Was your friend aware at the time that these strikes were being called?
Not that I’m not necessarily criticizing you. Depending on the setting and tone, I could see cutting a friend loose for any one of these. I’m just curious as to whether you said, “OK, that’s strike two!” after the second one, or “OK, that’s strike three, you’re out,” after the third one, then told him what the other two were. Or did you just count in your head and cut him off without warning or explanation?
He was not aware, (yes, I was keeping track in my head), but he didn’t see his remarks as being untoward. He didn’t think that way; he just opened his mouth and said whatever was on his mind.
To be fair, he also doesn’t understand why he has no other friends, or has had 3 failed marriages, or why his kids no longer speak to him.
So why did I tolerate him?
I used to be a rather forgiving type of person.
Screw that.
M was a good friend of mine in high school. For a while, he dated my sister, but he and I were still good friends. Several years later, long after he and my sister had both moved on, he was dating another woman seriously. At that time, he pretty much dropped off the face of the earth. No calls back, no reponses to card or letter. It turns out his new girlfriend/eventual wife had a problem with him staying on contact with me.
So I lost a friend because he used to date my sister.
I ended a friendship with someone for several reasons, the most trivial of which was an argument we got into over hair. Apparently, she was convinced that I was jealous of her because her hair is blonde. Well, everyone knows that all women with brown hair really just want to be blonde.
This argument was sparked when I noted that she had pinched her husband - very hard - in front of me after having called him stupid and fat to his face. I asked her not to do that because it looked like it really hurt (both the pinch and being called names). She told me I was “being insulting” because I was jealous that she had blonde hair. :rolleyes:
She was pregnant at the time and kept acting like some sort of invalid. “I can’t possibly roll the dice myself! I’m pregnant! Mike, do it for me! I didn’t want to play this game anyway.” She would also eat stuff then hand me the leftovers and trash, expecting me to whisk it away for her.
The strange thing is that we were arguing about two different things. I was mad at her about her rude, abusive behavior (mostly to her husband, but also to me) and she argued until the minute she left that this was all about hair color.
She’s tried to call me several times since to catch up, but I can’t bring myself to speak to her. I told her at the time that she shouldn’t expect to be hearing from me again and told her exactly why, but apparently it never sunk in.
Very recently someone that I considered a good friend stopped speaking to me because I wouldn’t sleep with her brother. More precisely, because I rejected her brother and then had a liaison with someone else, she told her brother about it (although I am not sure in what possible universe this was any of his business), and I became angry with her about that. She couldn’t understand why I was, though.
I stopped seeing a guy once (we weren’t exclusive or serious or anything) because he had big pores on his nose. It just…I don’t know. It was kind of off-putting. NO ONE KNOWS THIS! He was a really great guy other than that. Had a degree and a high paying job, owned three cars (one of which was a Hummer) and a motorcycle at age 23. Guess I’m more of a hopeless romantic than the money-grubbing type, yeah?
Ah, remember! Only SHE could see the Orb!
I once lost a friend over a scoop of cat food. My cats were completely out and she had a half-full bag. She said I could borrow a cup of it until I got paid a couple of days later. I apparently took one scoop too many.
There’s a happy ending to this story though: we made up a couple of months later. I haven’t borrowed a scoop of cat food from her since, though.
Boy, some of you make me wonder with your obliviousness. If you really think your friend ended your friendship over a bottle cap, and you thought everything was going fine right up until then, it makes me really wonder what my ex-husband thinks we got divorced over.
Nevermind that I told him six ways from Sunday what was going wrong and what he could do to fix it. He probably tells his friends that “We got divorced because I told her she practiced ‘A Horse with no Name’ too often.”
that’s strike one.
I had a guy dump me - while *he * was at sea - and among the reasons he listed was that I liked to listen to John Denver and he didn’t. Um, okaaaaaaaaaay…
I think I eventually decided that he was intimidated by me. At the time of the dumping, I was going to college pursuing my engineering degree and he was an electronics technician in the Navy who wanted to be a rock star. I think my ambition made him feel inferior or something. <shrug> Last I hear, he got out of the Navy and went to work as an electronics technician in Milwaukee.
