How did you lose a friend over something petty?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Sometimes you lose friends by major events: relocation, death, imprisonment
Other times it’s something that in retrospect was really petty.

Like my friend who for years was in a club with me where we met in each other’s homes. One time at my house, he started up the stairs and offhandedly asked if it was okay to look around upstairs, “because I’ve never seen this model in the subdivision”. I said it was a bad time, as it was a huge mess, and he could look next time. I was recalling all my laundry piled in the hallway and all my banking open on the desk.
He said “That’s all right, I’ve seen messes before” and waited for me to say something. I didn’t, being ticked with him. So he backed down the stairs and never spoke to me again.

2

Work friend, we’d hang out in the lunchroom. One time she went to the fridge and said “What!? No brown mustard!? What’s wrong with this bunch!?”
I said yellow mustard is the most popular kind after all. She shouted “Philistine!” and I laughed. She said what’s so funny and I said, she wasn’t exactly a gourmet, I’d seen her own lunches. That was it for her, and I got the cold shoulder from then on.

3

My best guy friend from high school now actively hates me because of a boyfriend I had when I was 17 years old. I dated the guy for less than 3 months. He was an idiot, don’t get me wrong – but when you are swearing to be friends with someone for the rest of your lives, three months seems awfully stupid to throw it away for.

My friend never explained why he didn’t want to be friends anymore, he just completely stopped hanging out with me our freshman year of college (months after the breakup) even though we lived in the same dorm. He is still close to some of my family members which means I have to hear about him and occasionally see him.

I wrote him an e-mail (we are 24 years old now) 6 years after this falling out and asked him why he stopped being my friend. He finally admitted it was because of my boyfriend when I was 17. I spent too much time with him, he said.

I said, ‘‘You could have told me you were feeling neglected then.’’ He refused to accept that he had a responsibility to tell me how he was feeling. It was my fault, I abandoned him.

He won’t accept that that was 6 years ago, refuses to move on, and still refuses to even talk to me.

I cannot fathom anything more petty to lose your best friend over. I still grieve.

4

In 1989 I quit smoking cigarettes. My best friend, whom I’d known since our teen years, insisted on smoking in my house. I asked her not to do so, and she blew up at me in a spectacular fashion, saying that I was being selfish and rude and she’d never come to my house again.

A year went by with no contact between us. Finally I decided that it was time to retrieve our friendship and put the past behind, so I bought two expensive tickets to La Traviata (my friend’s favorite opera) and sent her the tickets on her birthday, along with a note saying that I loved her and wanted to make amends, and hoped that she would enjoy seeing the opera with her daughter. A few days later, I received an envelope that contained the two tickets, shredded to bits.

I still miss this friendship. My friend died of cancer in 2002, without ever forgiving me.

5

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6

My husband insulted my sister-in-law with an off-color joke in an email. It wasn’t that bad of a joke - I can’t recall exactly what it was, but it was tame enough that I later told it to my 70-year-old mother and she wasn’t shocked. He apologized profusely. Sister-in-law had none of it. She then started badmouthing him to everyone who would listen, and got insulted when the rest of my family didn’t all band together with her and hate my husband.

That was almost 5 years ago. She doesn’t talk to any of us now. My brother (her husband) occasionally speaks to my parents or one of my siblings. They’re mostly out of the family, though - they don’t come to family holidays or parties or anything.

Crazy. All over one off-color joke.

7

Wow. Few people would take it that far. Sad story.

8

For some reason I occasionally play Devil’s Advocate with out really thinking about it. Mostly because it amuses me and it can be challenging. I suppose also I tend to have an instant reaction to something and but usually have a hard time explaining why until I mull it over for a bit so I’ll often grab what ever reason first pops into my head.

Anyway I had a friend who was married for the green card who wanted to start dating this other guy. This struck me as a bad idea and I said so. She asked me something about a friend always supporting that which would make their friend happy. So I landed on and began arguing the position that it was not necessarily true, a friend would want that which enabled him to spend the most time with another friend. The rest of the lunch was awkward and we never hung out again after that.

It actually took me a few days to realize how it seemed to her. Oh well, we weren’t great friend. Just friends. Although one time when I was visiting she went to the bathroom without shutting the door. shrugs

9

Yeah, no kidding. All because you told her not to smoke in your house.

10

My guess - he fancied you, realised you didn’t feel the same way, and decided if he couldn’t jump you then it wasn’t worth being your friend!

