of touch for years and started to meet up again for a while.
I don’t know how but I’d forgotten how dreadful she was.
I just stopped replying to her.

Your no. 3. We had a young baby. She came over and stayed the night (we lived in a place with poor public transport and she didn't drive). While I was dealing with baby, she was trying it on with my now ex.

My now ex told me. I knew it was true, as she has form (although I never thought for a minute she would do this with someone I was in a settled relationship with).

My best friend from school. It became gradually more obvious that she didn’t actually like me very much, wasn’t interested in me or my life and just kept me around to fill in gaps in her social life. It was a real shame as we had so many good times when we were teenagers, but by the time we were 30 the friendship was dead.

I used to have a really good friend I'd known since school. We both worked in a pub part time, then one night she came downstairs after closing time with another girl who she hardly knew, but they were both dressed up for night on the town.
After that, they went out together all the time and left me out.

My best friend from the age of 5; we even went to Uni together and travelled abroad after. I realised at the grand old age of 25 that she was always making me the butt of her jokes with her “cool” friends and went NC. I have a certain nostalgia about old times but I don’t miss her or how she made me feel.

I ended my longest and best friendship after realising that over the course of years she had been gradually becoming more and more selfish. Bit by bit, slowly, she's become a selfish manipulative and frankly rude person but I'd been forgiving and overlooking it, because of "all the good times" "she's been such a good friend! There for me" "she's my oldest friend!" "Like a sister to me!"

Then one day she said something, not something any nastier or more self absorbed than a million things before it. But as she said it, it was like the scales crashed and I saw that actually this is toxic. No longer friendship. I was taken for a granted and treated the fool and had she been a man- I'd have ltb on the first or second strike.

I think sometimes friendships are allowed to continue where relationships wouldn't but actually, we should be just as careful as to our long term friends as our long term lovers. Toxic people are just that. And many very good relationships have natural expiry dates.

Lied about small stuff but over time it became stupid lies and I lost respect for her.

I ended one when our values completely diverged on every issue. It wasn't so much that I wanted her to agree with me about everything but when I felt shit about all of her life decisions it just became impossible to carry on.

I had a friend I saw pretty much weekly, but rest of my friends and family didn't like her much. She could be a bit off, but life had been pretty hard for her, so I always made excuses and was very loyal to her.

Then, out of the blue she started messing me about - dropping out at the last minute and not replying to calls (pre mobile days!) and when we did meet up again after about 6 months her first words to me were, "oh, you've had your hair cut. Very severe isn't it?"

The scales fell from my eyes and I saw her for the b*tch she was. I finished my drink, made my excuses and left. When she called a couple of weeks later and asked why I hadn't called I took a deep breath and told her I didn't want to speak to her, she said "oh" and hung up!

I ended a friendship that I thought was the strongest and most trustworthy and rock solid thing in my life with someone I loved like
a sister because I found out she had talked about me and made a judgement on me without even asking me about it.

I'm currently considering ending a friendship. She's incredibly self-absorbed but it's beginning to grate on me.

She texted me to ask how I was the other day. I mentioned I'd slipped and hurt myself. She replied but didn't acknowledge it at all. I'm bloody pregnant. If my pregnant friend fell I'd want to make sure she's okay!

It made me realise that she only asks after me so she can talk about herself. I suspect she skim reads my responses, if she reads them at all!

Friends for 20 years and I discovered she was telling lies about me and stirring shit behind my back. It all came to a head when her dc crazy father attacked me on a night out because of lies she had told him. I haven't spoken to her since.

I went on a girls night out to a party and my married friend spent the whole evening flirting with and sitting with a man who wasn’t her husband. She had her arms and legs draped all over him. I knew her husband well and we used to go out as a foursome a lot.
She ditched me, I didn’t know anybody there so I went home early. Sisters before misters I say.
I haven’t seen her since.

She told my harrassers (a family who have been going on for over a year now. Police are dealing with it) details of my mental health that I'd only shared with her.

