30 Instances Friendships Ended Because Folks Realized Their Friends Weren’t Actually Their Friends

When my father passed NONE of my friends showed up to the funeral. It was an hour and a half away so when they made up excuses not to come I said I understood (I didn't).

Surprisingly two of my neighbors that I barely know showed up. I'm friend with them now.

She was one of my best friends, I guess. She was a self-centered drunk, but had some good qualities. We were talking on the phone one day, and she rambled on and on about her stupid, lazy co-workers. Then I told her I was afraid I was starting to relapse (life-threatening illness I thought I was over). She sighed and said "....AND? What's that to ME?" She was bored and wanted to talk about herself. When I got off the phone I emailed her a "Dear Karen" letter, saying don't ever contact me again. She didn't, and I didn't either. And I wasn't relapsing after all, thank God.

I decided to throw a Super Bowl party a few years ago. I went out a bought a new grill and mounted a tv in the kitchen for people who wanted to hang out and snack while watching the game. Had tons of food and beer ready. 30 minutes before kickoff I got a text that the whole group decided to go to someone else’s house and that I should bring all my food and beer over there. Needles to say, I didn’t go, and I haven’t thrown a party at my house since.

Was a cop wife for twenty years. When you divorce you not only lose your cop family, you evidently lose your best friend who is married to a cop. I learned a valuable lesson. Friendships built on a common thread last only as long as that thread remains. Heartbreaking.

Tried to invite them to an event I go to every year. Day of I go by myself and find out weeks later they went as a group without me.

My wife and I had a small wedding. I didn’t invite a ton of people but I invited 15 or so friends. Besides my best man, only one showed up. What’s worse is that all these people said they were coming. I no longer put effort towards those friendships.

EDIT: I’ve struggled with social anxiety my whole life. These “friends” were all people I met at work. I work at a big company and this was the first time I actually had friends. I wouldn’t call any of them super close but I thought they were at least close enough to come to my wedding as they always talked about coming and would comment saying that I better invite them. I worked on several different teams then and most of them didn’t know each other. I don’t think it was intentional. I just think I misinterpreted what true friends are. I was more of a casual friend to them than they were to me. I did wonder if I did something wrong and it made me feel pretty awful for a while, but as someone who didn’t have experience with friendships I think I just invited people who didn’t really value me as much as I value them.

I hope that makes sense. I definitely looked back at my behavior, and like I said, I wondered for the longest time if I had did something wrong, if it was my fault.

An easy answer for me.

One year I had a sleepover party with a bunch of childhood friends from the neighborhood as a teen. It was really fun and I invited 15 or so kids, had to convince my parents and spent a ton of money to make it perfect for everyone. We went swimming in the pool, played dodgeball, kickball, had tons of food, had a nerf gun war, played pool, played video games, and watched movies. It was a blast and everyone was clearly enjoying themselves.

Then they tried to watch a horror movie that my parents would [end] me if I saw it, and I objected for a while before reluctantly putting it on. I hated horror movies, too, but I wanted them to have fun. It was like 1 in the morning.

They got bored during the movie and asked if we could all go to the clubhouse (I lived in a gated community with a public clubhouse at the time) to meet up some girls in the middle of the night. I said that my parents would never let it happen and that I didn't want to get caught, so I told them we couldn't go. After that, about 5 of them left at like 2-3 am to go without me. They said they'd be "right back" and that "one of them needed their medicine so they went to get it." Within the hour, everyone was gone except me.

I was crushed, and too embarrassed to tell my parents, so I finally put on the movie *I* wanted to watch before going to sleep. In the morning my parents were furious because over a dozen kids that they had promised their parents would be at their house had disappeared without a traced. Sad and tired me had to call all of them to figure out where they were and let all of their parents know that they didn't spend the night. Even though my parents made me do it, a lot of them got mad at me for that. The worst part by far was figuring out that they had all went to a different kid's house to spend the night after leaving mine.