11

Friends with both since highschool, I sang at their wedding, they were godparents to my son. When he was 2 and my daughter was 5, I sent a picture of them to my friends. I got a phone call about 2 weeks later. She said he posted it on their refrigerator and keeps talking about how they’ve been married for 9 years and have no kids and I’ve been married for 7 years and have 2 kids. I asked if I should stop sending them pictures, sne said something like “Yeah, that’s all I need.” and hung up. I never heard from either of them again. I wrote. I left phone messages. I heard they got divorced. I wrote to her cousin and got her new email. Never heard from her. My son is almost 18 and my daughter is 21.

12

Last Wednesday, I went to the funeral of a former friend who died (young) of cancer. We hadn’t spoken for many years. I could have resurrected the friendship anytime I’d wanted to, had I not been so bloody proud. So could she. We didn’t. It sucks.

13

I had a very close friend who was getting divorced. He kept ranting on about how the divorce was all his wife’s fault. One time I made the mistake of suggesting it might be partially his fault. He got mad at me, said I was taking her side, and never spoke to me again.

Admittedly, I had lied when I said the divorce was partially his fault. It was in fact entirely his fault. He was openly having an affair with another woman and had moved into her apartment. His wife decided that this was more than she was going to put up with and told him she wanted a divorce. So why did he think it was all her fault? Because he had cheated on her many times before and always went back to her eventually. He didn’t think it was fair for her to do something different this time.

14

She was moving to a new apartment, and I decided to chip in, tho she had another (male) friend and two burly moving guys to do the main lifting. I did let her know that I had a class that night and wouldn’t be able to help on the other end of the move (wasn’t a huge amount of stuff by any means), plus going up and down the stairs that day was making me woozy, so I begged off and went to my class (recuperating for about an hour on the veranda on campus). Never saw her again, she never returned my calls, not even so much as a chewing out or attempt to hear my side of the story. This after many “long dark nights of the soul” talks where she admitted that I had made a great difference in her life. The other male friend? Somehow got away with murder, relatively speaking, on several occasions (to have heard her tell it), but she didn’t suddenly drop him like she did me.

Who can fathom the female mind…

15

My old college roommate of three years refused to speak to me for the last month that we shared our apartment, and hasn’t spoken to me since. I asked that her boyfriend not sleep naked in the living room, in front of the glass doors where the entire neighborhood could see him. Then she mailed me a Christmas card, asking for the full amount of our apartment deposit, even though I cleaned the place after she moved out, and we’d each paid half the deposit in the first place.

It’s been 15 years since we’ve spoken, which is a shame. I liked her, and she was usually a nice person. I wish we could be friends again. Deposit and naked boyfriend forgiven.

16

John, I don’t understand this part. How do you know the other male friend ‘got away with murder’ if you lost contact with her? You don’t refer to him as if he was your friend as well as hers.

If you know through speaking with him, or through just observing from afar, I might suggest she is calculating that the news of how she lets him get away with murder will get back to you somehow, and treats him well to further get your goat.

I go through this regularly with my best friend and his wife. While she either ignores me completely or deigns to interact with me by contradicting every single thing I say, she’ll at the same time laugh at all his jokes, etc., etc., especially after he has just done something, like not take off shoes in the house, that would normally earn either of us icy stares or worse.

I don’t want to get into the bottomless pit of trying to fathom the female mind, but this is a fascinating thread because I used to be just as much her friend as his. Something happened, and I can identify the time – about two years ago – but not the cause. So I don’t even have the satisfaction of adding to this “lose a friend over something petty” thread. I don’t know if it was petty or not.

17

I have 3 (I’m so great at keeping friends, eh?) Let’s see, in chronological order…

1.) Friend K and I were best friends in the 2nd and 3rd grade, we did everything together. She was so cool, I worshiped her. She moved away and even though it was just the next city over, it was too tough trying to maintain the friendship. I was always the one calling her. Around the 6th grade, at her birthday party, I realized that we were just too different (she was desperately trying to become a “popular”) and it was just too hard to maintain as we were going to different middle schools. I made the concious decision to let her drift away. Now that I think about it, not once after that did she ever call me.
Anyways, cut to high school. I found out that she had transferred into my school (after going through two others already). I was thinking of getting in touch with her when my mutual friend told me “Yeah, she asked me about you. She asked me if you were still a geek.”
:confused:
I never thought that she saw me like that; I was pretty surprised. Excuse me if I had goals, and wanted to get high grades to go to a college and get the hell out of the area. Needless to say, I lost my desire to say hi to her pretty quickly after that. Funny thing is that I recently got a Myspace friend request from her. I doubt I’ll reply back anytime soon; I don’t know if I could match her high life of selling “grillz”. :rolleyes:

