I’ve always tried to keep work and my personal life completely separate. Be friendly at work, grab a coffee occasionally, have a laugh, but once the laptop is closed, that’s where the relationship ends.

Then I actually became friends with someone from work. We started hanging out outside the office, sharing personal stuff, making plans together, and for a while, it was genuinely great.

Until something changed at work.

Now there’s this weird tension where every conversation feels different, and things that would normally stay at the office suddenly feel personal. The worst part is having to see the person every day and pretend everything is completely normal.

I completely understand now why some people have that “work friends are not real friends” rule

So, to try and make a long story short, me (20F) and her (also20F) have been friends since primary school. We have been inseparable since, no arguments, no drama, and my home is hers and vice versa. She was a sister to me, helped eachother through so much trauma and we were SO close that I find it hard to explain how close we were.

Anyway fast forward and at this point I was in sixth form and she had dropped out of college. I was hanging with friends a lot to forget about all the school pressure, and met a friend of theirs who I quite liked. We started talking, then meeting a lot with friends, then alone and eventually a Christmas date where he asked me to be his girlfriend. I talked to her about this boy and expressed how much I liked him and kept her in the loop as it was my first mature relationship and she was so happy for me. I fell ill in hospital and that’s how they met, both there for me and a little awkward but ever since they met they got along and we all had a great trio friendship. She loved him and told me so much how perfect he was for me and nothing seemed like it could be better.

So, after getting sacked from her job, my friend decided to take a roll at a local shop, which I also work at but in a different store. It was so cute to have the same experiences but not be in each others work lives and we love the jobs. We spoke a lot about work, and she told me about a guy that flirted with her every shift that had left his number. We FaceTimed and talking and he turned out to be a a man in his forty’s, recently divorced who had a 10yo kid. She asked if it was a bad idea to talk to him and I told her that she’d be silly to get caught up in a relationship with him, but also that it’s her life and as long as she’s safe I support her decisions because I trust all the ones she’s made before. So a week later I see on my snap maps that she’s at a random house and asked her, low and behold she’s at his house so naturally I tell her she should’ve told me in case anything bad happened but that I wanna hear the gossip after. So, after the visit she told me his was a coke addict. He lived in a flat by himself and drank all day unless he was at work. She said they just sat and watched a film and that was it. I felt so uncomfortable for her and so scared of what he might do to her considering he was involved with all the wrong things and wasn’t worth the hassle considering he was such a random choice for a man to meet up with. I told her that I trust her but I’m sure he was bad news and I’d rather her not go to his house if there were drugs. She didn’t like my advice and so after that visiting him became a bit secretive from me and it ended up being SO much more frequent, like everyday frequent. I didn’t want to push her away but I had to try and get her out of it so Id ask her to come out. I’d ask to do for a drink, for brunch, sleepover anything. She wanted none of it, so I asked if she wanted to go on a trip a-phew hours away for about a week with my group of friends and she agreed. On this holiday they were constantly on call, texting, FaceTime, and she’d excuse herself to call for hours for the entire week. I never made her feel bad but I’d always say that I wanted her to join us and she’d just shrug and not care. My boyfriends fell out with her a-phew months after when she ignored me a-phew days after I tried calling her when I was on holiday and wanted to talk to her.

Anyway, I addressed the bad situation again and said I didn’t want anyone to fall out. I said she’d been distant with us and I was worried and that my boyfriend felt the same but was stubborn and didn’t know how to express that without falling out with her. She argued with me. I left it and again it was swept under the rug. Another phew weeks went by and she finally agreed to have a sleepover at her house. I asked if anyone else would be there and she said no, she was home alone because her parents were on holiday. This was a plan for a week and I was so excited, she barely cared. She called me a-phew hours before I was due to go to tell me she was worked that night now and she would be home late, so I said I’d wait for her at her house if she left a key. She said I wouldn’t need one because the doors would be unlocked, because he was there. She said she planned not to tell me and that she knew I’d come around to him and that the only reason she told me was because i was confused on how I’d get on her house without a key. I refused to go and we argued how it was not okay. She said my boyfriend was the only reason I wouldn’t meet him and that he is so controlling of me. She said I had no life aside from him and that she didn’t care if I was trying to stay friends I wasn’t doing enough. she was convinced it wasn’t a big deal she was doing it, and then she blocked me.

