Ever had to "break up" with a friend?

In My Humble Opinion
1

So recent events, coupled with this discussion have got me thinking about severing friendships. (Well, not about doing it myself - so you’re all safe! :smiley: But rather about the concept.)

A friend of mine, “Sally” (no, really - this is not one of those “OK, so it’s really me” situations) is involved in a friendship that she simply doesn’t want anymore. She feels taken advantage of, and like it’s all just become too much work. However, this is a person with whom she works, so she feels like special care is in order in terms of ending the friendship. So she and her soon-to-be-ex friend have actually scheduled a coffee date to “discuss the friendship” and Sally basically plans to dump her over coffee.

So Sally, another friend (“Lulu”) and I were talking about the whole thing, and we all agreed that severing friendships is somehow weirder and more complicated than severing romantic relationships. Usually, in romantic relationships, there’s a “breaking point”; an argument, an infidelity, the sudden realization that you haven’t had sex in 3 years (and at least one of you is not OK with that), etc. Or maybe you just fall out of love. And so one of you just comes right out and says, “It’s over.” The end of a friendship, on the other hand, is often more ambiguous, and it seems both weirder and more complicated to just say, “It’s over”, unless there is a BIG REASON, like one of you catches the other in the sack with the wrong SO or something (or, as mentioned in the thread above, one of you gets a new SO who doesn’t want you hanging out).

That said, however, I’ve been thinking about how I’ve ended friendships with people I just . . . frankly . . . didn’t really like anymore, and my usual M.O. is to just stop talking to them, and stop initiating efforts to see each other, and just wait for the person to “get the hint”. Only lemme tell ya - that method can sometimes take YEARS, especially since I tend to go through weird guilty phases, and so will confuse the issue by accepting if the person invites *me * to hang out . . .

And because of comments I made in the aforementioned thread, it occurs to me that that makes me a little bit of a jerk.

So how about y’all? How do you end it with a friend? Have you ever?

2

I don’t think guys do this. Seems to me, there is always some sort of statement along the lines of “You’re a [insert favorite expletive].” Most of my friends are guys I like to do things with. If I stopped liking them, it would be because I stopped liking to do that thing. Maybe it is where I am in life. With kids and all, I just don’t have time to sit around and shoot the um, breeze.

3

No, I’m a wuss. I just avoid the person until it’s clear we’re no longer friends. :o

4

If someone is bugging me enough, I will always tell them off.

If they’re just not very interesting to me anymore, I’ll stop contacting them, and stop responding to their contact. Works fine.

5

Well, some friendships just drift. But yes, I have ended it with friends in the past. It is hard to push me to the point where I am truly angry. If you do, it is hard to get me to the point where I forgive. Or, to say it another way. It is very hard to cross that line, but once crossed, there is no coming back.

People who have done it pretty much know, because they have gotten warnings and then a final, I’ve lost my patience with you, leave me alone.

6

My wife is in the process of trying to break it off with a friend of hers who was her maid of honor.
They used to be really good friends when they lived near eachother 5 years ago but have just went different directions. My wife married me and we have one child. Her friend (who’s desperate to find a husband) started having an affair with a married man who had kids and my wife thought the worse of her for it (as she should). Then she met some other guy who attends bible college and now she has “found god”.
She lives about 10 hours away so they never see eachother but the friend calls every couple months just to “keep in touch”. Their conversations consist of telling the other what’s new while the other listens pretty much disinterested.
My wife desperately just wants to cut the friendship off but can’t find a way to do it without appearing rude. My wife’s biggest fear is that some guy is going to ask her to get married and then she’s going to ask my wife to be her maid of honor.
She really want’s no part of that.

7

I decided to break-up with a friend I had from 6th grade until I was 25.

We decided to be roomates to save money. Only he was late on rent a lot and quite a few times I had to cover half of his part of the rent cuz he did not have enough, even though he had enough money to go out with his girlfriend the friday before.

