If he bought work/job interview appropriate clothes, I would be more inclined to understand/forgive than if he bought casual or fancy clothes.
Ditto.
I’ll just point out that you have other options besides either “forgive” or “hold a grudge.” You don’t need to do either to walk away and move on (although when going that route I do recommend allowing yourself some time to grieve).
Forgive, yes. Leave money within their reach again, no. It’s a different thing - one is accepting them warts and all, the other one is feeding those warts.
I do tell my mother no, and why no, when she asks to borrow money. So do my brothers. It’s not “borrowing” if you don’t intend to pay, and excuse me, if you borrow earmarked money, I want it to go towards what it was earmarked for, not towards a set of curtains that are too transparent to do their job and towards a pair of glasses which cost 1 month of the minimum national wage (in theory the money was to fix a bathroom which was fixed years later by one of my brothers). My cousins D and R once got a present from her mother which later turned out to cause my aunt problems with “IRS”; upon hearing about it, R immediately went to the nearest ATM and gave his mother 1/3 of what the tax folk were asking for; D said “oh gosh, that’s so bad!” Now my aunt will not give to her daughter anything more valuable than a cup of coffee… certainly nothing that may involve taxes - D just asked to have my aunt’s half of Grandma’s flat gifted to her (Grandma is still alive, btw) and got a resounding hell-no.
I’m going to make this a warning because by now, you should easily know where to take insults like this.
Not to mention you’ve been warned for insulting posts before. Knock it off.
I would try to forgive them as quickly as possible, but would probably never trust them.
My mom was not one to forgive. Her belief was that if she forgave, then the wrongdoer had “gotten away with it”. She could rummage through her memories, and pull out a grievance from decades past. She’d take it out of it’s box,unwrap it from the newspaper she had carefully stored it in, polish it up, and pretty soon she was as angry (if not more so, for the practice) as she had been the day it happened. She never, ever, let go of a single grudge, and by the time she was middle-aged she was spending far more time being angry than enjoying her life.
The thing is, her anger rarely ever caused an ounce of grief to the wrongdoers. Her, on the other hand, it turned in to a bitter, negative, spiteful soul. And I believe it had physical effects as well. Not only stress related diseases, but bitter hateful people don’t take great care of themselves.
When she got Alzheimer’s she started losing some of her collection of grudges…the recent one’s anyway. And she couldn’t stay mad for more than 10 minutes or so even when she found one to drag out. There was a phase of Alzheimer’s that saw here happier than she had been in many years.
I took my mother as an example of what not to do. Then my car was stolen, and I forgot all that and followed her example. Perhaps I was on the wrong path anyway, but that is something I can point to as to when my life started going wrong. I pretty well lost my way for a decade or more, only starting to pull my head out of my ass the last couple of years. The lesson I have relearned that applies to this thread is that holding a grudge hurts me most of all.
If the “friend” has paid you back, then you are financially whole, and have the lesson as interest. If you hang on to the anger, then you are only punishing yourself. Myself, I would go as far as encouraging them to seek help. To have stolen from you they are either desperate, emotionally/mentally sick, or both. I would not provide them with any opportunity to steal from me again unless they demonstrated a profound change.
I’ve always said if you loan someone $50 and you never see them again, (implying that they have too much personal pride to be around you if they can’t/won’t pay you back), then it was probably worth it. It sounds like your ‘friend’ doesn’t have any personal pride, you need to decide if you want to keep hanging around with him. If you do, forget the $50. But I wouldn’t loan him any more.
I can’t just forget the $50. Like I said, if he doesn’t pay me back, I feel pretty expendable as a friend. So, either he pays me back or we’re not friends. Like the OP, he is one of my best mates. I don’t know if the kid will ever come to his senses. Until then, we’re not friends. It’s not a grudge. It’s simply something I’m walking away from.
SB111111, I think if you really want the friendship, then forgive and forget. Yes, it was definitely a strange, and bad act to steal the money, and even with your bullshit CCTV story, he still could have denied it. (People do.)
You can’t have the friendship you want with him, and make it conditional. You have to continue trusting him in the way you did before, otherwise you’ll always be ‘on alert.’ You got (or are getting) the money back. As the loss of the friendship seems to affect you more than the momentary lapse of reason that lead to the theft, then give him a pass. We all do shitful, regretful things, and it means a lot to be able to make amends for stuff we sometimes do that we can’t even explain ourselves.
So let him know that you’re willing to forget the incident, and that you believe him to be honourable enough to know that you expect nothing remotely like this will ever happen again; and that if he’s short of a quid, then he can always ask for a loan. You may not be in a position to help him, but as good friends, he can always ask.
Let it go, and if the trust is broken again, you’ve learned something. If it’s not, you’ve learned something even better.
I haven’t read all the posts here, just skimmed but I read the OP.
I’ve forgiven worse, but as someone else says, you never forget. That doesn’t mean you need to carry the metaphorical splinter in your foot forever, you just put the memory aside rather than dwell on it.
I’d definitely ask him out for a pint and once your settled just say, “So. WTF was going on when you took my money?”
What happens from there totally depends on the answer. You’ve known this guy for years, you know how his head works, you should have an idea if he’s bullshitting or not.
The fact that he’s paid it back shows remorse, it may have been a very difficult decision for him in the first place to steal rather than ask.
Don’t write someone off without understanding why they did what they did and taking time to process that information . Don’t be a blind sucker who gets used by others, but don’t write off a long term friendship without sussing out why either.
Thank you, I genuinley appreciate you taking the time to share that.
You know your friend best. Was this a one-off event or part of a larger pattern of behavior?
Due to a complicated set of circumstances I was sure that a friend of mine had cheated me out of a significant amount of money. He was sure that he hadn’t. So we left it at that. I would sometimes joke with him and remind him about it but we remained friends.
He’s dead now and I told him when he was dying that he was dying before me because he was in the wrong about that incident many years ago. He laughed.
I want an update!