Our friends are our chosen family. They're always there when we need a laugh and when we need shoulder to lean on. At least they're supposed to be, right? Unfortunately, a lot of friendships don't last. It's often because people grow apart, but sometimes it's because some people are just really lousy friends who feel no remorse when they take advantage of others or stab them in the back.
These Redditors share their experiences with toxic friends and reveal what the final straw was that ultimately ended the friendship. Content is edited for clarity.
Friend Drama At The Happiest Place On Earth
“I had a friend who I introduced to my sister-in-law. My sister-in-law started organizing and paying for a trip to Disney World, Orlando, FL. This is no small feat as we live in the UK. The friend wanted to go as well. This made my mother-in-law very happy as she didn’t like the idea of my sister-in-law traveling solo.
The sister-in-law puts down a deposit for the friend and organizes places to stay, travel etc. Two weeks before the payment deadline for the trip, the friend turns around and says she can’t afford to go. This probably would have been OK if she had not spent the previous few months saying ‘I’ll get the money to you,’ ‘I’m definitely coming,’ helping make the plans for additional things to do and, basically, all the right noises that you would think she as definitely going.
The mother-in-law steps in and offers to loan her daughter the money to cover the friends cost of the trip.
They go, have a lovely time and come back…then nothing. Total radio silence from the friend. A few months pass and the daughter doesn’t seem to be doing much to get repayments organized. Then, my mother-in-law chirps up and wants her money back. The daughter-in-law (to whom the money was initially loaned) cannot get the friend to pay any more than the tiniest amount towards the cost of the trip and the mother-in-law decides to contact the friend’s mother. The friend and my sister-in-law are both in their mid-twenties. It’s been war ever since. The trip was in 2016 and collection agencies are being utilized and letters are periodically sent.
So I’m no longer friends with my friend. Whilst I find her behavior awful and probably wouldn’t be friends with her now anyway, I didn’t really have a choice due to the family connection thing. We had been friends for many years and I’ve found the entire thing really hard to process. I’m still quite angry about the whole thing.
PAY YOUR BILLS, PEOPLE. DON’T GO TO DISNEY WORLD IF YOU CAN’T AFFORD IT.”
How Could You Treat A Friend Like This?
“I had a long time friend that I met in the eighth grade. We were best friends, inseparable, spent nearly all out free time together.
By the time we were in college, she got her first boyfriend. Then she just straight cut me off. They had no problem having me drive them around town and stuff, but then they’d hang out with our other mutual friends and talk smack about me behind my back.
We didn’t talk for about ten months after I found out. When she re-entered my life, she was struggling and needed a place to live… and she moved in with my family and me. She was never grateful and trashed the room. Like, we found bowls of molded food under the bed. Trashed.
We started to get close again around that time and I was diagnosed with cancer. She didn’t even call when I was in the hospital for a week. Then she started getting mean again. She would throw tantrums if I didn’t show up online to hang out as soon as she wanted me to… By this time I’m having radiation and just general fallout from cancer treatments. She flipped her lid one night when I told her I’d been depressed due to a recurrence of disease. She started saying stuff like ‘this is the first I’ve heard of any depression,’ like, it surprised her that a cancer relapse would get me down. I tried to explain that to her, that uh, I had cancer, and this is just part of it, but then she was like, ‘OH SO NOW MY FEELINGS DON’T MATTER AND YOU’RE JUST GONNA SAY YOU HAVE CANCER AND DEVALUE ME?!’
I think it was maybe a month before she sent me a long, rambling misspelled text message about how she was tired of trying so hard to be a friend to me and I just do nothing.
I had surgery a week later.
I never saw her again.
This was someone I cared deeply for. Someone I grew up with. I stood beside her at her wedding.
I heard she moved to another state for some get rich quick scheme and is living with new friends from the internet. I wonder how long they will put up with that kind of insane treatment before she and her husband are kicked out.”
A Lot Can Change In Three Weeks
“My roommate my first semester at college living in a dorm was an instant friend. We hit it off and did everything together. I even spent Thanksgiving with her and her family. Over the break between fall and spring semester, she had to work and I went back to my home state. I was gone for about 3 weeks. When I came back, I was beyond shocked.
