N, don’t want to pile on, so I’m just going to address a subpoint that seems mostly overlooked.
You’ve repeatedly complained that B is not treating you the way you have treated him in the past, or how you would treat him in the same circumstances. This is undoubtedly true.
But then you proceed to judge that this means you are the one behaving in the Only True Way a friend would, and since he isn’t that means he is disloyal, a bad friend, and what all.
Really, hon, that doesn’t follow. Different people have different notions of what being a friend means, and especially have different notions of how much various bits of possible interaction mean to the other person in a relationship.
A good friend and I once broke up, over a lapse on my part that I thought was trivial and she thought was major. What happened? I forgot her birthday, didn’t so much as send her a card or wish her Happy Birthday when we ran into each other that day. To her this was a huge betrayal of friendship. She always remembered mine. In fact, she picked out really nice presents and wrapped them and all – she even made me a birthday cake two years! To her, if I couldn’t be bothered to remember her birthday at all, well then, it meant I really didn’t care about her, that I wasn’t a true friend, and it had been a sham all along. And now that she knew the truth she was bitterly disappointed and wanted nothing further to do with me.
Well, guess what? From my side, my forgetting to celebrate her birthday meant nothing of the kind. What it indicated was that I had been busy with other matters, and celebrating birthdays is very, very low on my own priority list and so I’d just forgotten. That’s just how I and my family are – we don’t make big deals out of birthdays, never have. Personally I’ve never had a birthday party in my life. It doesn’t mean we don’t love each other, we just have different ways of showing it.
I was incredulous over how much importance she placed on this Birthday Card nonsense when we broke up. She decided I didn’t care because I didn’t mail her a chunk of paper on one day? The fact that, oh, I’d helped her moved her stuff to three different apartments in just the last year didn’t count? That I’d come to her place and cleaned it and brought her three meals a day when she was down with a horrible flu that summer meant nothing? That I pet sat for her whenever she had to travel? Hundreds and hundreds of hours of shared conversation and support and encouragement and help in achieving her goals over the years – none of that counted, since I hadn’t patronized Hallmark? Sheesh, what an idiot, I thought. If she felt that way, then good riddance.
Which was stupid, of course. To her, birthdays REALLY MATTERED in friendships, in the way that, oh, LENDING A HAND WHEN HELP IS NEEDED in friendship matters to me.
To bring this back to your situation, N, can you consider that this rift between you and B is happening because you two happen to place different degrees of important over being in the same place at the hour of midnight, 1/1/04? To you, it clearly matters. To B? Apparently not. Maybe he thinks in terms of “we’re good friends, we’ve been together hundreds of times in the past, and will be hundreds of times in the future, so compared to that, these few hours matter very, very little.”
Basically, what other have said: Doesn’t this decade long friendship matter more than a couple of hours? Do you really want to give up all you and he have meant to each other because you are hurt about what will happen for a couple of hours one night?