My father. It’s been 20 years, and from what I hear about his health, “never again” isn’t too far off.
I haven’t spoken to my father in 15 years, and I never will again. Which is good for me, because apparently, he is even worse now than he ever was. He’s always been a mean, domineering, and nasty person, but it sounds like he doesn’t even have the thinnest of filters anymore in his old age, and will just say the meanest things that come into his head. It sounds to me like some kind of psychosis when my brothers imitate him. There’s only about 3 people in my family that still speak to him, and I’m so glad I’m not one of them.
Some interesting stories here, and some stories that make me go, “WTF, man? How many times do you need to learn your friend/family member is a nutcase before you put some boundaries in place?”
At least in the experience of my relationship with my father - married to my mom and a decent husband but a shitty father - it seems like I will remember the pain he caused and hold out for years, only to forget and slip up and give him another chance.
I think it’s hard to maintain the energy required to ignore someone if other family members you love are associated with them. I assume one friend out of a group would be hard to ignore as well.
In my case - it was daughter’s friend not mine. I found her irritating & certainly I could never live with her, But its not my call to tell my adult child who she can be friends with. & this mooching stuff only started last year.
The only things we said directly to her about her behaviour was about being on the road in ansafe unwarranted car. & you could see the walls go up where Zora didn’t want to hear it. & I said my son wasn’t to be a passenger in that car to my daughter.
& I emailed my daughter a NZ Herald article that collection on debts was going to get tougher here.
Sometimes, one has no choice.
I’d love to never deal with my wife’s disfunctional sister and her abusive husband again, and if it were up to me, I would not … but they have two children who are my son’s first cousins, and he’s very attached to them. They are so young that to cut off the sister would effectively mean to cut off them as well.
Sorry this typo was bugging me 
I cut my father off after my grandmother (his mother) died. He sexually abused me and my mother (and verbally/physically abused us and my sister), but I was reluctant to sever the tie until I felt comfortable severing ties with his entire side of the family. I’m not big on family ties in the first place, though, and my aunt (my dad’s sister) is an alcoholic xanax-aholic prone to multi-hour phone calls who’s married to a supercilious workaholic. So I’m disinclined to communicate with any of that side of the family, regardless.
After my grandma died, it was easy to stop returning his calls. And after I moved, I finally stopped getting birthday cards. I don’t miss any of them. Needy psychic vampires, or just plain bad people. I am convinced there’s a “Bad Seed” gene in that side of the family (EXTREME mental illness, EXTREME alcoholism, agoraphobia, escapism, and generally just addiction-prone, WAY more intelligence than motivation), which I also inherited. I am reluctant to have children because of it. It’s best if the seed dies with me.
That goes back to the whole “good person” thing I said earlier.
They’re “Family”, and a whole lot of guilt, shame and culture pushes us to maintain contact with bad people merely because they ARE family.
My best friend from when we were freshmen in high school until we were 30. I loved her like a sister, we went through so much crap together. We were very different, but complemented each other in so many ways we just got along so well for so many years. She did some screwy stuff, I saw her through two accidental babies, one aborted and one subsequent mis-marriage on account of the baby. Then divorce, then another marriage that I dropped a ton of money and time on, that lasted just over a year. I got her through a lot of life crises. Then I had one when I re-examined my own life at age 30 and made some major changes, moved cities, quit a well-paying great-benefit job that was actually smothering me, and when I really needed support it just happened to be when she was getting married for a THIRD time. Since I couldn’t put my depression and my own needs on hold for once, and really needed her to support me for once, and I couldn’t make everything about her THIRD marriage because I needed therapy, well we “broke up.”
My decision to cut her out of my life was sealed when she sent marriage announcements - announcements mind you, NOT invitations - to 250 people. WITH REGISTRY INFORMATION at the two places where she had registered. Seriously expecting presents for her THIRD marriage to which she invited 6 people to a destination wedding across the country. I haven’s spoken to her since before those announcements went out and that was 11 years ago. I miss the close friendship. I don’t miss her. It’s sad.
