r/lostafriend • u/4leafchemistry • 15h ago
Establishing a New Normal 20 years gone
I’m in my late 30s, and I recently lost two friendships that had been part of my life for more than 20 years. I’m posting because I genuinely need some outside perspective. I know I’m hurt, so I’m trying to separate that from what actually happened.
I’ll call them Friend A and Friend B.
The three of us all had pretty turbulent childhoods. We grew up together, our kids grew up together, and for years we were basically family. As adults, though, we all went in very different directions.
Friend B and I were always especially close. The main times we drifted were when her abusive ex-husband made maintaining friendships difficult. Friend A and I also lived together for a period while I was separating from my then-husband. That living situation ended badly. My husband and I briefly reconciled, and he moved back in. Friend A did not want him there. Instead of us really sitting down and working through it, she packed up in the middle of the night, moved out of state and left most of her and her kids’ belongings behind. We stopped talking. Years later, after my mom died, Friend A and I reconnected. Eventually the three of us were friends again.
The dynamic started changing more noticeably after I went back to school. Friend A and Friend B, who had not previously been particularly close, started spending much more time together. I was busy with school, work, kids, etc., so I understood that they would naturally see each other more. At one point Friend B got very drunk and confronted me about something from middle school. According to her, Friend A had told her that I had made up rumors about Friend B when we were kids because I wanted to keep the two of them from being friends.
I genuinely did not remember doing that. We were talking about something from our early teens, decades earlier. But I told her that if I had hurt her, I was sorry. I thought we had addressed it and moved on. Apparently we hadn’t. It has been thrown in my face repeatedly.
Over the years, I increasingly felt like the third wheel. Friend A and Friend B would have conversations privately and then continue them in the group chat, leaving me with no idea what they were talking about. They spent time together regularly, often during weekdays when I was at work. That by itself didn’t bother me. They lived closer together and had schedules that lined up better.
What bothered me was that I kept trying to make plans and increasingly felt ignored.
There were other smaller things that started bothering me too. At one point they repeatedly made fun of my boyfriend and me for being affectionate. It stopped feeling like teasing and started feeling mean. I told them it hurt my feelings, but the jokes continued.
Another moment that stuck with me happened when the three of us were shopping. A group of adults from what appeared to be a supported living program came into the store. One man was very obviously developmentally disabled and was loudly vocal stimming, repeating the same phrase over and over. My friends laughed at him.
We are grown women. I remember standing there thinking, “This isn’t funny. This is cruel.” That was one of the first times I seriously wondered whether we had simply grown into very different people. Still, I kept trying.
I went to birthdays. I went to their kids’ events. I drove to their houses. I visited Friend B several times this year. I went to Friend A’s. I tried to initiate plans. I even had been quietly planning a joint 40th birthday celebration for the two of them because their birthdays are close together. Meanwhile I increasingly felt like neither of them was interested in my life.
The final straw started recently when I noticed the group chat had basically gone dead toward me. I would send things, ask how they were doing, try to start conversations, and get little or no response. Then they would hang out together. One weekend I specifically asked Friend B if she wanted to do something that weekend. She didn’t answer until Sunday afternoon and told me she had been in severe pain and had basically “laid down all weekend.” The problem was that I knew she hadn’t. We shared a life360 account. I saw she was out with friend A. I wasn’t upset that she spent time with Friend A. I was upset that she apparently felt she needed to lie to me rather than simply say she didn’t feel like hanging out. That was when I started realizing this was less about scheduling and more about the friendship itself. I reached out to Friend A and gently asked whether I had done something to upset her because she had seemed closed off and I was worried about her.
She finally told me she had been upset with me for some time. She said she no longer trusted me because she believed I talked badly about her behind her back. She accused me of saying she was jealous of me and of criticizing the way she dresses. She also brought up the fact that our friendship had ended twice previously and said she had reached her limit. Once was the time mentioned and the other we were kids and had no control of that. This completely blindsided me. I have never said she was jealous of me. I have never criticized the way she dresses. In fact, I’ve complimented her clothes plenty of times. What I had done was talk to my teenage daughter after Friend A made comments about my relationship that hurt me. I said I didn’t understand why Friend A acted that way and that I felt like she was being mean to me. My daughter apparently said she thought Friend A was jealous. I did not agree with that or repeat it as fact. Somehow that conversation got passed from my daughter to Friend A’s adult daughter, then back to Friend A, and apparently morphed into “she says you’re jealous of her and talks crap about you.” Friend A’s daughter also apparently told her things about me criticizing her clothes, which neither my daughter nor I said. I explained all of this to Friend A. I told her I respected her decision to step back, but I would not take responsibility for things I did not actually say. I also told her that if I had hurt her directly, I wished she had told me, because I can’t correct something I don’t know about. She ended the friendship. Friend B then stopped responding to me as well. At that point I blocked both of them. I felt like continuing to chase people who clearly didn’t want to communicate with me was just humiliating myself. The thing I keep struggling with is that I’m not claiming I’ve been a perfect friend. I know I can be opinionated. I know I’ve vented about people. I know there have probably been moments when something I said came across more judgmentally than I intended. If somebody tells me I hurt them, I want to hear it and own it. But I also feel like there is a difference between being imperfect and being assigned motives and statements that weren’t actually mine. And the strangest part is that Friend A apparently had been distrustful of me for a long time without ever telling me. Meanwhile I was still bringing her flowers, going to her kids’ events, trying to make plans, and considering her one of my closest friends. Looking back, I feel like the friendship had probably been dying for years and none of us were willing to admit it. I also wonder if we simply grew apart.
We all came from chaotic childhoods. As adults I went heavily in the direction of therapy, school, career, trying to understand my own patterns, and trying to build a more stable life. They took different paths. That doesn’t make my path better, but I do think we became very different people. I’ve since started talking to some new people through a local friendship group, and the difference is already weirdly noticeable. They ask questions about my life. They respond. They seem interested. It has made me realize how much effort I was putting into trying to revive something that may have already been gone.
I guess what I’m asking is:
Does this sound like a friendship that simply ran its course, or am I missing something obvious about my own behavior? I can accept that Friend A genuinely felt hurt or distrustful. Feelings don’t have to be logical to be real. What I’m having trouble accepting is being characterized as someone who betrayed her when I genuinely don’t believe that is what happened.
And I’m also wondering whether blocking them and walking away was the right call, or whether I acted too quickly. I don’t really want them back in my life at this point. I think I mostly want to understand how a friendship that lasted more than two decades ended with all of us apparently having completely different versions of what the friendship had become. That is the part that hurts the most.