Sometimes our greatest loves turn into our deepest hates. These folks share the time a friend transformed into an enemy.
He Had A Roof Over His Head While His Family Starved
“When my husband decided to let me and our children be homeless while he stayed at his father’s place after telling me it wasn’t any of my business to try to find a new place to live because he was taking care of it.
We had three months to find a place to live on the other side of the country. For that time I would pack, take care of our kids, and when they napped I would look for apartments online. I sent him many I liked in the price range we agreed on. We visited his hometown (3 hours south of where we were moving) and he said he had some showings we could go to, so we drove up. When we got there he said the people had canceled…ok, great. About four weeks he told me to stop looking at places and he would get it figured out. Two weeks before we needed to move, I decided to check his phone for messages from the landlords he had been talking ABSOLUTELY NO MESSAGES! So I then reached out because obviously, he is not responsible. He got so mad at me for doing this but it needed to be done.
The day came to move and I had to bring the kids to the doctor, while there my father-in-law arrived and they packed up the vehicles and trailers and set off for the other side of the country. I was supposed to do the final washout of the apartment which I thought would not be a problem, wrong! One child wanted to do everything I did and was unknown to me the other had a double ear infection and was screaming non-stop. 11 pm came around and I just told our landlords I did what I could and thanked them for letting us live in their house. The kids and I took the midnight train and I was looking forward to seeing my husband, our new place and MY bed! When we arrived I couldn’t find my husband so I called to ask where he was, he was in bed at his dad’s house. ok great. I asked when he thought he would be picking us up and he didn’t have an answer. The answer ended up being 2 nights that I had to figure out a place to stay and things to do to entertain our kids during the days. I should add the kids were 21 months and 6 months old.
That was three years ago, he still can not explain to me what his thought process was and how I was going to be okay with it. I do not trust him to make decisions on anything, our finances are a wreck because he won’t let me see the bills and his accounts and he would rather add to the debt rather than pay bills. I am ready to be done with it.”
You’re Wife’s In The Hospital? Stop Being So Selfish, Bro!
“My wife had a horrific accident a few years ago that left her with paralysis on her left side and other deficits. Though she’s recovered quite a bit of motor function, the reality is, is that she’ll never regain 100% of what she lost.
After her month-long stay in ICU, she was transferred to an inpatient rehabilitation center. Because she was a competitive powerlifter prior to her accident, she progressed quite quickly from the muscle memory and her not completely wasted away as one might do having spent an entire month in a bed. She relearned how to walk, how to climb stairs, started to remember things that she had forgotten. I was there at inpatient every day, even sleeping in her room with her a few nights. Of course, I informed her family in the beginning as well as mine so they would come and visit when they could. Both her parents and mine live about 100 miles away so I really appreciated them coming when they did.
During this time, I was still in a band. For obvious reasons, I couldn’t commit to any shows and my band had really taken off and gained some serious traction as far as deals and shows.
My brother, who was and still is the ‘brains’ of this band called me and said, ‘dude, we have this gig coming up and it’s going to be huge.’ I said to him ‘Look, she’s in the hospital, you know this. She can’t even walk. I just can’t.’ He said ‘bro, why are you always being selfish?’ I hung up the phone and never called him again.
Since that day, I haven’t spoken to him. I don’t intend to. The level of disrespect, especially from my older brother, is unforgivable. It made me feel like he didn’t respect the fact that she is my wife, the mother to my daughter, and my family.
At first, it was seething hate. I couldn’t even listen to the music that I created with him. I hated that I was a musician, a vocalist, and a producer because I had done it professionally with him for so long. I couldn’t even listen to the genre of music that ours was categorized in. It’s been close to a decade since I’ve spoken to him.”
This Person Absolutely Sucks
“About six months ago I went through a bad break up and I genuinely hate my ex. I’m not being immature or emotional, I’ve dealt with it, but I truly hope karma finds her.
To cut a long story short, she was working illegally (by choice) and her visa was denied. I had just got a promotion to the best-paying job I’ve ever had. We had about six weeks’ notice before she had to leave. We explored all options, including breaking up and hopefully seeing each other in the future. She was incredibly stressed out and was lashing out. Eventually, we decided to split and two days before the flights, she begged me to move to a new country and promised to treat eachother better. The whole ‘I wanna spent the rest of my life with you’ speech. I fell for it because she doesn’t normally do deep meaningful conversations.
