toxic relationship

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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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I’ve lived every possible failed romantic story, and I’ve heard countless ridiculous excuses for bad behaviour, trust me, but blaming a heavy piece of furniture because you said another person’s name is one I've never heard of before. I think it’s clear that something is off about this situation. The problem is, what can you do about it when YOU JUST FINISHED MOVING IN TOGETHER? How does one proceed?

25-year-old boyfriend accuses girlfriend of "making stories in her head" after he calls her another name: 'I don’t even know any Olivias. I’m exhausted from the move, it’s hot out, and I was carrying a heavy piece of furniture.'

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"'

We all have that old friend from high school who was secretly our crush back then. They’re not in our lives anymore, aside from the yearly happy birthday message or some random like on a picture here and there. They’re just a happy, wholesome memory, about the first times we felt something for somebody else, floating on the internet.

28-year-old man refuses to stop messaging his highschool crush while he's in a long distance relationship with another woman: 'I am making him choose me or her'

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In life, we're sometimes confronted with very difficult decisions, some about our career paths, some about our finances, and others about our love lives. It's a tale as old as time: the mean wife makes the husband decide between his friends and her. But in this case, I think the mean ones are the husband's friends, and the wife is not even bringing up the decision.

41-year-old man allowed his friends to pressure him into organizing a hiking trip without his wife: 'They have also made remarks implying that my husband should prioritize their trips over plans he has made with me'

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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When the birthday requirements are over the top We definitely deserve some form of special treatment from our loved ones on our birthdays, and if we are lucky enough, we get it. Having said this, some people demand a little bit more than special treatment and command week-long tributes, constant attention, praise, and presents. All the while believing those requirements are an obligation for the people around them. Beliefs like that are really hard to shake, and that’s exactly what happened to…

30-year-old woman wonders if she exaggerated by telling her 28-year-old boyfriend to plan his own birthday dinner: 'He has been staying with dad because “I ruined his birthday”'

These blessed phones Let’s start by saying that going through phones is NOT okay. There is nothing we can do now because the protagonist of this story has already gone through one and found things she shouldn’t have. The only thing we can do now is deal with the aftermath of what came to light.

29-year-old woman goes through her 35-year-old girlfriend's phone and finds out she is planning to leave her: 'Whole time she was miserable and apparently using me which she won't say she is because we live together and split bills'

When the household chores won’t do themselves I can’t say how many times my mother has tried this technique with me when I was a teenager, surprise: It never worked. I’m not saying I don’t do my household chores now; in fact, I just put all my clothes in the washing machine, I’m saying it didn’t work THEN. I had to learn this all by myself when I became independent, having countless issues with roomies.

24-year-old girlfriend decides to only do her laundry and dishes and leave her slothful 27-year-old boyfriend to fend for himself: 'You can’t really help me help you. The only way to take something off my plate is to do it yourself'

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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'

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;

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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When should our nitpicking stop? In these modern times, there's a pretty widespread idea that our partners should be there to satisfy our every need, and that we should be so pragmatic as to leave them ASAP if there is a very minor box they don't check. Evidently, I do not subscribe to that way of thinking, and today I'm going to explain why.

44-year-old woman considers leaving her boyfriend over a pillow: 'I just feel like I've run out of ways to calmly communicate why this is important to me'

Who determines our relationship to love and marriage? At first, I thought this was yet another story about a guy getting cold feet right at the moment he is asked a big question. This is how it always goes for me: everything seems to be going fine, and at some point, I decide to bring up some variation of the ‘what are we?’ question, and all we had goes up in flames.

25-year-old woman asks her 27-year-old boyfriend about clarity on their future and he breaks up with her: 'He later said he spoke to his mother and she said he should marry 6 months after finishing postgrad'