Nine years of friendship and now I can't stand him

PapoPez22 · 12:48 AM

I'd like to get your perspective on this.

I'm a straight female. My best friend is a gay male. We met while working together about 9 years ago. Normally, friendships that start at the workplace don't last too long for me after one party quits, which is ok. But this one has managed to stay in my life for almost a decade. We were really close, but would treat each other like a pair of dudes who don't show their feelings.

About a year ago his 5-year-long relationship ended shortly after he went to study abroad. He was heartbroken, but he took the situation to open himself up to new experiences as a single gay man in a different country. And he was fascinated. At first, it was cool to hear his sense of novelty, but after a while it got really old. Every time we spoke, he would always talk about who he was sleeping with, flirting with, hooking up with this guy and this guy and this guy, blah blah blah. All. The. Time. Anyway, I understood that this was new for him, so I sucked it up and mildly pretended I was interested in his flings and trysts. Anyway, this is just for context.

Then, a string of weird small things started to happen: (it's quite hard for me to put it in a nutshell, so I'll just go ahead and indent the story; you can skip to the non-indented bottom if you don't feel like reading it all):

As we were planning on going on a trip together, all of the sudden he abruptly said:

“But don't you dare to invite your boyfriend".

I was kinda shocked by the comment, because, one, I was obviously not going to invite him so it was super unnecessary to say that, and two, it sounded kinda rude, and my boyfriend has always been super nice to him. He noticed that I didn't like the comment and tried to laugh it off. I decided not to make a big deal out of it, so I just let it fly.

A couple of weeks later, I was ranting about my boyfriend, and at one point he started chuckling and said:

“Oh my God, can you imagine if I moved to NY and you guys break up?”.

The comment really bothered me, mainly because I’m the kind of person who can talk s**t about my loved ones but will strongly defend them if I hear someone trying to diss them. Also, my friend has been known to admit to socially engineer situations in order to achieve a certain result, and the comment sounded like something he might try to pull off.

A few days later, he goes like:

”Hey, I gotta question for you. If I moved to NY, would you live with me?”

…What? Was he pretending I would just move in with him and leave my boyfriend hanging?

“And what about my boyfriend?” I said. “I live with him, you know. And I think we've become used to having our own privacy, I don’t think we would feel comfortable going back to living with roommates again”. I don't remember much of what happened next, but that was pretty much the end of the argument.

Later on, a childhood gay friend (let's call him Seth) came over to stay at my apartment while visiting NY for the weekend. On his last day in the city, my friend started texting me asking me “Is he gone yet?”. I finally replied saying:

“Yes, he's on his way to the airport. Why?”.

"Good. Because I don't like seeing you having a good time with other people, hahahaha”

I kinda laughed back, but was again bothered and annoyed by the comment. He laughed it off again, and then asked me:

"Did you think about me? Like, ‘Ah, if he was here I would be having an even better time?’”. Uh,… no, I didn’t. I was simply just having a good time with my friend who, by the way, has known me for longer than you. Honestly, the whole exchange just weirded me out.

Fast-forward to Summer: he tells me that he is coming to NY the following week to take the NY bar test and was going to stay with a friend during the week, but needed another place to stay during the weekend. I said, sure, no problem, “ we can make plans to hang out together while you’re here”. He says, “Actually, can I just come in on Friday instead of Saturday?”. Yeah, sure, why not, whatever is best for you. "Sounds like a plan!"

But then, the Tuesday before he was supposed to stay with us, my boyfriend and I realized our 6th anniversary was on the same weekend.

"Does that mean we can't celebrate our anniversary? Ugh, this sucks”, my boyfriend said.

"You know what? Why don’t we do this”, I said. “He originally asked me about coming here on Saturday but then changed it to Friday. What if I tell him to come here on Saturday so we can celebrate on Friday night? I think it’s a win-win, right?”. My boyfriend agreed.

So I go and explained the situation to my friend over a DM, and asked him if it was ok. And his response was a very dry and plain “Ok.”, period included. Nothing else. I knew him well enough to know that he was not pleased at all. I was mildly disappointed by his apparent attitude, but whatever.

Well, Friday afternoon came and all of the sudden he texts me:

“I don’t have a place to stay today”.

I automatically got silently upset because all I read was “anniversary plans: ruined”. But of course, I was not going to leave him in the street. I knew, however, that I had to tell him that I was upset with the situation because there was no way I would be able to pretend or act like it was all good, so I decided to express how uncomfortable I was and get it out of the way. Well, he went silent for a few hours before responding: “Never mind. I’m going to Delaware.”

“What? Who lives there?”

“I’m staying with a family member. I’m not coming back to NY”.

“… So, you’re not staying here at all?”, I asked, confused by this random solution and his bluntness.

“No.”

“Well,… I just want you to know that I was looking forward to hang out with you this weekend and my plans still stand. So, if you change your mind and come back, my doors are open for you”.

I didn’t hear from him during the whole weekend. I thought he might have gotten mad because I prioritized my anniversary over him, or at least that's what it seemed like. It kinda made me sad, but if he couldn’t understand it, there was nothing I could do for him.

