... wondering about the worst thing done to you by a so called "friend" *Content warning added by MNHQ - just flagging that some of these are quite upsetting*

[PieRSquared]

Waiting in the airport to collect my DD from her flight (seriously delayed!) at the end of a great trip she's had travelling abroad with a close friend of hers.

It brings up some very unpleasant memories for me. The plan was to travel for a few weeks in south east asia with my long term best friend, first time I'd ever travelled there. On the 3rd day of our trip she met someone "special" and went travelling with him instead!! It really caused me a huge amount of trouble and stress, traveling alone there was not easy, a few bad incidents, trying to make some other friends along the way. It was also a bit more expensive not sharing a room, and deciding on some safer/more expensive locations.

We're not in contact any more, but I'm feeling angry and agitated as I write this, and think about it again. No more coffee for me!

Any other bad things done by friends were relatively minor for me thankfully.

@Midnightblack Thank you, it took a while to realise and a while to admit even to myself. Luckily my family are lovely and my child is fantastic so their loss!

A friend I really loved 'borrowed' money from me for a deposit on a car, she then used some of the money to buy a coat and lied about it.
Then a few months later she decided to sell the car and needed more money to buy another. Told me if I did not give her the extra money she would lose her deposit, so in effect blackmailed me into giving her the money. I realised she was not a friend at all and had to block her. It hurt.

in Her late 30s -and what transpired to be when she was in the throes of a nervous breakdown culminating in a missing person hunt - she wrote some some shocking lies about me and allowed them to be used in an abortive attempt to help my psycho ex in court
she wrote to my a couple of years later begging for forgiveness. There was no way back for me most of all because of my children but also because that I
loved her like a sister.
I just didn’t reply
it was too painful to

I disclosed that I had bern abused by a family member to my best friend in year 12. She told everyone, and told everyone the word the abuser called the abuse. Everyone called me by that word until I left school at age 16.

As a new Mum, I had a really hard time. No family other than OH and our baby seemed to be really hard work tho I was overjoyed with her. None of my friends had children so I really relied on my NCT group. In retrospect I was probably annoying, going on about 'my' baby all the time, but I had no-one else to talk to and underneath, I was really worried (found out many years later that I was right, she does have some additional needs that made her a particularly challenging baby/ child)

Anyway, NCT friends began to exclude me, I could feel it so tried to arrange things. When a venue for our babies first birthdays fell through, I offered my house gladly. They all came, we exchanged gifts for the babies - secret santa style, though my baby seemed to have been missed as she didn't receive a gift. A few days later I invited everyone to the park, they were all busy so I went alone - and bumped into them all there together. It doesn't matter now, but then it broke me at a time when I really needed a friend.

To the earlier poster who asked me if I saw my “friend” again, yes! We had tickets to return home the same day, and met in the airport, and traveling home together. We also worked in the same company afterwards. We were friendly, but not friends.

it feels like a silly post from me passing time, but reading MN over the years there’s been excellent advice on red flags for partners. I think that can also apply to platonic friends. When I was younger I was much more open, and for better or worse (and it’s a mixture!) I’m more cautious about friendships.

however, I do see that when I was younger I did want to reach out, connect with people and was generally more optimistic. I guess that’s a good thing when you’re young. But friendship, like all relationships are fraught with difficulty.

funnily, I never told my parents what happened on the trip. I told them it was interesting, fun, we had some disagreements, etc but never explained what happened. Not sure why…maybe I thought it reflected on me in some ways.

At uni, I was madly in love (and semi in a relationship with) a housemate. I went home for the summer holidays and my best friend who also lived in the house rang me to tell me she was suddenly in a relationship with him. Absolutely horrific having to go back to the house and see my ex best friend who was on the same course as me.

Moved into a house and the neighbour decided I had to be her best friend. We shared a hobby, so became very entangled. I wasn’t thrilled, she is a fantasist and made up so much shit and had a very dodgy background. She decided to tell the owner of the place where we did our hobby some downright lies about me which got me kicked out. I confronted her and she refused to explain why she’d done it. I went on to have a very serious accident at the new hobby place. It has changed my life, I now have a blue badge and limited mobility. I can’t help but blame her. She appeared at my job last year as an assistant. I have told management that I absolutely will not work with her.

At school, 14 or 15 my three closest friends ditched me one lunchtime. Pulled me aside and just said "we don't like you any more and don't want to hang out with you".

I was deep in the throws of dealing with CPTSD from sexual abuse and a harrowing court case, depression and anxiety, and what I now know was undiagnosed autism. My crime was being annoying.

It's taken me over 20 years to get over it enough to be able to trust enough to start making friends again.

One friend got really nasty and started gossipping about me to others (e.g. that I'd only been helping her with her thesis in order to sabotage it), and got someone else to write me a letter about what an awful person I was and how I had supposedly 'exceeded the limits' of various people. For quite a while, I thought that the other people really had been complaining about me and I was truly devastated; it eventually turned out that it was only the first friend who had done so. She also fell out with another friend and, as revenge, actually contacted the police to complain that this other friend (same sex) had been sexually harrassing her -fortunately the police realized that this was a malicious complaint.

