This is long…thank you if you read until the end. We have been friendly with a couple for over 17 years now. DH and I immigrated to the country we currently live in to study, we didn’t know anyone and this couple had taken us under their arms – they also had no other family around so it felt like we were growing this relationship into something nice. This relationship has been been sustained by myself and female friend, the males mainly going along with us so not as invested as we are.As years went by my husband and I started to see/feel the differences between us, mainly in values, behavior and life choices. DH and I are in our early forties now, have two children, one already in secondary school, the other starting in September. We are very focused on our family life, kids’ education and socialising. Also, over the past 7 years we have been renovating our house – we did it slowly, a lot of DYI and not much help apart from my dad who came on 2 occasions to help. We ended up much better off financially than said couple with DH running and owning half of a small business. We never bragged about it, always kept ourselves to ourselves but could not hide the things in our house and our lifestyle. We are not rich, just earning a decent living but much better then them. The couple are much older than us – she is late 50s, he is mid 60s. He is a widower to first wife and had two kids, he is not in contact with one of them, the other lives in another country and they see each other every 4-5 years. He barely met his grandchildren. She has a son from a previous marriage, now in his early 30s who still lives with them. He is struggling to keep jobs, now studying at university level after struggling with life for about 15years – left school at 16, became a computer games addict, then a drug addict. Apparently he is now better but still smoking and struggling to finish his university course. We feel this is mostly down to her controlling behaviour as she overprotected him. He was never encouraged to join any after school clubs, go out an play in the street, give him freedom to be himself. All of this ongoing situation put a huge strain on her and relationship with husband. I tried to be supportive, offer help and suggestions but everything was dismissed as she knew better. I am giving this context as I think this is relevant to their reasons for being jealous of our life. Our relationship was put to the test during covid when people started to be all weird. They were particularly weird and had to have a conversation with them at the time. We settled down but things have been rocky since. Example: met them once, my daughter tested positive the next day. phoned her to tell her. She reacted very rude and made me feel like we had done something wrong, as it meant if her DH got covid he would not have been able to work. During all the house renovation they barely had any compliments, mainly asking when will we stop, why are doing so much. They renovated their own kitchen after we did ours – they mostly copied the style as well as the furniture. After they finished and returned to us for a visit she said ‘Oh, your kitchen looks very much like ours!’. We are now near completion of a full garden renovation, back and front. They visited last week and we made dinner for them – front garden was finished, back nearly – not a single comment/compliment, especially as they knew we had done a a lot of the work ourselves. Made us feel very disappointed with them. For a while, we had considered them our second family here, so it’s been like never getting any validation/praise from your parents that you are doing something good and they are proud of you. I don’t look for this from other people but was expecting it from them and family in general. We have been thinking for a while to stop seeing them as every time it gets uncomfortable for one reason or another. The kids are noticing her behaviour too as she made them feel uncomfortable on a couple of occasions. I know deep down she finds it hard to cope with our success. I also know the reason is due to her own situation being so difficult but still can’t understand why it’s hard to be glad for others despite your own difficulties? All my husband and I want is for people to be successful and are genuinely happy for them when they are! AIBU to think this is jealousy/envy? And AIBU to want to end friendship it even though they were there for us at the start? Do we owe them anything?