I was visiting my best buddy from college for a weekend, bosom buddies while we were studying, and kept in touch by phone and letter for years. Eight years after graduation, we were just shooting the shit - and he suddenly stopped me mid-sentence and said “you’ve changed”.
After I left his house, I never heard from him.
A couple of years later a friend bumped into him in the street and, not knowing what was up, dragged him to my house to say hi. He was in town but hadn’t told me. It was really awkward. Out of politeness I went to see him in a play later that evening, then went to the afterparty with him and his girlfriend. The last I saw of him was when I was leaving the party. I tried to say goodbye, but he shouted “shut up - this is a crucial bit of the match”. His girlfriend said “it’s not a match, it’s a PlayStation game and you can pause it”. But he never looked up from the screen.
That was ten years ago. It took me about three years to come to terms with what had happened, mainly because I didn’t have an explanation for it.
I’ve been there, with my college roommates. I was pretty wrecked; I’m sure some of it was down to being 21 and overly dramatic, but I have no desire ever to go through it again
Friends come and go. I don’t recall ever “breaking up” with any friends. School, jobs, marriage, and so on take people in different directions. Sometimes I run into a friend from the past. Every time so far, I’ve found that when we get done laughing over old times, we don’t have much to talk about.
My two best friends in high school stopped talking to me completely sometime after I left for college. Wouldn’t return email, snail mail, phone calls, anything. Haven’t heard anything from either of them since. No idea why.
It’s been a long time since I had a “best friend” other than my partner . . . but when I did, losing him was very traumatic. That kind of friendship is rare, and when it’s over, it hurts.
This happened to me about a year ago and I’m still upset about it. I don’t dwell on it any more, but I still can’t be in the same room with her without getting angry/sad/headache/dizzy and having to leave and vent to my husband for a bit.
If my best friend died, I would be pretty shaken up. I would cry a lot over it and miss him forever.
If something happened between us that was so bad that it would cause one of us to end our relationship…wow, that thing would have to be pretty bad. If I did something that could make him hate me…geez, I sort of hate myself already.
I voted “I don’t know” because, while I do have a best friend and we’ve been friends for almost 20 years, she now lives in a different state and I rarely see her anymore. So, while I would almost surely be wrecked when she “broke up” with me, I suspect that the long distance between us would mitigate my hurt feelings over the long term.
It would be different if we lived near each other, or (like we used to) lived with each other.
I had a best friend. We got along real well but, quite frankly, he treated his wife like shit. It had been worse in the years before I knew him (physical abuse and affairs) so I guess I told myself the verbal abuse and lying I saw was an improvement and he was getting “better”.
But he backslid and started another affair. He reached the point where he was actually living with the other woman while still insisting to his wife that he wasn’t having an affair. But she decided she’d had enough and rather than go through this again, she was leaving him and seeking a divorce.
My friend lost it. He insisted the whole problem was his wife. She was the one breaking up the marriage. He had cheated on her before and she had tolerated it, so she was supposed to keep doing it.
He came to me for sympathy. And while I could make general statements of support like “It’s too bad” and “I’m sorry to hear that” he wanted me to agree with him that it was all his wife’s fault. And he kept pushing the point until he finally asked me outright if I agreed it was all her fault.
I didn’t tell him the whole truth - that the divorce was all his fault, he was a terrible husband, and I was amazed she had put up with him for as long as she had - but I did suggest to him that he might be partly to blame.
That was all it took. He yelled at me that if I was going to take her side, I was not his friend and he would never talk to me again. And that was the end of our friendship.
I had one of those rare relationships, a female platonic BFF for more than 30 years. We had a misunderstanding, which led to a fight (over email, no less) which ended badly. That was three years ago and I’m still upset that we couldn’t continue the friendship.
The best man at my wedding passed away last year. Given the level of devastation that occurred then, I can’t imagine the pain that would have resulted if the breakup had been voluntary.
I said the I would be devastated which is more than true. I have known my best friend for 20 years and we have shared so much. We aren’t that much alike but we share our problems (big and small) and she is the one of only two people (the other being my husband) who ‘gets’ me.
That said, we have had our ups and downs. We’ve fought some. We’ve both done stupid things. But we never lose contact or that sense of rightness between us.
Based on the big things our relationship has already weathered, I can’t see anything that would cause us to break up.
Like Fretful Porpentine, my best friend and roommate in college ended our friendship, and it was awful. Part of the problem was that she didn’t tell me she’d decided she was no longer my friend and in fact really seemed to hate my guts. If I’d given her reason, she wasn’t sharing. I was tragically naive at that age and just sat there and took the abuse. It took me months to understand what was going on and finally extricate myself.
I’ve ended close friendships since then, and no matter how justified I feel, it always, always sucks.
I just lost a friend not long ago. Why, I don’t know, though there are a couple possible reasons - the most likely one being completely unreasonable. Well we weren’t best friends but I was very upset for a while & cried a bit. Having this happen taught me that people will come and people will go from my life, and that it doesn’t matter if they say they’ll be my friend forever, if I buy them tickets to a concert they’ve been wanting to see, if they open their home to me in a time of need, they’ll still stop talking to me eventually.
Now I have a policy of making friends but never dropping them, never chasing after lost connections, just letting friendships come and go as they will.
Had some friends who I considered family, and that’s what they called me. Things went downhill over several years and ended extremely badly. It’s been almost 10 years now and I’m still bothered by it. I don’t understand how they seemed to think that their behavior was acceptable to anyone, let alone to someone they called “family”.