We lasted 12 days, eight days in quarantine, and four days out in the new country. She never gave me any reason or speech. I didn’t think it was real, I thought she was just stressed. After a few weeks of on and off, she ghosted me after dating for over five years. She used me so she didn’t have to move abroad alone, I also did all the planning, paid more than half, organized visas, etc.
I earn 40% of what I used to, I’m in debt, I left all my friends, my cat, and my bike behind. I still haven’t recovered financially.
I don’t think she planned it, I think she just buckled under the pressure of me sacrificing a good job for her and took the easiest way out. She doesn’t face problems, she runs, and after 5 years I became that problem she needed to run from.”
A Bit Of A Freeloader, Huh?
“I went to visit my now former best friend at least four times a year, every year, for four years. She lives four hours away from me by car, and I happily made that drive to hang out with her. I’d get the hotel and she would stay with me. I’d buy her food for the day. I’d take her around and run errands with her before we could do anything fun because she had to be a ‘responsible adult,’ but due to her disability, she couldn’t drive. Never offered to pay me for gas when I’d spend hours driving her around, or pay for the hotel, or anything. Her justification was that I made more money than her. That was fine, I understood.
Now, I live in a major city, so there is a ton of stuff to do and there is a major train station that just so happens to be accessible to her. Despite me going down to see her all the time, she never, not once in the five years we were friends, offered to come to see me. I understood, train tickets are expensive, much more than driving, and my car was needed to get around. But then another of her friends came to visit my city and she bought a ticket right away. Her friend contacted me even though we weren’t that close to asking if I wanted to come along because she knew I lived in the city. My friend never said anything, but when she found out I was coming, she demanded I pick her up.
I had to work in the morning so I was half an hour late getting to her and had to take public transit in because there was no parking anywhere nearby. She was disappointed I didn’t have my car and wanted me to pay for her bus ride back to where my car was so she could drop ber luggage off. She brought a full suitcase (for a two-day trip) and a huge tote bag of activities for the train which weighed about twenty pounds. I told her it was going to be an hour there and back and if she’d told me beforehand that she was bringing that I’d have told her not to because I knew we’d be walking a lot. She was upset by that. Her friend met us at a restaurant and offered to take her back to her hotel room to drop her stuff off. She declined and instead carried it around all night.
It started to rain pretty heavily. She was upset that she was getting wet, that all of her stuff was getting wet, and that we were doing so much walking. Kept demanding why I didn’t bring my car. I finally snapped and asked her where she expected me to park, and how many parking lots had she seen, and she pouted for the rest of the evening and barely talked to me. I ended up carrying her stuff because she claimed she was too weak. We finally ended the evening and got back to my car, I drove her to her hotel, and I told her I was going home. She got upset because the hotel room was ‘dark and scary’ and I needed to protect her. (I should note, at this point, she was 33 years old.)
The next day, I drive out to get her, take her and all of her luggage to the transit station. She asks me again why we’re not taking my car. I ask her again where I will park. Offer to let her leave some of her luggage in my car and I’ll bring it to her the next time I come down. She declined. We haul it all around the city again. We come down to crunch time on getting her to the station after our bus gets stuck in traffic. Her friend is monitoring the time and telling her that we have plenty of time to reassure her. She starts crying. I tell her I’ll get her a new ticket if I have to. She stops crying. We get to the station with twenty minutes to spare. She pulls me aside to complain about how her friend is so inconsiderate to have not planned on getting her to the train on time and for brushing off her feelings. She almost misses her train because she spends so long complaining. The whole train ride back she texts me about how terrible the experience was.
Anyway, that whole situation put a bad taste in my mouth, but the real final straw was her demanding I take two weeks off of work to drive down and plan her father’s funeral, and demanding her boyfriend take a month off work and fly up to come to see her so that we could plan her father’s funeral because ‘she shouldn’t be expected to do it because she’s just a little baby.’ Again, she was 33. We told her we just didn’t have the time and couldn’t afford it. She gave us both the silent treatment for two days and only contacted us to complain that the hospital wouldn’t release her father’s body. I quoted the state law that says they have to, she again demanded I come down and handle everything for her, I said that I had my own problems with a dying relative that I’d been keeping private for the last month because I knew it would upset her, that I didn’t appreciate being taken advantage of and having to regulate her emotions the way she expected, and deleted all of her messages. She reached out maybe six months later to ask how I was, I tried to good faith communicate with her again, she instantly started to complain again about everything that’s ever happened to her. I stopped responding. Haven’t heard from her in five years.”
