Name change in case any of these women are on here. Two friends (both women) broke up a decade or so ago. I'll be honest and say my 'original' friend (friend A, let's call her Amy) is the one accused, and I'm biased towards thinking more positive of her. I met her partner (friend B, let's call her Becky) through her. While nothing was said at the time, Becky has now been posting on FB about being an abuse survivor and saying she is finally able to open up after so many years.
I'm not sure what to think - other of Becky's friends have been posting things like the 'squeaky stair' story about how people ignore abuse, and how horrible it is when people side with the abuser. But I also feel I can't throw away a multiple-decade friendship with Amy just for this story, which I'm also confused about - and particularly as reading on MN has made me wonder if it wasn't the other way around? I'm hoping people here can help me with some perspective.
I'll try to brief but will probably fail:
Becky says it was the months before their breakup when things started to go badly and when the abuse occurred. However, being 'more' Amy's friend, it was her I interacted with most in the lead up to their break up - from Amy's point of view, it was a good year beforehand, when Amy began a postgrad degree in a city distant from Becky. Amy had worked to support them while Becky worked on a PhD (which took about 2x as long as planned due to Becky having health issues), and now that Becky had graduated, Amy got a Masters+PhD scholarship, but Becky could only get a job in a city about 2 hours away. So Amy lived near her Uni in the week and went home on weekends. Becky struggled with this - she was was very unhappy in her teaching-based zero-hours contract, her health issues worsened, and she developed depression. She would often phone Amy saying she was suicidal and Amy would come home to be with her. I remember talking with Amy about how this almost always happened when Amy had something important to do (she did experiments which needed to be checked on a time schedule, plus of course classes), which she then missed and thus her studies were going poorly. We talked about how it might be Becky knowing that Amy couldn't come home which triggered the panic and suicidal thoughts. Amy also said she felt unsupported in her studies by Becky - she felt like she had supported Becky but now that it was 'her turn', Becky wanted all of Amy's time whenever she was home, even though Amy needed to study and due to coming back so much was missing a lot that she needed to catch up on. Eventually Amy convinced Becky to go to a therapist and I remember how relieved she was that Becky had someone else to support her. Although she still did mostly come back when Becky called being suicidal.
Both Amy and Becky agree on the 'flash point', although Becky called it the 'start' of their relationship problems and Amy the culmination of them. There was some day-long thing at the end of Amy's Masters, which was basically now a make-or-break thing for Amy, that she absolutely needed to be present for or she would fail (this detail wasn't in Becky's story, but I know it from Amy). That day, Becky apparently for the first time told her therapist about being suicidal - the therapist then insisted Becky needed to go to hospital and wouldn't let her leave alone as the concern over suicide was so high. Thus Becky called Amy to come get her. From Amy's story (heard at the time), I remember being slightly dubious that it really was the first time Becky had told the therapist this - Amy was really upset because she had assumed that the therapist had been helping Becky with it for months but the therapist hadn't even known. But Becky's story (told just now) backs this up - it was the first time she told the therapist. Anyway, Amy's story covers the next few months as she finally stood up for herself and didn't just do everything Becky asked. In particular, she put in an appeal for her Masters and was allowed to continue to her project while it was in consideration, and she actually took the time to do it. Amy said she realised Becky didn't care about Amy, and this lead to the break-up. (To wrap up: ultimately Amy's appeal was unsuccessful and she did fail the Masters and lost her PhD funding.) Becky's story tells more details of the pick-up and trip to the hospital, where she says Amy yelled at her the whole time, asking things like 'Why did you say this today?' and 'Why didn't you call someone closer?', and then says Amy was "emotionally abusive" (no details of what this entailed) for the next few months until they finally broke up.
So my confusion over this is, first, I've read on MN in the intervening decade about partners using threats of suicide to control another partner, and that this is abusive. Which seems to be what Becky was doing to Amy. It strikes me that Amy noticed relationship problems basically as soon as she stopped supporting Becky and tried to further her own career, but Becky only noticed them when Amy (self-reported) started 'standing up for herself' (although Amy didn't say what the details of this was either). Also, why did Becky pick that today to tell her therapist about being suicidal, after apparently keeping it secret from her for something like 6 months even though Amy thought it was the topic of the therapy, on the one day that it would mean Amy leaving her studies would mean she failed? And why didn't Becky call someone else? She had two (divorced) parents and several friends in the town she lived, but called her partner instead 2 hours away. Although I can understand this - I'd rather have my partner over my parents in such a situation, for example! Yet if I knew it would mean my partner would fail out of postgrad, might I have called a friend instead?
A decade on, Amy is clearly doing much better. She did a different Masters, got another funded PhD, got a faculty post and recently won some kind of 'young researcher' award. Becky's health problems only worsened, and she now cannot work, and can barely leave her home.
So I'm now confused - was Amy abusive? I was actually considering asking her to be godparent to my child, but is this someone I want to connect myself to forever if she an 'abuser'? Could they have both been abusive to each other? Definitely spending a car ride to hospital yelling at a suicidal person is not exemplary behaviour. And I don't know what the 'standing up for herself' versus 'emotionally abusive' behaviour actually was - and it's not as if I can ask either of them for details, that would be weird! I do remember at the time feeling a bit odd over how Amy left Becky just when Becky's health was getting worse and Becky needed more support, sort of like Amy dumped Becky due to her health. Thus I had been feeling slightly odd over Amy's behaviour at the break-up. But I'm also not entirely convinced about Becky's current story.
Another weird detail - when Amy and Becky were together, Becky told me about how she did not want kids and thus their joint pets were their 'children'. Amy was more interested in kids, but not willing to have them over a partner's objections. Yet slightly before Becky posted about the abuse, she started posting multiple times about how sad she was that she had no relationship, would probably never have one, and how this meant she would never have kids which she always had desperately wanted. So knowing that she was either not telling the truth when she told me (it would be nearly 20 years ago now or so) she didn't want kids, or rewriting the past now about having always wanted kids (I am willing to believe she developed a desire for children later, but her statements clearly don't match the 'always' she is saying now), is making me more suspicious of her current statements about abuse.
Can anyone help me make sense of this?