Freinds BEGONE! The aftermath of happy times is sour....

Wisdom from my mother: "Two days later I always find I've just spent 20 minutes chattering away with them before I remembered I wasn't speaking to them."

I'm always the one who'd like to make up. They're the ones who hate my innate ways. I am not s/he who has fallen out with Mr Hanley, however.

One of my closest friends stopped talkign to me out of the blue 3 months ago. I miss him every day.

If I get sick of a friend, I tell them I am moving to Berkeley. And then I move.

Didn't talk to friend for 4 mos. once. Then she decided to talk to me. Then I didn't care. So we talked once, then I got bored. Now she's in New York.

My entire life is a slow process of making friends then screwing it all up and deciding that we never liked each other anyway, and we were only wasting precious time not being alone together.

You really start to get used to it, and even expect it after it happens about half a dozen times.

One of my best friends is taking me out for "coffee and a talk" tonight, because she's "worried about me" and I know from the way I've been acting lately that there's a very good chance I'll be ambushed for an "intervention" or something...

No. I'm joking... I think.

JM being the only person I've ever bothered to keep in touch with once outside of my immediate proximity, ever. This includes my parents. Who I do keep in touch with, but not coz I bother.

I haven't spoken to someone who wasn't my closest friend for almost a month now. this is odd, as we had a big argument and made up a few months ago. then I cared about it, but now I just don't seem to, which is both sad and plain good for my sanity. anyway, no matter how much of a hermit you are, you always meet new friends and learn to carefully despise old ones, so it doesn't matter.

bill

I used to have two incredibly good friends at college. They were great. I did everything with them, and we knew everything about each other. We even lived together for a year, and it was quite a good laugh. I honestly thought that I'd met my friends for life.

But then, two and a half years after I met them, just before Christmas, they decided they no longer liked me. It seems an ex had told them something about me that they didn't agree with, and to this day I don't know what it was. Anyway, as a result they stopped talking to me. I tried to reason with them but I remember one of them glaring at me and shouting 'Don't ever call me friend again!'.

I took it really badly. They convinced other people to stop talking to me and eventually it all became too much. I shut myself off from the entire college, and got involved with a completely different crowd. As a result I started getting into stuff that didn't agree with me, until I finally had my first real breakdown. And it was horrible.

To this day, I still wonder where they are, and if they ever think of me. I have real problems letting people be close friends with me, since I'm always scared they'll run off and stop talking to me, and just abandon me. I've never been able to make really close friends with anyone ever since, and sometimes all I want to do is shut myself away from the world to avoid social interaction. In fact, before I knew Kate, I would often go weeks and weeks on end without talking to anyone who wasn't who I worked with. I even knew someone who played on my fear, telling me that no-one would ever want to be around me and I believed it.

So my answer is avoid the aftermath by not letting people get too close. Not wholly satisfactory, but it works.

paul, i actually think the opposite. i have close friends, and if its natural i let people become close friends (of course i have plenty who are less close as well). i have been burned before, and wondered what happened (like anyone i guess), but i decided that this wasn't going to change the person i am, and that i wouldn't close myself off. this does mean that you can set yourself up for a fall and stuff, but thats just something that you have to realise might happen

I don't know. I think I took so bad a fall it's just made me incredibly wary. I simply don't have the ability to be close friends with anyone anymore. Maybe that's why I do Strange Fruit... I kind of hide my personality in it. I never speak to people at the club, really, aside from standing on the door and taking requests.

Better stop... I must sound like a monster!

The only close friend you have is a total fucking misanthrope who lets people get close to her as a way of keeping them at a distance. I think I see a pattern here...

I *know* that people will fuck me over and hurt me in the end, they always do. I've lost more friends than most people have ever had. These days, I'm far more sensible about it, and just let people *know* my faults right up front - "Yes, I'm a total misanthrope, yes, I'm a total lunatic, yes, I'm a miserable alcoholic" - so that they can't pretend like they weren't warned or anything.

Maybe we only get along, Kate, because of our misanthropy? Still, it could be worse... imagine if we only got along because of our lycanthropy... :)

Friends are fucking rubbish. So far the only reason I've figured out to have 'em is that they will pick your sorry ass off the curb when you've screwed your life up. Do this enough times, and you will eventually solve the awful problem of having friends. ;-)

Yeah, but every so often you come across someone who won't stop picking your ass off the kerb...

I've never had friends who've picked me up. Maybe because, as stated, I won't let then get close enough in the first place. Yet I'm happy to help out other people. Oh, all confusing.

