Current Events > What made you lose complete sympathy/respect for a friend?

(+) Yeah! (+)

My friend and I were pretty good friends, he was fun dude. he died in 2014 and I was bit sad when I heard the news but as soon as I found out how he died , I lost any positive feelings I had for him (He was drunk driving, going 100+ miles on the freeway in the afternoon , he hit a divider wall , the friend that was with him died instantly since both were super drunk and not wearing seatbelts. My friend had burns on 90% of his body so he didn;t last long), I was little mad at what a fucking dumbass he was and now I am only glad that he didn't kill anyone else.

Jesus that's grim

I was just going to say my friend turned into a huge racist RWNJ

A coworker who said that if covid vaccinations became mandatory for school, she would home school her kids. I always knew she wasnt the sharpest tool in the shed, but that

I later found out she watches Fox News and is a pretty hardcore Trumper so her respect levels hit pretty much rock bottom. But at the very least she has a nice rack. Fake, but well done, and shes not ashamed to show it off :3

Flexing on a guy with no job

Had a friend who I lived with for a while along with another mutual friend. One day, he ran away from us, his problems, his debt and his family to go try and nail some emotionally damaged woman in Nebraska. Lost the respect I had for him then.

A few years later, the aforementioned mutual friend also abandoned me in a really dark time, earning the third strike against him and my hatred.

I used to have really shitty friends.

guy quit his job, cashed out his pension (including paying the penalty for early withdraw), spent all of that money over the next ~3 years by sitting around in his apartment drinking. eventually got evicted and moved back in with his mother at age 36. to my knowledge he is still unemployed, living with his mother and spending his days drunk off cheap beer.

Being an antivaxxer or Trump supporter were the most recent respect losses

Things that would make me lose sympathy or respect for someone:

Child abuse
Animal abuse
Spouse abuse
Elder abuse
Rape
Racism
Homophobia
Bigotry
Sexism
Driving Intoxicated
Thieving
Willful Ignorance
Littering

All varying amounts, but generally fuck anyone who checks the boxes. Not gonna stop being friends with someone who litters, but I'll call them out on it and think they're a piece of shit.

My friend said that Caitlyn Jenner wasn't a hero

throwback

have a friend who's anti-vax and supports NFTs

also, i knew a guy who became a brony. get shivers still thinking about it

Rharyx211 posted...

also, i knew a guy who became a brony. get shivers still thinking about it

Im pretty understanding, but this might break me lol. This and devil worshipping. I don't really believe in the devil, but I don't get why you'd worship the devil in the same way I don't get grown man worshipping a child's show. Just seems like much deeper things going on.

When I was in high school I found out my best friend was doing very inappropriate stuff with his little sisters, two of which were infants. I didn't want to know about him existing after hearing all that.

I had a very good and trusted friend--a mentor from a big brothers/big sisters kind of thing, so about a generation older than me. About a year ago I found out that he has sexually abused children in his past. How dare you, man. How dare you do that horrible thing ever, and then how dare you put yourself in the position to be a mentor of children. I only ever had positive experiences with him but now all of that sentiment is tainted by the fact that he never should have been in that position in the first place and I don't really know him like I thought and I wish hell were real so that people like him would go there. I haven't spoken to him since learning this news. Don't know if there's anything to say.

Rumors that a former friend of mine raped a girl we all knew in a forest. They were dating but she broke it off and sometime later they argued and he dragged her somewhere and we heard what happened after.

The frightening thing is he's always had a problem of harassing the women he's been with years even after they break up but he crossed the line with us there. This was over 10 years ago right after high school no charges.

Time.

I'm creeping up on 50, and most of my friends are already dead or forgotten.

Sympathy, definitely.

My old roommate (male) has been in an incredibly toxic on-again/off-again relationship for about 5 years now. She was 19 when they met (so he was 28) and I warned him the age difference would be a huge issue as someone that young is still incredibly immature and doesn't really know their place in the world/what they want.
Long story short, last summer while they were broken up for the 1,000th time she got pregnant. Baby father didn't want anything to do with her so she "got an abortion". About a month later she's pregnant by some other guy. He didn't want anything to do with her so she "got another abortion". About a month later she and my roommate get back together and...what do you know...she gets pregnant a third time and he's dumb enough to believe it's his.

Fast forward about 6 months, the baby is born "prematurely" but perfectly healthy and the proper size/weight a baby carried to term should be. She doesn't want him there during the birth (probably because she knew it was going to come out looking nothing like him) and doesn't put his name on any of the paperwork.