She now spends her time trying to come on to my ex (who shows me the messages) telling him she's always liked him despite doing nothing but slag him off when we were together. they're welcome to each other but ex doesn't want her

Turned up with her drugged up partner to drive my dc to an event one night and made excuses for him after making out I was being a bit precious.

Kept letting me down on plans we'd made on the phone when I didn't realise she was drunk. Would fall asleep during phone calls due to drinking. Publicly slated me on Facebook for being a single mum and getting child maintenance. That was the final straw after she had an affair and frequently stood me up.

Rarely replied to messages but wanted support from me at various times. She go months without messaging or replying to anything I'd sent. The final straw was her declaring that men could be women.

Supported mentally unwell suicidal friend over decades. I needed a bit of phone support over a fwb I was madly in love with and she told me she couldn't go through all that again about him. This was a recent thing for me and I was really hurt by her attitude so I just stopped contacting her and she never contacted me again either.

I don't miss having any of them in my life as they were all emotionally draining despite the good times we had. I don't bother having friends now.

She bitched about me to someone who she hardly knew. Also she would do a lot of guilt-tripping me and made me feel useless. When I was told about the bitching, I rang her and asked her, and she admitted what she'd said! I told her that's not how friends behave, and put the phone down. As a pp said, I don't miss how she made me feel.

I'm currently withdrawing from a very old friendship.
Our values are completely different. It is hard to converse about any topic as she is very right wing and conservative. She always has been really but nowadays as we communicate primarily by phone, I am finding it difficult to keep a conversation going as there are so many things we can't chat about as she shuts them down and is very dismissive. I came to the realisation some months ago, when I hang up after talking to her, I feel irritated and annoyed more often than not.

Because she didn't seem to cut me any slack for not responding to her messages quickly. I had a ft job and two children, I'm a single parent. Before I got a ft job I would have been responding to messages quicker but she got snippy and sarcastic with me when I didn't respond because I was working. I surprised myself by feeling ''IM DONE''.

There wasn't much of a lead up to that. Perhaps I was just feeling exhausted, I was adjusting to a new busier routine and I needed understanding and I got the opposite of understanding

Friend is a paediatric healthcare professional. She met me for a catch up session over coffee and was relaying a story about giving the mum of one of her patients some awful bad news about her only child (my friends patient). She was full of disdain for this mum (because she didn't take the news well, she should have seen it coming apparently) she was rolling her eyes describing this devastated mum's reaction, her voice was dripping with impatience and scorn. I was horrified and all I wanted to do was find out who this mum was and give her a huge hug and wind back time so she could somehow hear this news from someone who actually realised what it was to take away the final glimmer of hope that it might all be a false alarm. My friend doesn't like children and only ended up in the paediatric version of her profession when she couldn't get the geriatric version upon qualifying. Now she tramples on hopes for a living, full of the knowledge that her patients parents are idiots for at times holding onto futile hope.
I haven't seen her since that day.

Friend of 30 odd years announced l had it easier than her, as the fertility drugs (which didn’t actually work in the end!) l was taking, could not make me as tired as was. Because she had 2 children under 4
A few months before that she said she would love to go on a weekend away like we had (as we were depressed and sad after failed fertility treatment). But she had to spend all her money on childcare. Impressive levels of tactless and self absorption, even when l pulled her about it then she said she could not see what the problem was. Plus both the things she said were true

I've drifted from a number of friends over the years but a couple I've purposefully stopped talking to.

One was a girl who was so unbearably negative about everything. She complained about her boyfriend and how she wanted to break up with him from literally the day they got together. Yet I also glimpsed her texting her boyfriend complaining about me and how she didn't want me to be there (she had invited me...?). She hated her uni, job, her boyfriend, her boyfriend's family, everything. I cut her off about 8 years ago and as far as I know she's still in the same job with the same boyfriend. So I'm really glad I'm not still listening to it.