2.) Friend L just went nuts by the end of senior year. New, strange friends and new, strange behavior. I won’t even go into prom night. Our small circle of best friends and I were invited to her graduation party. Seeing as my best friend M(I would consider L my 2nd or 3rd at the time) was out of the country at the time, I was wary of L’s new and unpredictible behavior, and that I had just discovered the joy of working a minimum wage job for long hours, I just didn’t have the energy to put up with her (no doubt I would be the odd one out at her party). Cut to two weeks later. I got a random comment on my Livejournal. I could tell that it was from her half-wit boyfriend just by the way it was written. It ranted on and on about how terrible M, J, and I were by missing her party, how dare I call myself a decent human being, blah blah blah…I was entertained by the fact that 1.) It was directed towards M, who was still out of the country and 2.) L had made her boyfriend do the dirty work for her. It blew up into a spectacular war on my blog. I couldn’t believe how L had changed so quickly, and how missing her party (even when I knew that when she was around her “new friends”, she wouldn’t give me the time of day) was such a traumatic deal to her. I can’t say that I miss this psycho much.

3.) Friend J was part of my close circle of friends in high school. This one was probably the cleanest cut, but still over something stupid. It had been a couple years since I last hung out with J. She was working a lot, not going to school like the rest of us, and had a fiance that I hadn’t even been introducted to. I was having a going away party with a small group of friends. I invited M and her significant other (whom I was friends with) and S and his girlfriend (while I didn’t know her much, I had at least been introduced). I asked J to come. I don’t know if this would be a faux pas or not, but I didn’t invite her boyfriend. I honestly didn’t know J much anymore, let alone the fiance that I had never been introduced to. I thought nothing of it, but apparently J was very offended by this and chose not to come based on that. I had even apologized for not thinking about it when I realized her viewpoint on the matter, but apparently it was too late.

18

I had something of the same experience with a woman who I maintained a long-distance friendship with for something on the order of three years.

We exchanged e-mails several times a week. We talked on the phone at least once a month for a good long time. We were both going through rather dark times in our lives and we shared pretty much everything, even though we never met in person.

Then something changed. I didn’t hear from her for a month. I e-mailed her a couple of times and didn’t hear back. So I sent her another e-mail asking what was going on. I got a big response about how she’d met a guy on-line and fallen in love. I got one more response from her in the next month, then nothing.

Three months later, with no contact, I asked what was going on. No response. Two more e-mails not responded to and I got angry about it. Then I finally got a response about how people drift apart, but she’ll always be my friend.

I never heard from her again. At the one year mark, I erased her from my various address books and deleted her web pages from my favorites.

No Tammy, you won’t always be my friend. Friends don’t pull this shit.

19

A friend and I once arranged to meet at a large railway station, at the ticket office, but we’d forgotten it was a huge place with several ticket offices and missed each other. I got home to a series of increasingly angry answerphone messages (this was before mobiles) asking why I hadn’t left a message on her answerphone.

We had an argument about it over the phone. When I said the reason I hadn’t called her home was because I couldn’t remember her phone number, there was a stunned silence, followed by “Ellef, I know all my friends’ phone numbers off by heart”.

I asked her if she wanted a medal for that, and it went downhill from there.

20

Despite being incredibly close throughout school, my best friend in high school dropped me like a stone the minute we got to university - stopped talking to me, returning my calls etc. It took me a while to get the point - after all, it was hardly expected, and I spent the next year turning myself inside out trying to work out what I did wrong. Finally after a year, she approached me and said that she hadn’t liked herself at school, and wanted to take the opportunity to erase that old self, by starting over fresh. Over the next 5 years or so, I made 2 overtures to her to see if we could catch up - which were always rebuffed, and I realised that there was no point in bothering any more. Quite frankly, I think I liked the old her better!

But what sucks more than the loss of a great friend, is the damage she caused by handling it the way she did - I spent so much time convinced I had to be really terrible if my best friend didn’t want anything to do with me, that now it takes a lot for me to trust (and not very much for me to lose trust in others). I’ll forgive her for the loss of her friendship, but I’ll always begrudge the fact that she influences any other friendships I’ll ever have.