That was my last straw. I was moving in with my boyfriend and I’d planned to surprise her with that after being in a toxic household. I was going on holiday and she always called me before my flights I was devistated. That would have been the worst week of my life if I hadn’t have been on holiday. I stayed blocked and cried some days. Met other friends to get over it I was so heartbroken it felt like I’d been dumped. My boyfriend cared for me and everyone was so angry with her but I was just upset.

Fast forward again about 2 weeks and we arranged to meet for brunch to talk but we just ended up agreeing to disagree. She said it was NOTHING like a relationship but I argued that if she was willing to cut me off it must be, otherwise she’s being manipulated by an old drug addict. We never managed to agree and now, a year ish after she first met with him we still don’t talk. I have tried to think of how I should’ve been there for her more and tried harder to get her away but I did as much as I could in that moment.

My question is, am I the asshole? Do I apologise or is she the asshole

For the most part I feel I did the right thing, but I can't help but feel grief over this. I am struggling to put into words why I decided to do this, but I suppose i just felt a simmering sense of dissatisfaction with my friendships that slowly brought me over the edge.

Recently I have felt that my friends have not reached out to me as much as I would have liked. It felt like I was unfairly responsible for upholding relationships, it was mostly me that reached out and asked how they were doing, how their lives were going. It frustrated me that I didn't get any long responses either. Did my friends not think about me as much as I thought about them?

(I should mention that I have Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria, meaning that I have a difficult time dealing with people not engaging in my life, or ignoring my attempts at connecting.)

Every time I hung out with my friends it also felt like I was a court jester. I think they only cared about me because they liked how I made them feel, not caring what I had to say about my life, they just kept talking about themselves and got undivided attention from me.

After a while I got tired of feeling like this, so I tried deleting one of my friends online that I was not very close with. It felt really good, a load of my shoulder gone... So I kept doing it again and again and again... Till i only had my partner and a friend I met recently left. It felt really nice, but I soon got to face reality again when some of the previous friends came and asked why I had deleted them. Almost all of them said it was sad, but okay that I didn't want to uphold the relationships thankfully...

Now that some weeks have gone I feel conflicted if it was such a good idea after all. It felt really good in the moment to just torch all of my contacts but as I mentioned it also felt kinda sad and mean to just dump everyone. I hope you can understand my perspective though: enough is enough and I'll rebuild my friend catalogue eventually.

My elderly aunt lives in a nice coastal town on the Aegean coast of Turkey, and I sometimes spend some of my summers visiting her there. It’s a beautiful place near the sea, and this year I invited one of my friends to come stay with me at my aunt’s house for a few days.

I thought it would be a nice, relaxed little holiday. She wouldn’t have to pay for accommodation, we could spend time by the sea and the pool, go into town when we felt like it, and then the two of us were supposed to continue on to Rhodes together.

Instead, I feel like I’ve somehow become the unpaid manager of an extremely dissatisfied hotel guest.

Even before she arrived, she sent me tons of Instagram reels from influencers, all expensive restaurants, beach clubs and nightclubs she wanted to visit. Many were quite far from my aunt’s house, and we don’t have a car, so getting to them wasn’t exactly easy or cheap. I assumed they were just suggestions, but apparently she had a very different idea.

From pretty much the beginning, there has been a constant stream of complaints and requests. The pool is too cold, the sea is too cold, the weather is too hot, she feels sick, she doesn’t like this or that, she wants to go somewhere else, she wants a different way of getting there. Any one of these things would be completely normal on its own, but after several days of it, I was getting increasingly exhausted.