@CherryBlossomAutumn you really find out who your real friends are when you have a severely disabled kid.

Glad it’s not just me with awful “friends” (thankfully no longer friends).
One girl was my bestie for several years. We were out celebrating New Year and I was quite drunk and flirting with a guy, which was a big step for me having been single for a few years and very shy. We had a lovely chat and were getting on really well. I nipped off to the loo and came back to find my “friend” with her tongue down his throat. They left not long after. She spent the night with him and then turned up on my doorstep the next morning, not even remotely apologetic, boasting about the sex and the breakfast he made her.

I was best friends with one girl all of the way through uni. We lived together for 2 years. After uni we moved to different cities but still stayed in contact and would visit one another. She broke up with her boyfriend and I went to support her immediately, tried to cheer her up etc and had a good time. Shortly after that she dumped me completely out of the blue, defriended me on Facebook, wouldn’t respond to messages. Just completely ignored me, we never spoke again. I have no idea why as we were still
getting on like a house on fire when I was there a few weeks before.

Looking back, she was never as good to me as I was to her. She had let me down before but I always ignored her because we were so close and I was young and naive.

Still hurts when I think of her though.

I actually feel so sad reading through these.
This happened a couple of weeks ago. I told my best friend of 13 years how I lost my virginity...I was raped by my husband. I remember blacking out, woke up and he was still at it. She SMIRKED. I was so floored by her reaction that I just carried on telling her more details. I'm stupid, I know.
At school I was bullied for being poor, i was never hungry or cold, i wore hand me downs, had crap shoes, worn through etc. Its stuck with me and I've never felt I was good enough for anybody. I remember winning a prize for best essay, when the teacher gave it to me, the whole class and my friendship group laughed. He came up to me quietly afterwards and offered to change it if it wasn't a "cool" item. It made me cry even more.

@starfishmummy Sadly, that is so true. I think having a severely disabled child can sometimes expose relationships too painfully, my friend’s didn’t really want to know. We didn’t ‘fit’ anymore.

School bus age 17 . Had earphones in is they thought I was listening to music . The girl I thought was my best friend, and five others were having a conversation about me and how ‘best friend’ only spoke to me because she had no one else in her classes, how I was fat, annoying, weird, etc etc . Went on for a good 15 minutes .

I ended up in floods of tears stupidly - I seriously thought she was my friend - to which they asked me what was wrong . To this day I wonder if I imagined it as they were so ‘what on earth’s wrong’ when I ended up crying .

I’ve never had proper friends since, I’m absolutely terrified of people my own age in case they feel the same way about me . Always scared that if someone’s being kind to me that they’re secretly laughing at me .

I also have a disabled ds...and lost my friends for years because of it. I had to give up on my social life because my life revolved around him, all our dc1 and dc2 were in the same year. I just stopped going out because it was so difficult, and they never bothered to contact me.

She started an affair with my husband while I was away seeing to his Mum with Alzheimers ( yeah he was a dick too) despite the fact that she knew all our family forever. We used to mix together as friends. She and he used to arrange nights out for me and her husband too - sickos. They are married now - so happy that two cheating cants are together.

I’m so sorry peachy. Why are people so shit?

I've read through this whole thread and what some of the posters have had to go through is utterly despicable.

It's confirmed to me at least that while male bullying is usually physical, female bullying is psychological.

Never remotely had done to me what some people on here have experienced

Male best friend of 20 years, since early teens, had supported me through a violent rape abroad and then subsequent years of receiving horrifically violent threats from my rapist.

After a decade it became clear that the messages had come from the 'best friend'.

He was so clever and manipulative and plausible that he then turned our entire friendship group against me.

I’m so sorry. I feel similar, ostracised from my closet friends. I have other friends now with disabled kids, who all say the same. It’s awful.

From primary school, throughout secondary, and beyond... people pretended to be my friend.
I felt like an alien that was just here to observe humans (albeit, badly). I am now in my 40s, and still feel the same.

As an adult, I had a friend who used to listen, do stuff with me etc. I thought we we were good. Turned out that she actually wished I would fall down some stairs and die. She genuinely hated the crap out of me. Now, I can't trust anyone that is nice.... will they be like her?

Became best friends and completely joined at the hip with the woman who told a lie about me so serious it genuinely ruined my life. I was suicidal for quite some time and it took 3 long years until she slipped up and the truth came out. The kicker was no matter how many times I proved I wasn’t involved my supposed friend never believed me until the truth came out, not that I ever received an apology for that reprehensible behaviour.

It’s not particularly serious compared to what others have been through, but it genuinely broke my heart. She was supposed to be my friend, we’d been friends 20 years and this random that had been around less than 2 years got the benefit of the doubt?

I’m so sorry. That would be unimaginably hard to live through. I hope you’re in a better place now.