My bed was unmade, had been slept in, and had a wet towel in it. My clothes had been pulled out of my closet, worn, and thrown on the floor. There were chicken bones, salsa chips, and cheese/salsa dip all over the carpeted floor. My shampoo and conditioner bottles were empty. There was vomit all over the bathroom, including on my toothbrush. Oh yeah, she used my toothbrush to aid in her bulimia.
I couldn’t even put my bags in the room it was so disgusting. I went to Big Lots (discount store) and bought cleaning supplies. I cleaned the entire room, top to bottom, and replaced all my things. She came home from her shift and didn’t say a word. Tried to act like nothing had happened.
I called the dorm mother, told her what was going on, and asked her to be moved to another room. She did, and I never spoke to her again.”
This One Incident Was All She Needed To Peace Out
“I feel like I have the craziest story. This was with my best friend, H.
We had spent a two day vacation a town over from us because we were teens and excited about no parents and all that. We had taken lots of photos of each other and on the way back, she was driving, so with permission, I looked at the photos she took of me.
A main point to say is she never sends photos even if you ask, so I took my phone out and took a photo of one of her photos of me. She flipped out. Started screaming that that was her work, I was trying to rip her off, that I didn’t trust her, etc.
As we drove on, she got angrier and angrier as I stayed quiet. I requested to be dropped off a town over from ours because it was closer and my brother lived there; also I wanted to get away from this wack job. I don’t know why, but this upset her more. She kept asking me why I would let her drive home alone, that if she killed herself it would be my fault, lots more. The thing that struck me was ‘I should just crash us in this car right now.’
There was no emotion except for screaming and anger. I stayed there quietly hoping for this to be over soon, but she pulled over and made me drive because ‘she was two seconds from crashing us.’
As we were driving, she just kept screaming at me. I mean truly screaming in anger at me. It took us 40 minutes to get to my brother’s. She actually made us park at IKEA, three huge parking lots away from my brother’s. She stormed out crying and saying how she was going to kill herself. I kept offering to buy her a cab, calling her mom, etc., but she kept being the drama queen she always is.
Before she left, I asked her why she was acting like this and for her not to leave. Then she screamed at me in the entrance ‘what do you want? Why are you following me?’ And honestly, I just walked to my brothers.
I had enough of that crazy from that one incident. Let’s not meet again H, even though you stalk me on every social media platform.”
How Insensitive!
“I used to be friends with this couple, and we were pretty close for a while. Thing is, they always had to one-up any story/event that happened to me and our mutual friends.
While this was annoying, I still hung out with them, and even used them as photographers for my wedding. Too bad they never actually gave us our wedding photos (which we paid for). About 6 months after the wedding, I sent my husband to their house with a thumb drive and told him not to come back until he had our photos. This was when I realized they weren’t the kind of people I needed in my life.
The final straw came a few years later. My best friend had suffered her second miscarriage about a month prior to this and she ended up running into the husband at Walmart. He starts talking about how his wife is pregnant again (with their second child) and how they weren’t worried about miscarrying because it so rarely happened.
He said this to the face of my best friend knowing full well that she’d just had a second miscarriage. When she told me the story, I was so mad that I deleted their numbers/Facebook/everything that connected me to them. I haven’t hung out with them since.”
The Ultimate Betrayal
“In my first year university, met an American bloke, we turned good friends, to eventual best friends. We moved in for our third year and it all went to chaos from there.
We had a few issues, but I’ll point out the main reason.
This was a big one that really caused a wedge between us. I was poor, especially when uni started again as I’m a seasonal worker. He had his job, granted it was a pain to get to and from because of the hours, but he had a income. I didn’t, but the local pub I was starting to visit needed one guy to run it a few nights of the week. We were cooking one night and I said let’s go for a pint there while it cooks. So we had a couple of drinks (at this point, he knows I’m going to ask for a job). I said eff it, I’ll go turn the oven off and we can have a few more pints.
Our flat was 30 seconds away, so I was there and back in 3 minutes. During that time, he’d gone up to the owner and asked if there was a job for him. The guy said yes straight away and I lost out. When I got back in there, he sat smug at the table and told me he now had two jobs. I could have gotten over it, but he had also completed his license for being a bouncer and was in the middle of talking a deal for that. That to me was a massive act of betrayal.