Yadda yadda, drama drama. He convinces himself the kid is his in spite of a paternity test that shows otherwise. Moves in with her, starts talking about how much he hates his life and how unlucky he is and blah blah blah. I remind him that he's not legally responsible for her or the child in any way so he can get up, leave, and never see either of them again at literally any time and nothing will happen to him.

TLDR; friend is miserable because he's assumed responsibility for a child that isn't his and he's not legally bound to and I have no patience or sympathy for people who won't get themselves out of very fixable situations.

I've often wondered how many people there are in the world that have lived their lives without doing anything criminal or morally heinous to another person. I think everyone's life choices are shades of gray, and I also think we are all good at darkening the faults of others and lightening our own. A lot of the nicest people you meet have smiles that don't reach their eyes and a have a closet (or two!) bulging with skeletons.

i had a friend that i had a pretty big crush on, this was someone i talked to like every day, and back during the 2020 election we were talking about it and voting, and i implied being nervous about the results, especially since i lived in a highly republican area, and she was like "oh i dont vote, i dont care about politics all that much"
never in my life have i like physically felt a crush evaporate like that. she was white btw

One time I was friends with a girl. We were very good friends. I had essentially shared everything about myself with her, and vice versa. She had told me things that nobody else knew.

Then she got a boyfriend, and after two weeks of dating him he said he wasnt comfortable with our relationship and she told me we couldnt be friends anymore.

I was hurt. I felt like nothing. I felt like our friendship was a sham.

after three months total, they broke up. She tried to apologize, and I told her I wasnt a rent a friend who was there when she needed me. I havent spoken to her since.

What made you lose complete sympathy/respect for a friend?

Only case that's happened at the start of this year is coworker/friend of mine continuing to bellyache over her "lack" of dating options in men. She's an alright friend to me (as a gay man), but I've witnessed her performance trying to keep guys attracted to her and it's like watching a train wreck happen in front of me. Mostly her fault considering where she finds them and what her admittedly superficial priorities are. She keeps picking guys who will logically have little incentive to be exclusive with her and then acts confused when they do not want to be a boyfriend.

Meanwhile her brother, who I have also known for years, is legit happy living the solo life. He hooks up once in a while, but he's never really prioritized settling down. He's one of those types that's a hobbyist first, workaholic second (enjoys his job), and somewhere like 6th or 7th he's a romantic. Like dating is not a top priority for him and he's still fulfilled by his other interests. And his sister can not stand that. She's like the polar opposite of him and has been trying to sabotage his victories out of jealous spite. She's so butthurt about him not having the same insecurity that she's tried starting nasty rumors about her own brother so local girls won't hang with him. Did not work, but it's still a foul that she tried.

I told her I was straight up ashamed of her schadenfreude towards a family member who's not doing the same to her. Her bro has generally been supportive of her goals. I also told her she's in some serious need of self reflection over her dating dysfunctions if she's so casually dumps on a guy for being happy just because she's not. That's a red flag to other men like a fucking neon billboard...

It's not enough that I would dump her as a friend, but she's made it clear she's her own worst enemy.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

More nuance to the story: I am a very accepting and fluid person. I am not a jealous person, I have a partner and we have a semi open relationship. We do not believe in jealousy.

My partner was jealous of my friendship with this girl. For the first time ever. It took a little bit, but I explained that this friendship meant a lot to me, and it was a very important part of my life. If given an ultimatum, I would choose my friendship over my partner. Not because I cared about them more or less, just because I am not willing to compromise what is important to me, and the commitments I have made to others.

I had been there for her through a lot. a lot of shit. I wasnt going to turn my back on her for anybody.

After discussion, my partner understood and we remained friends. We remained people who (I thought) could rely on eachother no matter what.

I was having an incredibly rough time, the stress of my job felt crushing, and I was fading as a person. When I needed my friend the most was when she decided to choose sides and turn her back on me. No fight, no discussion, no nothing. Just chose the side of some guy over the person who had been there for her through some fucked up shit that she never would have shared with him.

Ill admit that the entire situation has hardened me quite a bit. Im less trusting. Im less open. I do not want to have another friend like that because I do not want to be hurt like that again.

I need a partner. I need love, sex, somebody to come home to. Some people dont need that, but I do.

I do not need a friend to share everything with. I can keep things to myself. I probably will forever keep it that way now. It was nice to have that person, but I can live without it.

Im drunk, Im not even sure if any of this makes sense.

My opinions about coworkers can definitely change, usually for the negative.

MICHALECOLE posted...

Stuff

While I did read the whole thing, and can understand why you're upset, I just wanted to say that I personally expect that sort of behavior when someone enters a relationship. Time that was spent on friendships is now spent on the relationship, and opposite sex friendships have to fall by the wayside.