I opened up to him about my mental health issues, and after a day or two he messaged me saying he couldn't have that kind of negativity in his life. This was literally the first and only time I told anyone about it.

He was physically and psychologically abusing to me for years. It took a long time for me to see that even though he was “joking” it was just flat out abuse.

Best friend of nearly 10 years expected me to travel halfway across the world and take a month off from work to stay with her (and her boyfriend) so that we could go to Oktoberfest and maybe do other things. However, when the time came, she refused to make any concrete plans, but still insisted that I apply for a visa and book my tickets anyway. Note that at this stage she hadn’t even confirmed the dates and had not spoken to her boyfriend about the possibility of my staying there for a month. She never initiated the conversation and very rarely answered my texts/calls. At some point I called her out on it, demanded that she show some interest on her part considering how I would be making a significant financial investment if I had decided to go through with the plan. She told me she was busy and that she would call me back. She never did.

One day I simply had enough, blocked her on all social media and haven’t talked to her since. All relationships require effort. If people care, they will show you they care.

When I was hanging out with my real friends and felt at ease and calm with them.

Made me realize that my other friends gave me anxiety.

My husband and I went on vacation with her and her husband. My husband and I did some gambling and won a decent amount of money. They did not gamble at all. When we got back I found out they had told everyone how much of a b***h I was because I had not offered to pay for their half of the vacation with my gambling winnings. When I confronted her she did not deny it. I didn’t want to be friends with someone that thought money played into our friendship or that talked like that behind my back.

Not me, but the kid who vandalized my house and car.

After someone threw eggs and rocks at my house, and finished with a rock through my windshield, I left the car parked next to the street with a big poster on it with "Reward for information" on it.

Within hours the kid's friends turned him in for $10 each.

They don't contact me at all unless I go out of my way to contact them first. They find any reason to not hang out. They claim we're good friends but it just feels like they just want to be able to say that I'm a friend without doing anything to *be* a friend

When I realized that everything I did for them, they totally took for granted and advantage of most of the time. Like going out to eat I would usually pay because I used to make more then her but when she got a better job she still expected me to pay all the time. Nope

She sided with her boyfriend when I told her he had made jokes about sexual assault which made me uncomfortable, eventually accused me of lying even though she was there when he made them

I used to go out for dinner with some college friends.

Unlike me, they'd order multiple "call" drinks and *the most expensive* things on the menu.

Then, when the huge bill arrived, they'd say, "Let's just keep it simple and divide it equally." The guys knew I was paying double or triple what I should have, but that didn't seem to bother them.

when i decided not to be the friend who always organised things and started conversations. i get no contact on the weekends and during the week, i noticed that if i kept quiet in a conversation, they wouldn't even notice i was there

With friends on a trip to Japan, drinking one night in Roppongi district. I'm trying to taper off, Karen (no, really, it was her name) keeps putting drinks in front of me, paying the bartender for weird shots for me, but not for anyone else in the group. She's saying really catty s**t, but laughing like it's all good fun, we're pals. She starts saying some pointed stuff that makes me think she's been holding on to some really ugly resentment for awhile. After I'm good and sloshed, she pushes me over to my partner and tells him to grab a taxi and take me back. On the way back to the hotel I look at my partner and say, "I didn't realize until now that Karen hates me." He replied, "She sure seems to." Neither the trip nor the friendship was the same after that night, and I had the worse hangover of my entire life, passed out on the floor of a Tokyo hotel bathroom.

We lived together during our early university years. I was not in a good place when we became friends. A couple years later, I picked myself up, got into really good shape, was accepted into the degree program I wanted and found an extremely awesome job. She said she couldn’t continue being friends with me because I didn’t need her. If you don’t grow together, you grow apart. Years later we were still Facebook “friends”. She deleted me when I got engaged. I noticed and asked her why, she said she didn’t care anymore about anything in my life.

It took me a long time to get over that last part. No one needs that in their life.