Been about five days now from when I last spoke to one of my closest, longest running friends. Last six years have just been very tiresome. Lots of lies, misdirections, strangeness. Things like inviting me to an event, telling me to wait for his call for details. I call in annual leave for it, but I miss the event because he doesn't call me back. Tells everyone else I couldn't make it, not that he forgot. Regular long periods of just ghosting me, saying he has no time to call but really wants to talk and to keep calling, though he never would accept the calls or return them. All whilst meeting all of our other friends every week. I brought this up with him in person and how terrible it made me feel constantly having to chase after someone in good faith, and warned him if he kept this up I'd have to start treating his word as worthless. He asked me for more time, and I gave him more time.
He seemed to make a conscious effort to try and return some calls and pick up some calls, and at the very least listened to me when I said if he didn't want to talk, he should just politely say he can't talk / doesn't want to talk, instead of telling me to call him back when he wants to be left alone. Still had to deal with the occasional ghostings but I just stopped calling regularly and so it stopped being as much of a drain on me. But then I'd still get the nonsense of stuff like him arranging to go to Scotland with all of our friends. Everyone else was told 2 months in advance, he tells a mutual friend to tell me about it, so I get told about the trip 6 hours before they're leaving. On a work day. One time me and a mutual friend agreed to meet up, just a chill normal lunch meetup. He cancels, says he's sick. We go on ahead without him, but accidentally bump into some of his housemates. They invite us over and we buy some stuff to help him recover from his illness. When we get there he isn't there. He isn't ill. He's out for drinks with one of his other friends.
This is a guy I would trust with my life - or at least, would have. We'd been through thick and thin together, and I'd always had his back. I even told him I had absolute faith in him and he should feel no reason to lie to me, cos I'd never get mad over someone cancelling just cos of schedule clash or they changed their mind. Still carried on being weird. A few times he and I would do some collab project together, making stuff like a full uruk-hai set of armour or tabletop gaming campaigns. Three times he worked with me, we planned everything out, I invested loads of time and money into making it work - and he would unilaterally cut me out at the last minute without even contacting me to tell me I'd been cut out. Each time I'd scolded him and we'd make the project work, he'd tell me how grateful and it all ended up amazing / the best e.t.c. but his friends would tell him I was being an asshole for treating him like a project manager. I wasn't treating him like a project manager. I was angry he'd wasted my time, time I don't have a lot of
All these little things are just little things. They could easily be resolved, because their core conflict is childish and remedied simply. He just needed to be honest and open with me. We'd sit down over laksa and have these one to ones where he'd affirm the strength of our friendship, his apologies for how he's treated me, and I'd ask him to just do better and he'd ask me for more time. In one particular incident, we had a long heart to heart talk where he said I was one of two of his closest friends, and he said he really didn't know why he was like this to just me, as he was not like this to any of our other friends. We parted ways from there as we had talked for long, I needed to go back to work, and there was no resolution in sight. And then he ghosted me for 10 weeks after this. It was like a parody.
I always gave him the benefit of the doubt. He told me he was falling apart, physically, mentally. I trusted his word on that; certainly, he had suffered a mini-heart attack already and was pushing his body to the limit whilst studying medicine. Some of our mutual friends said he was exaggerating, but again, I chose to assume the best and not the worst of him. I was extraordinarily patient, hoping that this was all just a rough patch and he would return to how he used to be - a good friend. I warned him however that I felt things were getting worse, whilst he felt he was doing better, and would get angry when I said he was still distant and poor at communicating. We had an especially bitter argument that was only resolved a day later when he called an old friend of his and asked them if he was bad at communicating, and that old friend said yes (in our argument, he genuinely asked me "wouldn't you not say that I couldn't be any less clearer than I am possibly being right now?" - my response: "there is no way you didn't practise that" - him "it's a simple yes or no question."
He apologised to me, but again, I could see the writing on the wall. Even when we were able to meet up and just chill, the majority of time we spent together was just catching up over what happened in between the ghosting periods. I began to know less and less of what was going on in his life, and spent most of my time with him just checking to see if he was okay.
Finally in 2023 he asks me to run a tabletop campaign for him. I'm immediately incredibly tense about the whole situation, given our long history of failed collaborative projects. I warn him in advance that I don't think he can do one but he convinces me, this is what he wants to do. After I finish all the notes, I call him up and the other player up. The other player's ready to go, but he ghosts my calls / direct messages. All in all I contacted him over 120 times over a period of a month, and each time he would tell me he'd be free to talk at a certain time, and on that certain time he would not pick up the phone. He told me in that time he was struggling at a low point and thanked me for my concern. I stopped trying to reach out to him altogether as I realised he was once again doing the thing where he asks me to call him, but doesn't want to be called.
Turned out in that time he was running his own tabletop game and going on holiday in the aegean sea. From 2023 to 2025 we ended up meeting in three periods over the span of 6 days, and each time the sessions would go great. I paid for and prepared all the food, prepared for all the game notes, even their character sheets. Each time everyone said it was the best game they'd played - looked forward to the next one - and then my friend would give an availability date months away for next session. My other player was telling me to calibrate my bullshit radar but again, I was being very sensitive because I was being told they were one step away from meltdown and this game was a welcome escape for them.