Paul: This ex-"girl"friend of yours should have her arse kicked. There is really nothing more sorry and pathetic than a woman who has to bitch to her boyfriends' friends and acquaintances about how badly she's been treated. That is just so passive-agressive and twisted -- why didn't she either a. get a grip or b. confront you about whatever it is you're supposed to have done. One of my ex-boyfriends' complained to my mom (!) and anyone else who would listen about what a heartless bitch I was to dump him, so this topic irritates me to no end.

Jesus. This entire thread is making me want give Kate and Paul a big bear hug, but I'm afraid that they'd both punch me in the nuts.

I had an ex contact my parents too. Now, I'm not very close to my parents, and they know nothing about my life, so it was horrible. Was the same ex who talked to my friends, and for one Christmas when I had to go home (the last-ever Christmas I was at home) my parents couldn't stand me either. I shudder just thinking about it. I ended up running away to Manchester and staying in a hostel for a while.

I dunno. Sometimes I just want to shut myself away from everyone in the world and never come out. I guess we all do, though, sometimes.

Didn't it occur to your parents that this sad little person was displaying some pretty blatant stalker tendencies? Grrr. People like this pish me off even more than people who are out and out assholes, because at least those people are upfront about who they are instead of conniving and acting like a wounded party.

You shouldn't feel bad about this -- I feel bad for the rest of humanity who has to deal with this woman.

Oh, my parents are terrible. They *always* take the side of the other party. My mother still tells me how I dumped my first girlfriend and she was "good to me". For heaven's sake, mother. Recently, my mother told me how a girlfriend who made my life a living hell for a while was 'good to me', even though my parents were relieved when we broke up!!!

For Dan's sake, I will bear hug them both and see how long before they start slugging me. And who can blame them? ;-)

I should also note that from what I can tell Paul is talking about someone else other than the ex of his that I in fact know, so I can only conclude that Paul's got some evil emotional scar tissue. Eep!

Fall out with friends -- rarely. More like we lose touch and naturally drift apart, for better or worse...

Yes, Ned - different ex to the one you know. I'm a veritable walking relationship disaster, it would seem! Except where Kate's concerned, I guess.

The friend who prompted me to start the men/women/hate thread is skating on thin ice at the moment, especially as I've fallen out with him before and he's currently being rude. There seems to be some Me Vs. Girlfriend conflict developing...

Well, I've managed to keep in touch with people from school, college, uni etc...some I've lost touch with, just drifted apart...but never had any major fallings out except maybe in primary school. I find that some people are just acquaintances, so it doesn't matter that much if you lose touch.

Sometimes I just stop likeing people, but ususally it when I realise I never like d them much anyway. Or someone outside my group of freinds will point out that their bad qualities and I will say " You know, you're right". There will always be more freinds.

I don't usually get abandoned, but I end up burning bridges sometimes. I think that in the past I was a little too passive about relationships: being too friendly to just about anyone. I guess I'm "co-dependent", I take care of troubled people and worry about them too much, try to get them to love themselves, then I get caught up in their problems and don't know how to end it. I've ended some friendships terribly.

i once did something really scummy to a best friend and naturally she decided never to be friends with me ever again. i tried so hard to make things right but to no avail. i kick myself every day because she was such a warm, sweet, loving, fun, beautiful person. that was three years ago and i still haven't gotten over it completely.

how did i cope with the difficult times that followed? not well. for a while i decided that the whole situation was her fault and bitched about her no end to my other friends (who aided my bitching cos they hated her anyway). that helped to ease the pain for a while but it was really fucked for me to evade responsibility for my own actions.

have had to cope with some really scummy actions from some friends, can't go into too much detail because everyone i know in dunedin reads this site. (note: everyone in dunedin knows each other). have tried various ways of dealing with it, the only thing i can truly recommend is getting away from the person if possible. very difficult if you live in the same city and the city happens to be dunedin.

it all depends on how much you loathe their innate ways mike. do you hate everything about the person or do you still see some rewards in remaining friends? you have to remember that no-one is perfect, friends are entitled to fuck up sometimes because they are human.

Let's just say some peopl e have goo d points and bad points and sometimes the bad points outweigh the good points.

in that case, definitely try to keep your distance for a while, until you no longer give a shit about them. then you will be able to be around the person without wanting to commit acts of torture on them.

The reason that people like me and Paul slug people who try to hug them is purely defensive. In the past, anyone who made as if to hug me only wanted to get closer to me to kick *me* in the balls.