Goodbye, Dan
“I had to disown my lifelong best friend. I was 37 when I did it, we had been BFFs since fifth grade. The addiction turned him into an absolute piece of human garbage. I have dozens of stories that all warrant disowning him, but the tipping point when I realized that the person that used to be my friend is dead and that there is just some terrible person wearing his skin suit around now was this:
We had a mutual friend who was in town for her last remaining family member’s funeral, her grandma. Her mom and dad and brother had all died separately in the last few years so this was a huge heavy deal and also the last time she would ever have a reason to come back to her hometown. Well, we all went out to a bar, and as the sauced kicked in my ex-friend’s switch flipped and he started in on his standard ranting about how whoever his target for the evening is is going to die alone because they are a piece of trash that no one will ever love… except this time he picked the girl in town for her last relative’s funeral, and a table of like six of us watched him stand up, in the middle of a crowded bar, for literally no reason whatsoever, and scream at her about she’s a stupid floozy that deserves to have a dead family because she’s an unlovable, selfish piece of trash that is going to die alone.
Everyone at that table had been friends with each other for like 15 years. We all grew up together. We were tight as heck. Everyone but me hated him from that point on and none of them have spoken since.
I still lived in the same city as him so I gave him a couple more chances due to proximity, but it just got worse.
He has no remaining friends. He’s in a super abusive relationship where they beat the heck out of each other all the time (he’s gay), and he blames all of his friends abandoning him on them. He is incapable of admitting that he’s the problem. I’ve seen his brother beat the heck out of him few times. I’ve beaten the heck out of him a few times. I’ve watched him scream in his mother’s face about how she’s a disgusting fat pig that deserves to die alone. One time he came home from a Craigslist s*x party and sprayed this gross goo out of his butt all over the house we shared at the time and then told me to ‘clean it up, loser’ so I knocked him out and called his mom, and she apologized to me for having to kick his face in.
I could write a book on how evil this prick became as he grew older, angrier, and more bitter.
Hopefully, he sees this. I hate you, Dan. You need rehab, and you need serious mental health care.”
Absolutely Crazy Behavior
Ex roommate stopped paying rent and blocked the landlord on everything. When the landlord forced me to be the middle man he lied to my face about not having any money left, can’t afford food, a whole sob story. So I bought him groceries and got in contact with his parents to express how worried I was because I could see him spiraling.
His parents told me they send him rent plus a few hundred extra every month. To this day I don’t know where the money was going, but he was three months late on rent.
On the day the lease ended he moved his stuff out and left garbage everywhere and food rotting in the fridge, I spent nearly two days cleaning by myself but had a job waiting for me and ran out of time. So everyone lost their security deposit for the apartment being trashed, and when I confronted him his excuse was ‘I just can’t be in that place anymore, I’m putting it behind me.’
One month prior to all this I’d have called him my best friend, now if I think about him too much I get so angry my hands start shaking.
Rotting In Jail
“I have an older brother close to me in age. When we were kids I followed him everywhere, his name was the first thing I learned to say. We had an unconventional childhood with some severe abuse and neglect and we’d go for huge walks to get away from home and just talk about the trash.
Over time, we got separated a bunch by him going off to prison (six months in an Idaho state pen for possession with intent, felony conviction, followed by deportation to Canada). He had one bag of weed on him and he ran afoul of a Mormon judge who was there to scare him straight.
I visited when I could, called when I couldn’t visit, sent him money for the commissary when I could scrape it together. Not a ton of money, I was poorer than dirt, but whatever I could. For years I would western union him a hundred here, a couple hundred there. I knew he was an addict (he made connections in prison and sold crack later on, and of course ended up using as well) but I just kept trying to help.
I tried sending gift cards after a while when it became clear that he was recycling the same excuses and garbage and he stopped contacting me. Our mom died (in itself a good thing, the world became slightly safer that day) and I moved heaven and earth to arrange for a funeral in Canada though she died in Idaho, just so he could come. I had to borrow a minivan from an inlaw, get some weird permits for transporting a corpse, all this stuff, bought him a ticket arranged a taxi and did all this stuff.