I nearly cancel the game outright and have a frustrating heart to heart with him over whether he actually wants the campaign or not. Because it would be a lot easier for me to just get the boys over and cook curry, sashimi, noodles, rice, venison, spuds, roast veg or pies or whatever. Everyone can just act like normal human beings and socialise xD
He ends up being the one out of the three of us most loathe to just cancel the game, and says he doesn't want to have wasted my efforts, which at this point have reached >40,000 word count. I kept explaining to him that a campaign requires a time commitment and effort that he has shown zero interest in making. The most basic obligation of a player is to actually play the damn game, surely no? He came up with the iconic phrase, asking why we could not just play a series of interconnected one-shots using the same characters. Both me and our other player were just flabbergasted because that was the definition of a campaign, and I explained why it was torturous to ask me to put in work constantly maintaining a campaign every week, every month, for someone who shows up once every 4-5 months. My other player comes up with a brilliant plan; finish the game within four days back to back gaming, or just end it wherever it ends. We give that a go and finish just short of the conclusion. Given that we only had like an hour of finale left to play, we agree to do one more session... Naturally, it ends up being scheduled months after. In this time he ran his own campaign sessions and climbed the Atlas mountains. I genuinely asked him if climbing the Atlas mountains was easier than coming to one of our sessions -_-
I asked him to commit more time to the campaign he requested, and he told me to remember that 7 hours was a lot of time. I really bit my tongue after spending hundreds of hours preparing a campaign he asked for that he had no intention of playing, whilst constantly telling me he wanted it more than anything.
In this time he invites me to his campaign, but then ghosts me and dodges my questions every time I ask about it. I ask if he would introduce me to his gaming table because I'd like to invite them to my one-shots, but again, he gets hesitant and dodges my questions or else politely expresses his fears that other players would join our campaign and ruin things. I was very deadpan and asked him how he thought they would compete with our campaign when our campaign only meets once every 3 months. But we meet to finish this campaign, and amongst our friends group it ends up being the first campaign any of us has actually finished. It was a good ending, though there were lots of mysteries left unresolved.
He expresses great desire to continue the campaign. I express likewise, but say I am worried he'll just act the exact same as before. He promises me he won't, he'll communicate clearly. He tells me he's free to run it in three months time on january, to which I am much pained but - as I had a lot on my plate, he had a lot on his plate, and our third player likewise - it wouldn't be a big deal.
Come February it becomes apparent he has no intention of committing time to this, and our third player is also likely to have a worse schedule, as will I. The chances of us two having free dates that align with his whims drops to 0.1%. At this point I have over 80,000> cumulative words of notes, typed and hand-written. I ask him if he has any free dates lined back to back so I might have a chance of cutting content and condensing two year's worth of campaign into four days of runtime and he gives me one day and three half days, all non-consecutive. In the three months between our last session and the proposed dates, he had run weekly sessions of his own campaign, without telling me he planned to do this or that he had done this. I found out from a mutual friend.
The three of us sit down and read through the notes together over some food I cooked. I ask him in polite but "WTF BRO" terms why the hell he would fuck me over this badly over the course of two years at some of my lowest points. I got that he was struggling, but everything he said just made him seem even more selfish. He talked and praised about how my game was a high point, an escape for him. But when I told him it was emotionally exhausting, taxing to my time and energy, and I had pushed myself juts to make it ready at the same time I was dealing with my grandfather's decline into death, workplace retaliation for reporting corruption, four failed house offers and half of my family cutting off contact with me, I also had to deal with the whiplash and wasted time of one of my best friends asking me to invest all my time into a genuine waste of time. He told me he genuinely wanted more than anything to do this campaign. I told him since all this time, he's been running his own campaign, sword fighting, running a marathon, climbing the atlas mountains, going overseas for holidays, going to the pub e.t.c. every single time making a choice, a choice where he does literally anything but participate in the campaign he asked me to make. He maintained, as he had for the last two years, that he had no choice, or that he could have done literally anything so why pick on those hobbies / commitments?
He told me to just drop it, because I kept ruining all of our outings by constantly bringing up the same conversation over and over again. I apologised, telling him I don't enjoy these conversations either. But I bring up the same ones, because the same issues keep springing up and nothing changes. He was very hurt by this, because he insisted he had been doing much to improve.
I told him I cared that he wasted my time on purpose, when I had no free time to waste. He repeated much of what I complained about in an apologetic way, but would immediately follow that up with a sort of "I agree that was bad, but possibly don't see things the exact same way you do." "How do you see them then? Speak clearly." "I am speaking as clearly as I can." / insisting he never did anything intentionally malicious to me. To which I would say, you do not need to be malicious to do harm, especially when you're "clumsily" doing the same mistake over and over again even after being told the harm you're causing.
