friendship

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Imaginary friendship Is it just me, or is this a classic situation? I’ve been through this so many times. I hope I haven’t done this to anyone, but it always goes like this: you get together with someone once or maybe twice, and they start believing you are their best friend, but you are not there yet, and you might never be.

Man wonders how to gently decline woman's request to get together after years of her thinking they share a friendship that is actually non-existing: I’m also turned off by the way she declared in her email that ‘we should do this and do that together’

These days, some messages are becoming really hard to decode. We’ve increased the number of communication channels we use, and with them, we decreased the quality of our messages. Before, you had body language, tone of voice, and words to understand. Not all of those things are codified, but there are fewer ways through which you can get confused.

Woman can't decipher Gen-Z gym acquaintance's confusing behavior after she moves the friendship to outside the gym for the first time: 'She currently sends several reels everyday, but never engages with actual substance'

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I highly recommend skipping the roommates phase if you can. The fantasy is wonderful, you get to live with a friend your age, and everything is fun and games, until it isn’t. With my experience, I’ve come to realize that when you get to know people through living together, you find the weirdest stuff about them.

24-year-old woman refuses to follow roomie's unfair guests policy and wonders whether she should bring it up or stay silent to keep the peace: 'She wants rules that only apply to me'

Those of us who were always very social have gotten used to the feeling of losing a friend; that specific kind of grief has become like a known path we can almost walk with our eyes closed. Culturally, we treat it as something different from grieving a romance, and in some points it is, but in others it’s just the same.

Woman wonders how to properly grieve a lost best friend while he is being active everywhere but the relationship: 'Today is the first day I stopped checking his online activity and socials'

The question this soon-to-be bride is asking sounds rhetorical, and I’m sure she will find that out sooner or later, and everyone will enjoy an amazing wedding celebration. In the meantime, we can discuss what makes her nervous and try to distinguish which part comes from the whole pre-wedding nervousness and which part comes from the actual issue being talked about.

Bride to be considers not making her lifelong best friend her maid of honour because she didn't defend her when coworker made nasty remarks about the wedding: 'I worry I’m overreacting and 20 years of friendship should outweigh this situation'

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There is countless proof by now, the words that send you into the most painful rumination, and never-ending loopholes are the ambiguous ones, not the clean, blunt truths. One should be grateful every time somebody else grants us the honour of receiving something hurtful in its most beautiful package: a gentle, respectful, harsh reality.

A man is sent to a non-stop rumination loophole by his best friend for not telling him what he did to upset her: 'She refused to name anything specific I had said or done, and kept saying "It would be an argument"'

The healthy dynamic of friendship doesn’t come naturally for all of us. Some people relate to friends from a very demanding position, and some don’t demand anything at all and never let friends into their inner world. The world is filled with types of friendships, and just like it happens with love, it’s only a matter of finding the right fit.

26-year-old woman wonders how to successfully terminate a friendship after she got too demanding: 'Expecting to be chosen over other friends / my boyfriend, always needing to plan our next meet up asap'

ometimes, with friends, without realizing, we’re the ones always texting, always initiating, and always wanting to talk things out. Some people exit our lives with proper goodbyes, they list reasons why they don’t want to keep sharing their time with us, they blame the weather, their cat, or their busy schedules; other times, people vanish from our lives...

Woman wonders if a friendship is really worth keeping after she is forced to initiate every encounter or text exchange between them: 'I don’t think she’s lying to me but I’m finding it really hard to believe what she says when she’s then just so passive'

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Have you ever lost a friend? Not naturally, not through the passage of time, but through concrete action, a good ol’ breakup just like lovers do. I have, many times, some I have gone back to, some I haven’t, but it’s always funny how so many words and songs and books and films exist about the end of romantic love, and how few about the end of a friendship.

Woman breaks up with a long time friend due to him changing his attitude and developing feelings for her: 'Someone who had become such an important part of my life was gone. Years later I still think about him'

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Friend gets mad because she is being used as a babysitter just so the dad can watch the World Cup at a bar away from his kids: ‘I told her I wasn't a replacement dad’.

Have you ever had a friend who has simply everything going right for him or her? Have you ever had the same friend having everything going right not for a period of time but FOREVER? I had, but I never reacted with jealousy. I don’t want to seem like the moral police here, but I think there can be plenty of postures to take that are much more beneficial than jealousy.

30-year-old woman runs out of the headspace she needs to handle the jealousy she feels towards her decade-old best friend: 'I’ve started resenting her for always having it so easy, always being just “lucky” and absolutely every single aspect of her life;

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Woman brings Tupperware to a restaurant to save leftovers, friend feels embarrassed and confronts her, woman doesn’t see the problem: ‘I was like "Please calm down”.’

Sometimes a relationship ends but one part is unaware of it I’ve been in this situation so many times, almost always on the aware part, but either way, it never ceases to be heartbreaking. Friendships, sadly, sometimes take the worst part of romances, and people in them exhibit behaviours such as nagging and jealousy outbursts; or you find out one day that you are much more important to your friend’s life than that person is to you.

33-year-old woman is trapped in an unwanted frienship because she is unable to say no to her very insistent friend: 'Every other time, I cook up a lie to say no. The annoying part is she doesn’t even ask or request'

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Friend steps out of cohosting a cookout as she was in charge of all the expenses for people that aren't even her friends: 'I’d rather attend as a regular guest.'

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Friends spend 4 years working on a project car together until one decides to sell it to fund a trip to Bali, gets hit with receipts, a 50/50 agreement, and a bill for labor hours: ‘Give me my fair share’

Jesse Kessenheimer

When something goes missing, we tend to think of anyone who’s not family as an intruder. For instance, the other day I was crashing at a friend's house, and she accused me of unplugging the refrigerator and causing everything to defrost. I said I didn’t remember doing that, but I was ready to take care of it financially .

Mother accuses daugther's lifelong best friend of theft after money goes missing: 'I acted normal when my friend left today, but inside I'm hurt, disappointed, and honestly a little resentful'