And honestly, for me, your reaction to her dropping you for her boyfriend just confirms that you had feelings for her above and beyond the friendship. The only acceptable reaction is being happy they've found someone they want to be with. If they're not right for eachother you're free to voice your opinion, but that's where your responsibility/entitlement ends, just like with my roommate.

A girl I was close to I had broke our friend circle because one of our friends didn't take the same class as her due to scheduling conflicts. Completely killed my enjoyment of the last few years of college.

A distant relative who I enjoyed playing with generally slowly ended up adding slurs and whatnot to his vocabulary, like if you met a 4chan user in real life.

Quick note, I just realised how much I wrote. I post long walls of text over plenty of stupid bullshit, sure, but this is a post that got way out of hand - like I didn't set out to write this thing. Feel free to skip, I had kind of an episode the longer I wrote and it's not worth reading.

A friend of mine did something that I wouldn't have done to him, and that set off a chain reaction where I realised how little he actually respected me and how much his presence in my life had been driving my self-destructive urges and general shitty emotional wellbeing. And it sucked, because he was a real port in a storm - my home life has been pretty shitty the entire time I've known him, and I came to rely on him a lot during the real low points. Even now, a friendship without the baggage that tanked everything would be preferable to where I'm at now in my life.

But it's like, sometimes one thing happens that's like the straw that breaks the camel's back. Cutting someone out for just that one thing can be extremely selfish and self-centred, and I've chosen not to shy away from that - if I'm selfish for doing what I did for the reasons I did, I'll gladly be as selfish as I need to be to get out of this situation and protect myself from further harm. I'll be the bad guy in all of this. But on top of the inciting incident, I remembered times when I'd do something kinda silly but totally innocuous, and it'd get used against me to like belittle me and make it into a joke. There was a point where he yelled my name at strangers out of moving cars, telling them to add me on Facebook. He kept starting this persistent rumor with any new people we met that I had a kid with my first girlfriend, and despite it always upsetting me and fervently denying it he'd go so far into this bit that whoever we'd just met wouldn't know if he was actually joking or not. When I'd go to add to an open discussion in our friend group, he'd just talk over me and say what he wanted to say, even after I gave everyone a grace period of a few seconds to make sure I wasn't butting in - I genuinely don't think it was intentional, because he'd just do it intrinsically without thinking. Without realising I was even talking. Getting surprised when other people told him to let me speak after he interrupted me five times in a row.

And it's like I'm thankful for our friendship, I would be less of a person than I am today without that relationship. I simply wouldn't be where I am today without him - not even looking at this through rose-coloured glasses, this friendship was critical to my personal development at the beginning. But saying that, for about half of our friendship I began to feel like less of a person around him, and one reason I fell into binge-drinking the way I did was to numb myself to anything that made me feel bad about myself, like people making me the butt of the joke. In hindsight, he was the better option in my life to be around, but I had to be drunk for that relationship to be bearable and that wasn't tenable at all.

Our friendship came with good parts, but eventually it got to the point where we'd be standing in line at the store and he'd go and make small talk with the cashier offhandedly, and I'd go up and just blank out and feel like a human potato - and I would feel like less of a person than my friend was. That wasn't something my friend intentionally cultivated in me or whatever, it's not his fault that I felt that way, but it's telling that that's how I felt about our friendship in the end. It's telling that when I drank myself into a health problem and had to go sober, I wanted to spend less time with him the longer I spent sober. Something about him just made me feel incredibly unhappy about myself in a way that other friends didn't, like I was a broken vase who had to suck all the pieces up and hold them in place whenever my friend was around. And in hindsight, I feel like it's because I was his friend out of obligation, out of a sense of owing him financially and emotionally for all I had taken up during our friendship, not because I liked being around him or how he made me feel. And that culminated in a scenario where he did something where he didn't want me to be hurt, but the fact that he did it at all was such a slap in the face that it ruined our friendship. He didn't want to rock the boat after doing a running leap from the bow to the stern.

I didn't trust him for a lot of our friendship because I noticed the way he treated me, how small and overshadowed I felt even when I began finding my voice and stepping further into the light. I especially didn't trust him after he confided other people's secrets in me and gossiped about them. And after months of badgering me to be more open and vulnerable with him, he used the one thing I felt comfortable talking to him about to stab me in the back. He might not have meant to, but he did.

The worst part is that most of my friends were through him, meaning that I lost most of my wider friend group, and the mutual inner friend group we did have are so entangled in what went on that when I left, I had to leave everyone behind. I went from having a solid 4-5 real life friends and like 15 acquaintances total to having zero friends and zero acquaintances, because I chose to disassociate from this guy after what happened - not that I begrudge those people, because I chose to leave knowing the consequences for doing so and the reason I left is so petty and selfish on the surface.