So after our one year rent contract was up I told him I was moving out. He was not too happy because he didn’t want to move or have to pay all of the rent by himself. After we move out and the apartment complex tells us how much we owe them because they had to “clean” the apartment. That amount came out to $160 and he had no money on him so I told I’d pay his share and then he could just pay me back.

At this point I still wanted to be friends I just did not want to live with him. We both find new places to live and we hang out a couple of times and each time he claimed he didn’t have any money then but was expecting to have extra money soon and he would pay me then. Well after a couple months of not hanging out but of me calling him asking for money and him giving me excuses I was getting upset.

About 6 months after we stopped being roomates it was around the week of Christmas and he still had not paid me a dime so I called him up and left a message cursing him out telling him he can keep the money he owed me as a Christmas present.

It sucked because we had been friends for so long, but there was no reason to keep him in my life and how much of a friend was he really when he refused to pay me the $80 he owed me.

8

I’ve never broken up with a real friend, but I’ve set some acquaintances loose, and I’ve told them why. One was a woman who started asking me to do a bunch of typing for her (for free), and another was someone whose kids were hellions, and I didn’t want my kids around them. “I can’t do this anymore – but call me if you want to do lunch or catch a movie.”

This should be easy, because a “real” friend isn’t likely to do anything to make you want to break up with them.

9

Generally the relationships that I have ended have been because of a big issues. Little things build up but you try to work around it because this is your friend, you know? It slowly gets worse and worse until something BIG happens. For example, I had one friend who was slowly getting to be more and more of an attention whore. I won’t go into details here, but it was getting insane. I let it go and let it go until one day she calls me and tells me she is going to go down to the bad part of town, buy some drugs and give herself an overdose to commit suicide. I went over there and she had a white powder on her dresser so I swept it into a ziploc bag, put her in the car, and took her to the hospital. After the nurses looked at the white powder I brought them they identified it as crushed up aspirin. She told them lie after lie and was committed overnight to their psych ward. After all of this she tried to bill me for her hospital stay since I am the one who made her go. I looked at her, walked away, and never saw her or spoke to her again. If I had stopped speaking to her months earlier because she was being dumb and trying to get attention any way she knew how I wouldn’t have had to deal with that, but I wouldn’t have felt as justified in walking away either.

10

I had to write my childhood best friend off as a loss :frowning:

We’d been friends since we were eleven, even through both of us moving away. As we got older (late teens, early twenties), she became more unreliable about following through on plans, breaking them at the last minute or simply not showing up. This went on for quite a while, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was me driving a couple hours to visit and her not being home… after she explicitly promised that she would not cancel this time. No note, no call to explain. Nothing in the way of an apology or explanation was ever offered. I haven’t spoken to her since.

It was hard not to forgive her, but how long can you let yourself be treated that way? A couple of years was long enough for me.

11

That’s true, and to me, that’s yet another component that makes it a bad strategy to sever a friendship, because the person could assume you’ve just lost touch for awhile. (Especially with me, since I’m notorious for failing to keep in touch, and anyone who knows me knows that there are many people I adore with whom I fail to speak more than a couple of times a year. So if I don’t actually like a friend anymore, s/he is not likely to be alarmed just because s/he didn’t get a Christmas card from me this year . . . )

12

Maybe that could be the moment that allows your wife to break free!

13

That’s a good point, and although some people here seem to have had issues with long-time friends, I have to say that the people I’ve wanted to “break up” with were more acquaintancey than friendy.

But sometimes it’s a fuzzy line . . .

14

I did end one friendship. The woman in question was a very needy type, and needed to talk to me every single day. She needed to process every feeling and thought that came into her head. If she was depressed, she would still call, but she would barely speak and my role was to try to draw her out and make her feel better. She would also call very late. I sent an email to all my friends asking them to please not call after 9:30 (even though she was the only one who did), and she would call at 9:45 and leave a message like, “Well, it’s around 9:30…” It was as though she felt the rules didn’t apply to her.