He finally called me on Sunday night like nothing happened, and told me that it was all good, he was just too stressed with the bar test, and explained that what had happened was that the friend he was staying with was going to a family thing and invited him, but he did’t want to go because there were going to be kids running around and he wasn’t "in the mood for that".

So… he DID have a place to stay, it was just that he wasn’t in the mood for it, so he would rather ignore my anniversary plans and tell me he had “nowhere to go”? What the actual f**k.

By now, I’m starting to feel fed up by him and decided to distance myself a bit… not replying right away and not engaging in a lot of conversation like we used to, but staying friendly as always. And he noticed. One day, he sent me a DM on FB while I was working. A couple of hours went by without me responding. So he decided to screenshot my conversation window that showed I was last active 30min ago and send it to me to basically confront me for ignoring him, half jokingly, half serious. Psycho much? I replied, justified myself saying I was at work and he couldn’t pretend I just start messaging him whenever he wants. I was pissed.

Finally, fast forward to Thanksgiving: Seth comes to visit NY again and stays with me for a week. My friend happens to be in NY too, so I already have my guard up for any weird comments or “jokes”. Seth really wanted to go to this small restaurant, so he made reservations for us and some of his friends to go. As we were getting ready, we started freaking out about the commute and not being able to get there on time, and in the middle of this my best friend texted me inviting me to a bar. I decided not to reply right away while we figured out if we should stay in the train, change routes, take an Uber, and what to do about our other friends who where stuck in traffic. We finally got there, got our seats and got served our food quite late. That’s when I texted him back to check in with him.

“Never mind. I left”. Short words. He was mad again. And I don’t have time for this.

Next day, he starts to complain that I’m ignoring him. I explained the situation again, and by now I’m just hating having to explain myself every time he demands something from me. Not even my mother, no even my boyfriend act like that with me.

“No, no, no. These should be the priorities in your life: 1. Your family. 2. Your boyfriend. 3. ME, and 4. The rest of the people in your life I really don’t care about”.

"You know, I really dislike those kind of comments. It’s not the first time you tell me about this “order of priorities” in my life and it upsets me a lot. What is the next thing that you’re going to say? That you’re just joking?”

“No, I’m being very serious”.

And that’s when I lost it. I didn’t disrespected him, but I did come down hard on him to put him in his place, telling him I had enough of his comments, demands or his “I’m the only one who matters” attitude. I guess he wasn’t expecting me to react like that because he immediately backed off, apologized and kinda justified himself saying he was exaggerating with the whole “priorities” thing, and then said he felt sad and didn’t want to talk about the subject anymore.

I tried letting it cool off, even tried some small talk, but as days and weeks went by, my anger was still there. I was kinda struggling with feeling the obligation of reaching out to him to meet while he was staying in NY, but then I decided I should just acknowledge my rage and forget about feeling like I HAD to do anything.

I knew we both were going back home for the Holidays and thought I should write him a note to try to patch things up, but when I started writing it, I noticed I was still mad and had really no interest in seeing him. What was the point on writing anything, then?

I returned to NY and saw on Facebook that he was coming to NY again. I guess he found a job here, or wants to keep trying to find something. I have no idea. He reached out two weeks ago in a last attempt to hang out again, but I never replied. It’s been three months and I still have no interest, man. Hell, I’m kinda mad all over again just by writing this.

Here's the thing: I'm not the sweetest sunshine ever, but I do think of myself as a really nice person. I rarely get bothered by things, and whenever I do, I usually give people the benefit of the doubt and let it fly because 90% of the time I’m incapable of staying mad at someone. And this works for me! If I start seeing a pattern, though, I do put some distance while staying friendly to make myself less accessible to a conflict. But if I feel like someone is just abusing or taking advantage or assuming an attitude that offends me, my way of handling it is to shut the person out of my life. It doesn’t happens very often, but when it does, it happens for good and it’s very hard for me to go back. I may have shut down about 3-4 people in my life, which is not a lot, and none of them have been people who lasted very long in my life… obviously.

But this friend… we’ve known each other for 9 years. Thats A LOT! I even used to say he was going to be my maid of honor. We never had any problems, we’ve always had each other’s back, our friendship was always super chill, not one single drama. And all of the sudden this past year was like, too much. How did our friendship turned out like this? My only theory is that maybe losing his boyfriend and living like a nomad across states made him feel unstable, and maybe he felt I was the one constant thing in his life or something.

And I don't even know how to describe his attitude: is it possessive? Sort of psycho? Is it almost narcissistic? Demanding? Needy? All I can say is that I constantly found myself thinking "Wait, what? Who does he think he is?".

Anyway, I don't think I want to shut him down forever, but I can’t definitely resume my friendship anytime soon.

Am I being unfair? Am I exaggerating? Should I write him a letter even if I don’t really feel like doing so? Am I being the word person ever for shutting him out of my life like this? Any other thoughts?

avlady · Feb 18, 2017, 12:15 AM

it sounds like this person is very controlling. i would not continue this relationship-you've already put enough into it. you may be disappointed in the end.good luck

Feb 18, 2017, 12:30 AM