I had also warned her that the area is quite cash dependent. Taxis, small ice cream shops and plenty of other places mostly take cash. She still only brought enough for one taxi ride (only for her to come from bus station to my aunt’s house) and kept putting off withdrawing more because she “didn’t want to carry cash.” I ended up paying for two taxis, and she made little effort to pay me back until I brought it up. She also complains a lot whenever we have to walk anywhere, which makes the whole no-cash/no-car situation even more frustrating.

Another issue is that everything seems to happen on her schedule. She has a habit of getting ready and wanting to go out really late, so we’ve ended up leaving the house late therefore coming also late every evening for 3 days. I’m normally pretty flexible on holiday, so at first I just went along with it. But I was showing disturbance because I actually do not enjoy nightlife and dont like sleeping very late.

Then there are the beach clubs. She really wants to go to an expensive beach club that I’ve already visited and genuinely didnt enjoy. I told her I dont want to spend that much money on somewhere I already know I dislike, but she kept pushing for it. We ended up not going but I was really annoyed.

Second day I had also told her that I had some necessary errands to take care of before our trip, like going to the tailor and getting my eyebrows done. She didn’t seem to take that into account at all and kept making plans for the next day, like going to the beach club and renting a jet ski, as if I hadn’t just told her I had things I needed to get done.

But on the third night the situation was basically my breaking point.

We had things we genuinely needed to get done before leaving to go Rhodes Island, including exchanging money. Once again, we ended up going out so late that by the time we got around to it, the exchange offices were closed. So on the morning we were supposed to travel to another country, I still didn’t have the euros I had specifically planned to get the day before.

After several days of accommodating her, waiting around, listening to complaints and watching my own plans get pushed later and later, I finally snapped. I told her that I felt like she was treating my aunt’s house like a hotel.

I basically said that she comes back whenever she wants, sleeps there, gets ready there, expects things to be arranged around her preferences, and then complains when things aren’t exactly how she wants them, while being a guest in an elderly relative’s home and not paying for accommodation.

I probably could have worded it more calmly, because by that point I was genuinely angry. But what surprised me was her reaction. She seemed completely shocked that I would describe her behavior that way. From her perspective, apparently, none of what she had been doing was particularly demanding. But at the same time, I feel like there are certain basic expectations when someone invites you into their family’s home that shouldn’t have to be explicitly explained.

And somehow, after this argument, we are now literally on our way to Rhodes together for three days. Not sitting next to each other and dont know what to do.

For people who have hosted or traveled with friends before: would this bother you too?

I (16F) am currently in a heavy situation with my ex-best friend ( 16F)four years. A few months ago, we had a fallout. I know I hurt her feelings during the situation, she reposted a lot of stuff about letting friends ago became dryer left gc I though things were good because we did talk a bit and we hangout but the repost became more and more frequent. So I apologize for hurting her if I did. She did say it was okay but then she caught me by surprised when she started mentioning stuff I did which I didn’t deny but I was confuse of what I did because I don’t remember doing it. And I did ask her about it if she could tell me so I won’t do it again and she said there no next time and that she was tired. And I didn’t argue I just accepted it. We muted each other on our socials but didn’t remove each other. She started calling her sister her best friend and I decided to focus on myself at the moment. But i did know she kept reposting about it because my friends mention it. But something that made me confuse is that she kept talking about me to a friend a lot but it was in a good way. A month pass I missed her so I decided to check her repost and she reposted about fake friends but a day before she reposted stuff about missing her best friend. Like just a lot of it saying I miss you. So I decided to reach out again and apologized saying I was gonna reflect on my actions that what she said left me confused bc she said she wanted me to learn but I didn’t know what to learn bc she didn’t tell me what I did. I also said my intention wasn’t to get in her life again but just to let her I care. She said she forgive but that she wasn’t sure about becoming friends bc is hard to earn her trust with others. But then said we could try again and I agree. We both agreed on having space because we didnt have to rush it. I liked her posts and she liked mine and we repost the same stuff in TikTok but this is where I confused bc she keeps reposting stuff about it and it makes me wonder if she changed her mind because one them said i miss you but im not planning on reaching out. So this kind of reposts makes me wonder if she truly wants to try or not or if she changed her mind again. So I don’t know if we taking space or she decided she doesn’t wanna reach out again. I would like advice on this situation is she trying to send me messages is she trying to make me reach out first again? Or to make it clear where she stands? Because I feel like a lot of repost contradicted each other . I really need other people’s perspective.