She was extremely jealous when I met the man who eventually became my husband, even though I still got together with her. She frequently mad comments like, "When you first met him, I allowed you some space, but I don’t like feeling so far down on your list of priorities. "She asked to borrow money. She asked to borrow my car.

One day, when I was pregnant with my son and had a toddler to take care of, as well as a physically and mentally demanding full-time job, she told me that she was angry that I didn’t make more time for her. That was the final straw for me. I told her that my family had to be my first priority, and that my job wasn’t something I could just blow off. I explained to her that every person in my life, not just her, had to fit into the rest of my life. Basically I had to say, it’s not about you, and it isn’t going to become about you.

I never heard from her again.

I do still hear about her from time to time, as we have a mutual friend. It seems like she has gotten her life together a lot more, and I’m glad for her. I don’t wish her ill; I just don’t want her back in my life.

15

I had a work pals with a guy who lived a block from me. We would often share rides to work. He invited us to dinner, but warned us his wife was mentally below average and while he made allowances for this, he wanted to warn us.
We went, but were frightened by her sudden bursts of childish behavior, foot stomping, throwing things and screaming when mad.
So we never asked them to our house for dinner. She was livid said we had an obligation to ask them over, and called us names when passing in the street.
So I basically stopped all contact with the guy. She was his cross to bear and not mine.

16

I’ve broken up with friends. It’s way harder than breaking up with men. We just grew apart and the things that bonded us were no longer part of my life. One particular friend just got to be too high maintenance for me. Also, she was single and I was in a relationship, so we weren’t out partying like we were on the brink of the apocalypse anymore. We went for quite a while without talking, but now we talk on the phone a couple times a year. She’s still very screwed up and I’m still glad we’re no longer best buds. But we are friends. Christmas card friends. I’m cool with that.

17

How sad. :frowning: That must have been very hard for you, elfkin, but it sounds like you did the right thing.

I’m in the process of “breaking up” with a former workplace friend. This is someone I’ve known for almost two and a half years. Things started out OK, but this summer I began to realize how demanding she’d become. Whenever she had a problem with her work, she wanted me to stop what I was doing and fix it for her, even if I was on deadline. She got annoyed when she found out that I’d been e-mailing a coworker/mutual friend who’d recently moved out of state – she thought that since we were all friends, she should have been part of all the conversations. She also resented that I had other friends at the office.

So she started putting me down all the time. When I got a big promotion at work a few months ago, she complained that the job was just “handed” to me when I should have had to compete for it (against her, presumably). A few weeks later, she confronted me and demanded to know why my phone was busy the night before. I explained that I was on the phone with my parents, who were both very upset because my dad had just lost his job. She scoffed and said, “what, he can’t afford to retire? This was important!” Her news? She was offered another position in the company, and was outraged that the salary was only a 5-percent increase (because, you know, she should be making way more money than me).

But the last straw was our coworker’s baby shower. Former friend told me to drive out of my way and pick her up so that she wouldn’t have to waste her gas. I told her that I had several errands to run that day and wouldn’t be in her neighborhood, but I would see her at the party. She gave me a funny look and left. At the party the next day, she made a big production out of giving me the silent treatment. She continued the act at work for the next four weeks … until she transferred downstairs to my department. At that point, I really didn’t feel like talking to her anymore. I’m perfectly willing to work with her and have job-related conversations, but I don’t want to talk about personal matters.

Unfortunately it seems that she’s trying to bully me into being her friend, if that makes any sense. She deliberately starts personal conversations with me in front of other people, which means I either have to play along, excuse myself (and look like a jerk) or tell her off in front of our coworkers (and again, look like a jerk). I’ve been miserable at work ever since she transferred, and I don’t think it’s going to end any time soon since she loves to cry and play the victim. Og knows what she’s said to our supervisor.