Meanwhile, he’s alternating calling everyone in the family getting angry, and claiming we stole her insurance. It turns out she had a 500,000 dollar insurance policy but had canceled it to send him dope money a few months before dying. He wouldn’t believe it. He also refused to come to the funeral (I managed to get back almost all the money and buried her in Idaho instead). He called my wife at the time and harassed and threatened her.
I called him and told him ‘look I offered to scrape together a twenty thousand dollar funeral while making a very low hourly wage’ and he laughed at me when I told him how much I made per hour. Man hasn’t worked a legal job at that point for a decade.
Forget him. He was my best friend, my only partner in the world. I would have literally covered up a murder for the guy, I did everything I could for him and he just essentially spat in my eye and threatened those I cared about. He’s dead to me, the man he is is not the boy he was and I don’t plan on ever talking to him again until he’s in the ground.”
Just Waiting To See His Mugshot
“My brother. He’s always been…off, but I always felt sorry for him for the most part. He’s not a nice person, and so most people in my family don’t bother with him. When we were younger he was super screwy and used to threaten to kill me and my siblings in our sleep and he’d chase us around the house with knives when our parents weren’t in. I don’t think that’s normal but I’ve never had a second opinion on it.
He’s my brother though, so over the years I’ve tried to help him with financial advice, given him a place to stay, been a shoulder to cry on, applauded him for every little achievement, but nothing’s ever enough. He’s a take-take-take kind of person, and I suppose I could accept that selfishness if he wasn’t so nasty.
The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was nothing major, and I think it was sort of cumulative after years of dealing with his nonsense. I hadn’t seen my brother in a few months (he only talks to me when he wants something) and my dad wanted us all to rent an Airbnb and go on a city break, but the one he found was three bedrooms shared between four couples. My boyfriend and I have been together six years and we like our privacy so I responded to the group chat and said we’d come on the city break but we’d get our own hotel, thanks for the offer though. My brother replied within the chat and said that I was being an inconsiderate ungrateful person along with some other distinctly more creepy things I shan’t repeat regarding my motives for not sharing a bedroom with another couple over the course of a weekend.
That was in September and I haven’t spoken to him since, nor do I intend to. He’s an awful excuse for a person, spreads nothing but negativity and his attitude towards women terrifies me. I doubt I’ll see him again unless his mugshot pops up on my Facebook newsfeed one day.”
Is ‘Hate’ The Right Word?
ArtFamily/Shutterstock
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘hate’ anymore because that indicates far more energy than I put into them but nearly all of my mother’s family.
My parents divorced when I was young and my dad got custody, so I saw them when my mom decided to use her visitation privileges. I have fond memories of my grandparents, aunt, and uncle from that time. My little brother, younger cousin, and I were all thick as thieves over there and had a ton of fun. Around 12 I got sick of my mom’s abuse and stopped visiting her, even though my brother still went (because he was her favorite), which meant losing contact with that entire side of the family. When I was in high school we got back in touch and became close.
But as time went on, I started to see and learn some things that soured me on them. Apparently, everyone knew how my mother was toward me from the very start but didn’t feel it was their place to say anything. However, when I had my child, they had zero issues attempting to tell me all the things they thought I was doing wrong. They were all extremely passive-aggressive and any time I laid down a healthy boundary or enforced a boundary, I was told that I turned out as evil and cold as my mother. Hearing that was the last straw for me and I cut contact with everyone aside from Grandpa and the older of my two cousins when my daughter was 10. I still allowed her to have contact because she was treated very well by everyone and I felt she needed to decide what relationship to have with them herself.
Apparently, they still track trash on me excessively. So much so that my daughter has had to step up multiple times when visiting and tell them that if they want to bad mouth me that’s their business, but if they do it in front of her they won’t see her anymore. Now she’s 17 and is very low contact with all of them except Grandpa and that one cousin. She got tired of passive-aggressive guilt trips, being used, and them still tearing me down when she’s in earshot. She also caught them flat out lying about some events involving me, painting me out to be some sort of monster and they got pretty mad when she corrected them about it immediately.
Sad, really, because some of our favorite childhood memories are time spent with them, but when you get old enough to have your own opinions and boundaries that don’t align with theirs, it’s like a switch flips and they make you out to be a terrible person over pretty reasonable stuff.”