We were so inseperable that for the first month after I stopped being friends with him, people who weren't aware there had been a divide would say hello to me and ask how my friend was doing before they'd ask me how I was doing. It really sums up how much of a cog, an accessory, I was in this friend's life - not just to him, but to everyone else.

I didn't want to write this much, but when it comes to this situation I tend to spiral into these episodes where I have to process everything all over again. Like a couple of times, I put my phone down and had to like process how I was feeling, less like a flashback and moreso just thinking about how unhappy he makes me in my daily life whenever he comes up. This is one wall of text I wanted to avoid, sorry.

tl;dr I realised how much less of a person I felt compared to my best friend, and in the aftermath of a traumatic event I began to realise how little he actually respected me as a person. He basically did the worst thing he could have done given the circumstances and expected everything to go back to normal, and I realised the severe effect that this friend had on my personal development in the aftermath, so I chose to leave all of my friends behind and start again from square one because I would rather drag my balls through a mile of broken glass than spend the rest of my life being a subservient accessory to a person who fucking hurt me as badly as he did.

DocDelicious posted...

While I did read the whole thing, and can understand why you're upset, I just wanted to say that I personally expect that sort of behavior when someone enters a relationship. Time that was spent on friendships is now spent on the relationship, and opposite sex friendships have to fall by the wayside.

And honestly, for me, your reaction to her dropping you for her boyfriend just confirms that you had feelings for her above and beyond the friendship. The only acceptable reaction is being happy they've found someone they want to be with. If they're not right for eachother you're free to voice your opinion, but that's where your responsibility/entitlement ends, just like with my roommate.

Feelings for her above and beyond friendship.. I mean, I guess? Like what is above and beyond friendship that isnt family or romance? We werent family and there was no romance. We each were the person that the other would come to for comfort, advice, humor, or just basic company. I know it went both ways. The things we had experienced together, or helped eachother through, were things that I thought bonded people together forever.

I am always thrilled when people are happy. I believe in doing whatever you want that makes you happy. And if dropping your friends is what makes you happy, then by all means you do you. That doesnt negate the feelings of the people that have been dropped though.

when their relationship started, I was thrilled! I thought he was great for her, and I fully supported everything.

and it all flipped so quickly. Communication went from daily to every three days, to no talking for a week. And I was fine with that, focus on what makes you happy. Im there if you need me.

but when I needed her, as I had been there for her every time when she needed me, I was met with I cant help you and we cant be friends anymore. I expressed how much I needed her to help me get through what I was going through, just mentally be there for me, and she wasnt willing to offer that because of this brand new relationship. What I had been going through had lasted longer than she even knew the guy, and it was at the very peak of pain for me, and when I reached out for help it was rebuffed so.. coldly. So matter of fact. So unemotional. After all the emotions we had been through together.

I wasnt trying to fuck his girl, I just wanted my friend.

and two months later when their relationship ends, I could have forgiven and forgotten I guess, but I could tell it was too late. It felt worse than a partner cheating on me. It felt like.. I meant nothing unless I was useful.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I dont even fault the boyfriend. I am promiscuous, I am sexually open and I am very confident. I dont get jealous, but I understand it.

but he was a reasonable guy. I truly feel a simple discussion and it could have easily been smoothed over. I would have understood if our friendship wavered over time and we drifted. That would have felt natural, nothing can last forever. I get that. But there was no discussion. No fighting for our friendship, no second thoughts on her end. She was so easily willing to throw it all away just to please him without even a simple talk.

it showed me where I stood. I was a therapist. I was an escape. I wasnt the friend that I thought I was. And she definitely didnt hold me in the regard that I held her.

and thats fine. Thats all fine. You do you. You make your decisions. You do what you think is right.

but when your decisions hurt people, you have to live with those repercussions for the rest of your life, and I hope its worth it. I hope her decision was worth it. I hope she is happy. But im not going to be a part of it ever again.

yeah losing a friend so close you can talk about anything, it's massively life changing.

Boy oh boy did drunk me say a lot last night!

Im impressed that my grammar and spelling didnt seem to suffer though

Adding tobacco to weed

DocDelicious posted...

opposite sex friendships have to fall by the wayside.

Not in a healthy and trusting relationship

Axiom posted...

Being an antivaxxer or Trump supporter were the most recent respect losses

When someone looks at 4 years of Trump and says they want more, I have to question every decision theyve ever made. Im specifically referring to someone I once called a friend. Shes a public school teacher and has a special needs child.