As the title says. Circumstances, if you feel comfortable sharing them? (Or if you’ve never done it, what circumstances to you would be ample justification for cutting off all contact with someone?) How long has it been? Ever had a relapse, even after many years?
One toxic friendship, one stalker and a couple of people who got too into drinking/drugs for my liking. I just stopped calling them and never returned their calls. It was easy (once I made the decision) and I never looked back.
I had a toxic friendship (he was manipulative and I was willing to be manipulated). He moved away (this was college) and tried to continue to manipulate me long distance. A summer away from his control showed me how boring I’d become with him around.
I broke it off with an email and a following phone call.
It’s odd. I still wonder about him and have dreams where I see him.
The spectacular end to a pretty long-term long distance relationship; as soon as he got out of the State Hospital and back to England, I sent him an email ending it. Then I blocked his emails, turned off the answering machine, and went away for a week so that I wouldn’t have to hear the phone ringing. By the time I got back he had pretty much gotten the idea.
He got engaged to somebody else about six weeks later. Someone he met in the State Hospital.
That was almost seven years ago. I have since thought about trying to contact him, but there is really no way to. He and his wife are semi-nomadic and on the wrong side of the ocean. And I’m really not missing much, either, it’s just a sort of morbid/nostalgic curiosity.
Hmm. He might be reading this. Weird.
Oh I’ve done this more than a few times for various reasons, but ultimately it boils down to incompatability + assholishness = see ya!
Have you ever inherited friends from other friends? I had a friend once that I inherited from a girlfriend and another friend. In a group this new person wasn’t so bad, but when one friend moved away and the GF and I were left with him, I tried to make nice and hang out and invited him to do stuff with us, afterwards my GF and I would often end up shocked about something stupid he did or bitching about what an ass he had been. And often my GF and our other friend would tear this guy a new one behind his back, but would still call him up to invite him out. So one day I was out with this guy and his GF at the grocery store and all they could do is insult the crap out of each other in my presence and in public. When I got home I decided this not someone I enjoy being around, this is not someone I respect in any way and more importantly this is somone who I find very offensive. So I told my GF that I would no longer have anything to do with him and I called her and my other friend out on their two-faced behavior with him. Why remain “friends” with someone you don’t respect?
Other instances of cutting off all contact involve people who flake out and become demanding and beligerant and after pointing it out they say/do hurtful things. That’s usually my cue.
I can forgive a lot, but once someone starts behaving like a 6 yr old brat, it’s time to move on. Life’s too short to waste on jerks.
I cut off all contact with my mother about 19 years ago. As far as I’m concerned, I’m just performing to the basic contract we had when I was a child – as soon as she was no longer legally responsible for me, I was to get out and stop being a drain on her life. I’m rather dispassionate about it and only think about the relationship when my shrink and I get bored of other subjects. My sister, however, hates That Woman and will not say her name or refer to her as her “mother” (or even discuss the concept of our having had biological parents).
A mate from uni’, used to be just that, a mate. Then for some reason he got all uppity on me in conversation, seemed like nothing I said was of consequence or approved off, in comparison with what he did (which made conversation boring).
Then to top it all off, after I told him my girlfriend was pregnant, he told me the first thing I should do when kiddo was born was to have a paternity test (he gave a graphic account of how to use one) and then beat me down with an hour of conversation because he thought I didn’t love my girlfriend and shouldn’t be with her (yeah, an hour, no idea why i didn’t just walk away)
So I just stopped being in contact with him, didn’t answer texts or calls from him. Kind of wish he’d ask why I wasn’t talking to him so I could tell him what an ass-hat he is.
On an ironic side note, my two and a half month old daughter has never been compared to her mum, only me. I joke and ask her if she’s sure our girl is hers 
Yup. First girlfriend during my senior HS year. I broke up with her after I graduated. Long story short, I found out that she wanted to contact me again a few years ago, 20 years after we broke up. We e-mailed and IMd for two weeks, and I realized that she was expecting things to be like they were before we broke up in HS. About that time my son became quite ill and had to be hospitalized. I only IMd her twice more from the hospital. That wasn’t good enough for her, though. She sent me e-mail a couple of months after that asking me why I didn’t want to talk to her anymore. I explained my time pressures, and that I would be happy to keep up by e-mail. Still not what she wanted to hear. I didn’t try to contact her again, and kicked her off of my IM friends list. Actually, I worry about her because her husband is in the Army, and I’m sure has been to Iraq more than once. But I’d be a fool to open that can of worms again, not when she couldn’t accept that I broke up with her after 20 years.
Vlad/Igor
I have. I had a friend that was way too immature, manipulative, demanding, two-faced, lying all the time, etc. She didn’t take it very well, to say the least. The thing is she’s a coward to say anything to my face, and always has been, so by cutting her off through the internet and phone she couldn’t say anything else about it. It’s been about a year and we just ignore each other now.