She was the gregarious one, so all the nightlife, hanging out, and other activities turned out to be mostly instigated by her. I haven’t really managed to develop a new set of close friends who I hang out with a lot, and I miss that a little, but sometimes I look around the home I’ve made for myself and feel very content and happy. I think things would be much more chaotic for me if I had gotten in contact with her again.
I have a few (I mean really, a lot of people don’t ever want to see/speak to an ex again) but the biggest one for me is my ex-friend. She and I were thick as thieves for years and she treated me like a daughter- we did everything together and were very close. Unfortunately, her husband is verbally abusive and she didn’t want to hear that reality- everything was peaches and cream to her- if something bad existed, she would just block it out and pretend it wasn’t happening. That isn’t my style at all and I encouraged her to get help/counseling/something to stop his abuse.
Long story short, I moved to FL and while I continued to call her, she was “busy” a lot and then just stopped taking my calls. She didn’t even have the guts to talk to me or tell me that she didn’t want to be friends and when I realized I got the big brush off, I was humiliated beyond belief. Turns out she has a new daughter in law so apparently she just swapped one for the other and is happy as can be that way. I know her well enough to know she’ll call or contact me at some point, but I am not having it, period. She’s a child in a woman’s body and I wish I’d seen it years before. We had fun while it lasted but even memories of doing fun things during those years are tainted by how it all ended up.
Can you elaborate on this, because frankly the picture you tried hard to paint in this thread; Ask the child of money - Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share - Straight Dope Message Board, regarding your parents, seems out of odds with such a dramatic statement?
I’d say that to elaborate on the 2nd half of the above sentence is that he was a huge jerk who showed his true colors 3 years ago and then went back to being in the shadows. Our relationship was very basic and our conversations on topics like sports, politics, pop culture, etc. ETA: I mistook that for caring and compassion in the past year or so. At the encouragement of my SO, last month I went out on a limb and gave him another chance into my personal life and he again fucked it up.
I still hang out with him; I had dinner with him Sunday night. But our conversations are very generic (as they were in those 3 years); I don’t discuss anything serious or of importance to me with him. I try very hard to maintain our generic relationship only because of my mother.
There’s a woman I knew in college I won’t talk to anymore. We were close for a long time, and she got married and had a kid. She had a few weird ideas about stuff, and that led to occasional arguments. The last straw was the day she told me she was giving her son these homeopathic teething pills she heard about on a mommy forum online. When I tried to tell her that homeopathy was quackery, and gave her some information on it, she blew up at me. Not just for questioning her judgment (she was a college educated adult, you see), but for having the temerity to question something about how she raised her child. Apparently, no one would ever do such a thing to a parent, and everyone knew but me.
Another two people I knew in college need mentioning as well. He was a best friend, she played my naive ass like a flute. I had a huge crush on her our first year there, and him and her decided they needed to date at the beginning of our second year. Even tho she had a room to herself in a different dorm, they stayed in our 4 person room all the time. I could hear them making out over the noise of all the other people in the room watching TV. I learned later from other people present at the time that they did a lot of stuff like that on purpose to fuck with me.
You will find a lot of women get very sensitive about perceived criticism of their childrearing. I’m not a fan of homeopathy either, but unless you had evidence that the pills could harm the child you should have backed off once you saw you were upsetting her.
Yeah, a lot of people believe a lot of really stupid things, and they all seem to like to tell me about it. Unless there’s clear and present danger, I try to keep my mouth shut.
I don’t always succeed, but my batting average is improving.
Sorry for the hijack, but seriously, having a kid doesn’t make you an instant expert on child raising, and if you’re stupid and arrogant enough to inflict that bad parenting logic on the people around you, you deserve every piece of counter-advice that can be pummeled into your head, preferably with a large heavy blunt object.
This is what I’m talking about with boundaries for family and friends you can’t help but bump into; you don’t have to go out of your way to never, ever see them again, but you don’t have to go out of your way TO see them (and let them keep treating you badly), either.
Agreed entirely.
@ the OP:
No never, never at all. There are a few people who I wouldn’t make even a minimal effort to meet - like some friends from high school who got into drugs and went downhill real far. But nobody that I have hostility towards to the point that I wouldn’t even talk to them again. In fact I’m probably most curious about the people who have acted the worst.