Just to give some context, he wanted to stay in our country for the summer and not go home. The only way he could achieve that was moving in with someone to split rent. I lived an hour away from my old university town, so I really didn’t need to pay full rent for a place for 3 months of the year I wouldn’t be there. But I did to help him out, not only did it cripple me money wise, it also cut my work hours from 90 hour weeks down to 30-ish because I was traveling back to see him (he was in a bad place after a relationship break down). He knew I was desperate for work and that pub job was super ideal, he actively waited for me to leave the area to ask. That’s being stabbed in the back, and that was it for our good friendship I’d say.”
“I’m Glad We Didn’t Go Down The Same Path”
“When I saw my friend chase after someone with a pocket knife in his hand.
I had known Juan ever since I was in kindergarten and we we were really close growing up. We had sleepovers pretty much every weekend and he joined me for my family camping trips every summer. I was an only child and he was like a brother to me.
Then a bunch of us were transferred out of our grade school by our parents in the 6th grade because of they were unhappy with the administration and felt we could learn better elsewhere. Even though I lived on the south side of Chicago, I ended up in a school on the north side with another friend of mine, Manny, while Juan ended up going to a school closer to his house.
Juan and I still hung out sometimes, but we started drifting apart more and more. I could tell his new school was changing him and by 8th grade he was part of a local crew. At the time I was really into graffiti and rap, so even though things were changing, we still found things we had in common.
The last time I saw him, I was at his graduation party. After the whole family thing was over, we were hanging out with some of his friends from the neighborhood to smoke some weed. Then Juan and I decided to go for a walk. I had a backpack full of spray paint, so we went to the train tracks by his house to hit up some trains and walls. I put up my name and he put up his gang’s tags. This wasn’t just a writing crew he was a part of, this was like an off-shoot of a pretty big Chicago gang that is basically like an internship for younger people to get into it.
As we are bombing this one wall, we hear a voice from below. There is some guy yelling up at us. I don’t remember what he said, but it really ticked Juan off. I had never seen him like this before, he was like a completely different person. He started running after this guy and out of instinct, I just followed him. The other guy bolted and he chased after him and I chased after him. After a few minutes, he lost him and stopped and I was finally able to catch up to him. He still had that crazy, angry look in his eye, but then I also noticed he had a knife in his hand.
It was then I knew that I did not belong there. He started talking about getting a couple of other people to find him. Apparently they had some beef with the guy, which is why he was so angry. I convinced him to let it go for now and go back and smoke some more weed to chill out. We did and I crashed at his house, just as I had done for so many years. But after that night I wanted nothing to do with the lifestyle he was getting involved in and even though we still talked on the phone sometimes, we never hung out again after that.
After we started high school, we lost touch completely. I still thought of him a lot and wondered whatever happened to him, so I would Google him sometimes, but never had any results. It wasn’t until last year I finally found him when I used his middle name in a search. There were about 6 or 7 different mugshots from his various visits to county jail, mostly on possession charges. It made me sad, but at the same time I was glad I didn’t go down the same path.”
This Is Never Something To Brag About
“I had a friend for awhile who clearly considered me his best friend while I only considered him acquaintance. That in and of itself was awkward; he didn’t have a lot of friends and would latch onto me because I gave him the time of day. I didn’t dislike him, but also was not interested in being super close to him as he could be a lot to take. He was always telling me really personal secrets and treating me like his therapist, which made me really uncomfortable. He was also very overly touchy when he would drink, which I also did not like. But, I felt bad for him and he seemed like he was overall a good guy, so I put up with those aspects of it.
But then, he started being really reckless, both with his own safety and that of others. The biggest thing was driving while under the influence. He did it all the time and had the nerve to brag about it afterwards. I stopped inviting him to anything if there was going to be drinking, then to anything all together.
The final straw was when he bragged to me about evading cops and driving hammered home from a bar. I’ve heard too many horror stories of innocent people being killed by reckless drivers. I told him off, saying how selfish and stupid he was being, which he didn’t take well. Over the following few days, he apologized to me but still didn’t seem to show remorse for what he’d done. Then, when I stopped responding to his texts, he tried to make me feel guilty by saying his depression was getting worse, etc. etc. I finally responded telling him that I wasn’t his therapist and he needed to stop texting me, at which point he begged me to stay his friend. I didn’t reply and he finally got the hint.