And no, I’ve never tried to go back but she’s tried more than once to be friends again.
In high school, I had a steady GF for a year or so. After a while, I felt more like a counselor than a boyfriend, and I found out gradually that she was nutso. Crazy as Frith in a barn. After we broke up, she kept trying to come back. I finally told her, “Leave my life forever.” (quoting a skit from television.) She did.
I approve heartily of this phrase. 
I can’t really say I cut off contact with my father years ago, because I never made a hard or fast decision to do so. He is a paranoid, manipulative and abusive hermit who screens his phone calls (in the days before caller ID you had to know the Secret Ring: let it ring twice, hang up, call back) or he wouldn’t answer his already-unlisted number. His name isn’t on his mailbox. He has never given out an email address.
He has never so much as called or sent a birthday card in 20 years. And yet he has the gall to complain that I never keep in contact with him, that somehow it’s my fault that he’s impossible to talk to and even harder to get hold of.
Through the grapevine (his wife visited my ex-job after I had quit) I hear he still accuses me of being a bad son because I don’t call — and yet I hear from his mother that he never calls her, either. Bad son, am I? Sounds like he’s projecting guilt from his own behavior onto me, but that’s typical: nothing is ever Dad’s fault. That’s just the way he is. Poor paranoid little victim.
Each girlfriend I’ve had (well, the three serious ones) questioned why I don’t speak to him. “Oh, come on, he’s not that bad, why don’t you contact him?” and so we go visit him, as a couple. He’s as bad, or worse, as the time before. (He once asked me, “Why are you dating her? She’s not very pretty — you could do better.”)
So… I never really made a decision to cut off contact with him, but cut off we did, gradually, because I came to the realization that I didn’t really need or care for his approval or input into my life. At this point, contacting him is so much harder (for no reward) than ignoring him.
I cut off all contact about a year ago with a guy I’d been friends with. We met through mutual friends at a time when many of my other friends had moved out of the area (after college), and I was feeling pretty lonely. He was always available to hang out and to do stuff, and I took advantage of that. However, pretty much from the start he annoyed me. But I was too lonely to tell him to go away. So I put up with it.
Then things really started to bother me so I tried to back off a bit - always being too “busy” to get together, saying I’m really more of a loner and needed my space, things like that. The hints just didn’t work, and I kept getting more and more annoyed with the whiney “What did I do? Why don’t you like me any more? We were such good friends; how can you cut me off like this?” etc. I finally had to just say flat out that I did not want to see him or to hang out with him AT ALL.
I have not seen him since then, which is unfortunate as it’s meant that when our mutual friends get together, we have to hang out with them at separate times. But it’s so much better for me not to have him around. I feel much less stressed and less angry.
A good friend of mine from high school. For a while he even dated my younger sister.
Then he met and married a woman who, at least to me, seemed incredibly insecure. She forbid him to contact me. Wait a minute lady, he dated my sister, not me. I’ve heard that they divorced years ago, but I’ve not been able to find him since.
To bad. I still sometimes miss having him as a friend.
I met a woman during our freshman year of high school, and we were friends for the next 16 years – and for the last 12 of those years, through college and our 20s, we were best friends. In 2001 (the year we both turned 30) our friendship hit some serious skids, and by that October it was over. I still cared about her, but I was too hurt and angry to have anything more to do with her … and I didn’t trust her anymore, which made it impossible for me to love her.
We lived 50 miles apart and e-mail was our primary means of communication, so I sent her a message letting her know where I stood: that I was done, and that I couldn’t say how I’d feel in the future but for the time being I did not want her to call or e-mail me any more. She didn’t ever call, but she did send me 3 or 4 more e-mails over the next year. After the first one I sent a terse reply repeating my request for her to never contact me again, but I ignored the subsequent messages. Each one was her spewing vile at me: they pissed me off, and it took all of my willpower to keep from firing back responses that basically said “fuck you” (but in lots more words). Like I said, though, that only lasted for about a year and then she finally went away.
Last year, I got an e-mail from her out of the blue: she’d just found out about the death of a mutual friend, and asked me if I had any details. I realized that I was completely ambivalent about her, and I had no desire to reestablish contact. I understood her desire to learn more about how our friend died, but I didn’t want her to misinterpret any response from me as an olive branch so I didn’t reply.
The closest I’ve ever come to thinking about getting back in touch with her was a few weeks ago, when I heard a dramatic reading that was very emotional and reminded me of her. It kind of surprised me to feel that way, but the feeling faded after the emotion died down and I’m chalking it up to part of me wishing that things were different.
I haven’t spoken or written to her in 4.5 years, and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I lost a great deal when I cut off contact with her, but at the time I felt that I had no choice. I’ve second-guessed myself from time to time over the years, and there’s some guilt mixed in there for good measure, but on the whole I feel that I made the right decision. I deeply miss that friendship, but I don’t miss the person she was when I stopped speaking to her.