That cracked me up. Thanks. 
I once had a girlfriend (who had a car and drove everywhere) who got mad at me on MY birthday because my car got broken into and I couldn’t go pick her up to go for dinner. I told her I would work on it and never called her back. Met her on the street about 6 years after. She was pissed!
My best friend from high school married from my other best friend. Fast forward 20 years. They found religion. With a vengence. I figured I could just reduce the time we spent together. Really, being told a la tag team style that you (your husband, kids, parents, brothers and sister, dogs, cats, turtles, etc.) are going to hell throughout a dinner engagement, will make you drink more alcohol than probably prudent. Then the emails started. When I didn’t respond to them, the phone calls at all hours of the night. Once at midnight, while I was happily gorging on Ben & Jerry’s watching some crap on TV, she calls. I let the machine get it. She railed against my hedonistic ways because she just knew I was out drinking and dancing and doing the devil’s work.
Of course, this is the same person who recounted her missionary work to Peru one night. When I asked when she was going back, she said verbatim “Well I don’t know. We just built the school so it will be a while. Besides, I don’t want to go back until they speak English, it was just too hard to understand what they said. Oh, and they have terrible toilet paper there too.” I’ve heard he has since become a preacher.
When I’m home, I still say hi…mostly just in the form of a wave as I drive by their neighborhood.
Thanks, you reminded me of mine. I was close friends (or so I thought, I guess) with a woman in freshman and part of sophmore year in college. I should have known better since she had given me the silent treatment for a week freshman year but then began speaking again. Anyhoo, sophmore year I was still a responsible student and I had a big paper I starting spending a lot of time researching at a couple of libraries. I guess this took too much time away from her because she stopped speaking to me. Meanwhile I still lived right next door to her and we ate at the same dining hall.
Of course I was raised by a guy who stops speaking for no good reason and I was somewhat used to the vagaries of people. But it was just another “no good thing lasts forever”.
See, I read stuff like this, and I wonder if that person isn’t thinking: “Okay, I need to end this relationship, but I don’t have the balls to do it myself. I guess it’s time to Turn On The Psychosis and make them do it for me.”
I stopped talking to my best friend, of ten years plus, coz he got in trouble with the police. Sounds fair enough?
Well he was stopped by them just for walking around late at night. He got arrested just coz he had a blunt knife on him. He got yelled at (we were about 15) and that was it. He was never charged with anything. Maybe not as weird as some of the stuff others have said, but I still think it was pretty dumb.
It worked out alright in the end. My new best friend of the years following is much better anyway
I stopped seeing a girl because she got in a car accident. It wasn’t my car, I wasn’t in the car, nobody other than her got injured and I don’t think it was even her fault. I could explain my rationale but, but it boils down to me being scared and acting like a grade A asshole.
This is not something I’m proud of.
When I was 19 or so my mom forced me to go on Weight Watchers. I wasn’t particularly huge or even self-conscious about my weight but she had gone on it with great results and she thought, why not?
Some time before my first WW meeting, I was telling a male friend about it on IM (he was gay, so I talked to him the way I would a female friend) and for some reason he was being a real jerk that night and told me I would never lose weight, or that I’d lose it and gain it back. His tone was mocking. I was so annoyed, the conversation just ended that night. I didn’t speak to him for five years.
It was just this year that I started talking to him again, because of Facebook. We greeted each other without making reference to why we even stopped talking in the first place.
So, dude - what was your job? Foot Fungus Recordkeeper?
(No offense to the accountants in the room . . . )
Similarly, I once got dumped because I, as a grad student, was failing to live up to my boyfriend’s expectation that I would be coming up with all sorts of interesting lectures, etc. for us to attend. (Nevermind that he barely made it through undergrad (flunked outta one school), and got so bored when we went to see Adrienne Rich read that he resorted to grabbing my hand and trying to make me hit myself in the face . . .)