I told him this is not what friends do to friends. I outlined how he had screwed me over for the last two years and at some point, I had to trust my own eyes and stop taking his word for every excuse. This got more and more heated as I kept trying to just get an explanation out of him, and he kept maintaining everything he did was reasonable, using strange logic. E.g. he had clearly told me he would like to continue the campaign in january. I told him he was clearly not being openly truthful, as he deliberately concealed his other campaign from me, and knew I would not interpret that as "yeah maybe let's talk about continuing the campaign in january." Arguing down to lawyer specific quanta the difference between "I would like to do this" as if he had said it with the meaning "I would like to, but..." Just, without the but.
This kind of back and forth arguing over minute details where we both called out the other for being the unreasonable one got worse, he got angry, defensive and told me this emotional blackmail wouldn't work on him. That it sounded like I was angry at who he hanged out with or what hobbies he had.
I was so angry I was actually left speechless. I told him if that's how he sees things, then the gulf between us has grown so far we'll never understand one another and I'm just going to leave. He apologised profusely and said if I took one thing away from this, it's that he loves me unconditionally.
I had no response. After a long fourteen seconds of silence, I said I was rarely speechless, so it would be best if we ate chicken and thought first. I felt guilty almost ending a fifteen year friendship like that.
We spent the afternoon talking things out, during which he said he was glad at least we could communicate and talk things out. To which I reminded him coldly, I don't feel that way at all, not anymore. He was genuinely crestfallen after that, as we had both often said amongst friends it was great that we could always talk, no matter how bad things got. But I told him the constant weirdness was just becoming too much for me. The strange lies, the intentional misdirections and concealing of truths that turn minor logistic issues into major personal ones. Even his memory seemed shot to shit. I told him about the times where he would jovially reconnect with me as if nothing had happened, and would be genuinely shocked when I respond with confusion, telling him we haven't talked in weeks. When he called me after my grandfather's funeral, I told him I didn't even know who told him, as I told almost none of our friends - his death had happened at such short notice and I had to arrange flight and funeral rites so quickly I had no time to tell any of my friends until days after. He said I told him, but we hadn't spoken in ten weeks before that, as he had been ghosting me again. I told him about the times he made a reference to the xyz time we did abc and I'd tell him I wasn't there. I'd tell him all the times we'd had conversations like this where he'd make all these great references to the jokes and convos we had and I'd ask him how, given how little we'd seen or talked of one another.
This is when he drops the bombshell on me that six years ago, around the time he started seeming like a completely different person, he'd had spinal surgery that had caused him for a brief moment of time to lose all sense of self and reality. Or so he says - some of our mutual friends say he's exaggerating, but I trust him not to lie about something this serious. He said he'd struggled to regain himself in that time. Coupled with his overworking, chronic stress and lack of sleep, plus any drinking, a lot of this adds up to a picture where he really just isn't himself.
We talked things out on the level, trying to think of a way forwards. I was so freaking hurt to be told I was just blackmailing him into giving up his hobbies when to me this was a last ditch attempt to try and fix a dying friendship. Not a big deal, but it showed a complete and callous indifference from someone I trusted. It's not that he seemed to wish me harm. It's that it seemed over and over again that he just did not care at all. When I told him what I had dealt with over the year, he responded with surprise, that he did not know it was that bad. This is around the time I disappeared off of bay12 as well - didn't even mean to disappear. Just poor health, death, family strife, inescapable workplace politics and medical bills just sucked me away. I said I didn't care few of my friends cared to check on me, because there was this assumption that I seemed invincible. To which my friend replied - it is true, that is how they see me. That amused me. I remember that year leaving a party I'd been invited to within minutes of walking through the door because I couldn't handle being near people when I felt that wretched. None of my friends there called or checked afterwards if I was okay lol, including him. In that time I called him to check he was okay, because I thought he had it worse, just based off what he was telling me. I told him I wasn't mad at any of our other friends though because they weren't the ones who were wasting my time, energy and money on top of everything else.
We talked out about how we might move forwards. I said I'd have to forget the first half of our conversation. I said I could do it. We both since then tried to keep things normal, like they were before. But the problem I realised quickly was that the normal status quo made me miserable, and all the emotional and time investment was coming from me. If I stopped chasing after him, our friendship did not exist. I talked to my best friend (a different guy, also good old friend) and confided that I worried even though both of us had an abundance of good will, both of us wanted our friendship to continue... It just felt like he had crossed a bridge too far. I want to just move on from our small disputes and be the understanding friend who helps him deal with his issues, but I am tired and can't get over how after all the inexplicable lies and harm he's caused me, he saw me as some manipulative snake, even when I still chose to see the best in him.
I met him since then with some mutuals. He offered me some pierogi and I politely refused it. He offered again, thrice, each time trying to rekindle that old energy. Each time I politely declined. I really wanted to just go back to normal, but now I felt like I had become the issue. Even though I said I would just try my best to move on and go back to normal, I just can't. I believe his apology, I believe he said those things in anger, I believe he still means me well.
I just can't see a world where we're friends again though. My second closest, oldest friendship gone so easily. I keep thinking if I should give him more patience over his brain surgery stuff... But he's already told me he doesn't do this to his other friends. Graaaaah. What a pain.
Author
Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 10105981 times)