That was two years ago, and we haven’t spoken since. Part of me feels bad for just cutting him off completely, but at the same time it wasn’t my responsibility to look after him or make him feel better.”
It Still Hurts To Think About
“One of my old school friends did multiple wrongs to me before I eventually cut ties. It took me years to see that I wasn’t being treated the way a friend should.
First, I was seeing a guy I was really into. Then, on a night out to turn around and see them making out. They’d been seeing each other the full time we were together. I forgave them and we stayed friends. I helped them through abortions and multiple cheating episodes and many more dramas.
A few years later, she moves about 400 miles away. I traveled down to the big city to see her multiple times just for us to stay in her house. And when we did go out, she’d ditch me and leave me on my own while I was left searching for her. Meanwhile, I was going through a horrible abusive relationship and was really struggling and she never supported me or even listened to me. It really hurt thinking your best friend doesn’t even have time for you.
Cue a year later and we both move back to our hometown: she starts trying to be a good friend. Like, genuinely making an effort with me, only for a mutual friend to tell me she’s now going out with ANOTHER ex-boyfriend of mine. It was a serious one this time. For me, it was just the last straw. I know a lot of people think it’s okay to date a friends ex, but it just doesn’t sit well with me.
Never once have I gotten an apology from her. It still hurts to think about.”
So Similar, Yet So Different
“He was a complete and utter tool. He and I were very similar. We both went to the same martial arts school and became friends because our teacher thought we were very similar and we were.
Arrogant? Yes. Blunt? Heck yea. Irresponsible? You know it. Stubborn? Part of the package. Gifted, stand offish, funny…everything lined up.
The difference was that he was very good with women, but didn’t care about that because he had an amazing girlfriend and for the most part they were great together. She was the only one that could make him be a little nicer and more down to earth.
Then she dumped him and he…he went dark.
He went to her place multiple times to try and get her to talk. They’d dated for six years so its not as though he was chasing a girl that he’s only been dating for a month. He messaged her over and over again trying to get a second chance and I encouraged him to fight for what he loved. I was young, I didn’t understand I was encouraging wrong behavior and I do regret it. She even moved to California. We live in Seattle. He chased her down there to try and talk to her, but she shut him down over and over again. This is when his tendencies began to worsen.
He and I were very similar, I’ve already mentioned this, but I don’t know if it was because she left him or if she was the only thing keeping it at bay, but his misogyny began to increase. He began to hate women. He’s probably been a part of every misogynistic movement of the past few years. He spoke against women wanting respect saying that if they dressed a certain way then they were asking for it. He spoke against women being angry that they were groped at comic con because they were cosplaying attractive characters. However, the straw that broke the camels back was when he recorded himself on Facebook during one of his famous rants that if women didn’t want to be assaulted then they should stop asking for it. No more dressing in a certain way, no more being in certain areas, and many other things where he basically summed up assault as ‘men will be men’ and that women shouldn’t provoke us.
Sorry, man. I know we are really similar, but I just couldn’t keep being friends with him after that. It was impossible to argue with him seeing as he’d just buckle down even harder. It’s really hard to slap some sense into him seeing as if we were to fight seriously I seriously doubt it’d end well for either of us. I just had to cut ties. We are very similar…but I wish that wasn’t the case.”
All That’s Left Is Pity
“My roommate stole the Adderall I was prescribed for ADHD when in college, snorted it with his friends, and made fun of me behind my back saying that he could tell when I took one of the sugar pills he replaced them with.
I found out years later because he was still laughing about it 5 years after we graduated.
He also stole a three month supply of it and let me pay $400 to replace it when I was a broke college kid. He even had the gall to try and console me about it as I broke down and cried that I had to come up with that money.
He never even apologized after I called him out. I suspect he was too ashamed, but yeah. I still talk to him every now and then, but I will never have his back ever again. He’s nothing more than an acquaintance and I’ll never respect him again. All that’s left from me is pity really…”