Anyone got any advice for this situation? I really don’t want this woman for a friend, but I need to break it off in a way that won’t result in constant harassment, cost me my job, or make me look like the office jackass.

18

I had to break it off with a friend I had since the beginning of high school; at this point I think it’s been a few years since I’ve seen her. I just stopped returning her E-mails.

She’s always been something of a drama queen, but back in high school we were fellow “oppressed” geeks with similar interests, so that kind of stuff got overlooked. I saw even back then that she seemed quick to interfere in the relationships of her friends. She also would just go over the top if she was interested in some guy but he didn’t return the interest - for instance, when one guy who just happened to be Jewish turned her down when she asked him out, she even used the occasional anti-Semitic slur in badmouthing him to people.

I lived with her for a year in grad school, and couldn’t have been happier when I got out of there. She became very self-absorbed. If she read self-help books, etc., she would agree with the parts that made her feel good and ignore the rest. We had one phone line, call waiting, and a dial-up connection for my Internet connection (with “incoming calls will disconnect you” set); she claimed that my computer use kept any of her friends from calling her - yet calls from telemarketers, family members, or my colleagues or friends would boot my connection and ring the phone. (Hmm, maybe someone just didn’t have any friends to call her.)

I’ve found that she’s continued to try to disrupt other people’s relationships, even her own sister’s. She rags on her sister’s blue-collar husband, tries to poison all their friends against him. He went through some depression when he was laid off, and of course from her that became “he’s lazy, he has no ambition, he won’t ever go anywhere.” Last I heard, the sister was beginning to believe this woman, when meanwhile from what everyone else says (who isn’t listening to my ex-friend) he’s also incredibly devoted to his wife and kid, very caring and kind, and just trying to deal with a bad patch in life.

A friend of mine who had held out in trying to still remain a friend has stopped seeing that woman’s sister - those two were good friends, but almost inevitably, visits involve both women and it just became too uncomfortable. She didn’t want to explain to the sister, “yeah, your sis is being a poisonous bitch, can we just not deal with her?” This woman turned against my friend because she mentioned t other friends that another (male) friend was gay and Ex-Friend hadn’t heard that he had explicitly said this was all right to tell them. She went apeshit and tried to convince the gay friend that my friend was dangerous, etc.

Oh yeah, no one who knows her really wants to be on the tail end of her venom themselves, so they don’t dare tell her off explicitly. Apparently she started working her “magic” on a couple she met via the Internet, and when they figured out what was up, they apparently went so far as to close down their online journals, change E-mail addresses, and damned near had to take out a restraining order because she would harass them so much.

She E-mailed my husband and I once, saying something about how strong our relationship is, etc. Personally, I don’t even want her thinking about our relationship. I know she wouldn’t be able to hurt us - and it sure is nice that we live a couple hours from her, unlike the other people in this story - but I just want her to forget we exist.

Everything bad in her life is someone else’s fault. Her lack of a relationship, her lack of recognition for her talent, etc.

19

If you don’t “get my back” when I need you to (and I don’t need it often), I will ask why you didn’t.

If you feign ignorance when we both know better, you’re history.

And yes, that has happened.

Q

20

I really enjoyed the companionship and personality of my friend “Casey.” She was great fun to be around. The problem was that she was a compulsive liar. There was no way that I could depend on anything she said. That drove me nuts.
I think she knew that I had suspected that she was careless with facts, but I had never been able to prove anything.

We hadn’t talked in a couple of months, but one day we were chatting on the phone and she mentioned that she had driven by my house the day before. I asked her if she had noticed anything unusual and she said that she hadn’t. “You mean you missed the major construction going on to the front of our house including the Port-O-John in the front yard?”

Things got a little quiet after that. It was the last time we talked. What a waste.

What would she have been doing on my street anyway? It’s a short street with two dead ends and two streets that intersect it. It’s way out of anyone’s way.