It’s not easy cutting people off. For me, it usually takes years of them abusing me in a blood relationship or friendship before I suddenly wise up and learn it’s healthier for me to say goodbye. Last instance of me getting wise to being betrayed, emotionally kicked around and generally treat like shit took nearly two years. I’m too forgiving for my own good.
I felt heaps better once the ties were cut. Sad too, yes – but only for the good times. Not the bad. And there were too many of those.
Cutting a person off that you have spent tons of time and energy on is very difficult. Once it seems like you’ve done it, the worst part is keeping it that way. For me it’s nearly impossible to say goodbye permanently because I keep memories of the past in the front of my mind. I always end up thinking of them with a smile on my face and then saying to myself, why go through all this mess when you could just be straightforward and call them? I usually favor the direct path over the misleading or hidden one. This tendancy has gotten me into trouble over the years but whenever I ask a guy friend (best advice-givers in my opinion) what to do in these situations he ALWAYS tells me not to sulk and mope around over something I want to say or do, that I should just get it over with and be open-minded. So, dunno. I guess you could argue that it’s not particularly healthy to completely abandon contact with someone you had a deep relationship with. Well, not to say I’m right. Hell, I’m goin to make some tea.
Having had a rather wild youth, many of my old friends went on to become total losers, alcoholics or drug abusers. So I’m used to saying goodbye.
One girl friend was a good friend but very self-centered and needy. I was going to UC Berkeley and we only saw each other when I took the trouble to visit her. She came to see me only one time during those years. She was a total drama queen. One day she called me up, hysterical, demanding to know “where we stand” and was I a true friend to her and really laying it on thick. I was like WTF? So I cut waaaaayy back on spending time with her. Then one day, she rolled her eyes and blew me off for the last time and right then and there I decided I was DONE. We didn’t speak for about 4 years.
Currently, I’m cutting off a so-called friend who disinvited me to his wedding because of a lie about me that someone (who doesn’t even know me) told to him. He told me to “wait it out” and “it will all blow over” but I’ve decided that someone so willing to believe such things about me after knowing me for 15 years is not really my friend. Plus, I dispise his wife. Adios, Joel, you poor bastard.
In the eight years I’ve been in the US, my next-youngest brother back in Canada has had a lot of problems of his own making. It’s completely changed his personality… or maybe let elements of his personality that were always there come to the surface. You’ve heard the saying “familiarity breeds comtempt”? Well, the familiarity is gone and all he has left is contempt. We used to be pals for a lot of years. We played a lot of music together, in fact that was our special bond. One of the best things about being a musician is if, not when, but if you ever find somebody with whom you share that psychic bond while playing music. That was us. People would comment on it all the time. I had such plans for us in our advancing years.
Well, our contact grew sparser, and when we did do e-mail, he was terse and not forthcoming about anything. That deteriorated into nastiness and arrogance and condescension. I had to tell him it had finally worn me down. Nobody else in the world talks to me like that, and as of that day, he wasn’t going to do it anymore, either. I said I was finished trying to reestablish a relationship with him. I told him I was going to miss my brother, but I wasn’t going to miss him at all. My position on it now is that if he never gets a clue about human interaction, he can take up autofornication.
Then there was the 25 years I didn’t speak to my father before he died. That wasn’t difficult at all. I didn’t want to know where he was or how to get ahold of him, and I didn’t want anything from him, so I never asked. When I heard he’d died, it was like, “oh.”
I had a friend cut off contact with me. She started ignoring me, and when I asked what was up, she told me that I was a bad friend and shouldn’t hang out with them anymore. When I asked for clarification, she said that I left her house to hang out with another group of friends. The first group had all fallen asleep (early classes) and so I said my goodbyes, left and that made me a bad friend.
Bullshit reason, obviously, but I did admire her being upfront with me (except for the ignoring, which only went on for about two days).
I’ve done it once.
She was a very negative, energy-sucking, woe-is-me, drama queen who refused to take responsibility for anything that happened in her life. Nothing was ever her fault. Oh - and she loved to bitch about her boyfriend (they both treated each other like absolute crap), but when I just couldn’t be supportive of their relationship anymore and ended up telling her that maybe she shouldn’t see him anymore, I got the old “But I looooooooooooooove him!!” line. :rolleyes: She only ever contacted me when she had something to complain about, but never wanted to know what was going on in my life. Eventually, I stopped calling her, and she stopped calling me (unless it was to bitch about her mom or her job).
When we bought our first house in 2004, we didn’t tell her. (Yeah, passive-aggressive and all that.) At Christmastime that year, we got a card and a phone call from her. After staring at the answering machine for a week, I just deleted the message. That was the last I ever heard from her. We had been friends for more than 10 years, and I just didn’t feel like wasting my emotional energy on her any more.