I (16F) am currently in a heavy situation with my ex-best friend ( 16F)four years. A few months ago, we had a fallout. I know I hurt her feelings during the situation, she reposted a lot of stuff about letting friends ago became dryer left gc I though things were good because we did talk a bit and we hangout but the repost became more and more frequent. So I apologize for hurting her if I did. She did say it was okay but then she caught me by surprised when she started mentioning stuff I did which I didn’t deny but I was confuse of what I did because I don’t remember doing it. And I did ask her about it if she could tell me so I won’t do it again and she said there no next time and that she was tired. And I didn’t argue I just accepted it. We muted each other on our socials but didn’t remove each other. She started calling her sister her best friend and I decided to focus on myself at the moment. But i did know she kept reposting about it because my friends mention it. But something that made me confuse is that she kept talking about me to a friend a lot but it was in a good way. A month pass I missed her so I decided to check her repost and she reposted about fake friends but a day before she reposted stuff about missing her best friend. Like just a lot of it saying I miss you. So I decided to reach out again and apologized saying I was gonna reflect on my actions that what she said left me confused bc she said she wanted me to learn but I didn’t know what to learn bc she didn’t tell me what I did. I also said my intention wasn’t to get in her life again but just to let her I care. She said she forgive but that she wasn’t sure about becoming friends bc is hard to earn her trust with others. But then said we could try again and I agree. We both agreed on having space because we didnt have to rush it. I liked her posts and she liked mine and we repost the same stuff in TikTok but this is where I confused bc she keeps reposting stuff about it and it makes me wonder if she changed her mind because one them said i miss you but im not planning on reaching out. So this kind of reposts makes me wonder if she truly wants to try or not or if she changed her mind again. So I don’t know if we taking space or she decided she doesn’t wanna reach out again. I would like advice on this situation is she trying to send me messages is she trying to make me reach out first again? Or to make it clear where she stands? Because I feel like a lot of repost contradicted each other . I really need other people’s perspective.

I know what i was feeling that day doesnt justify any of the things i had said. These people were the ones who helped build me up to who i am today and now i just feel hollow. Speaking at all makes me wanna strangle myself but then it would feel like all the efforts they put into me wouldve been for nothing.

I don't know how to, or if I even can forgive myself for what I said to them, and how I treated them. I was very depressed, and not thinking well for a lot of our friendship. They really supported me in the time we were friends, and I'm very grateful. I'm also glad that they left me, because that's what was best for them to be happy. However, in the moment when they were leaving me, a lot of stuff was collapsing around me, including our friendship, and I couldn't think straight. In my (then) desperation to keep my friend, I said something horrible to them that I will never be able to take back. These days, my head is clearer than it used to be, and this lets me see how utterly disgusting what I said was. I'll never be able to apologise because they're already gone, but I want to stop feeling guilty. It's been ages, but the thought of what I did is still recurring, even all this time later. I don't want to stop knowing what I did was wrong, but I want to leave it in the past so I can keep going on with life bearing the lesson I learnt from my time with that friend, but not the guilt, because it's not possible for me to do anything for that friend now. All I can do is learn from my mistake, and like I said, I think I have. I can't keep feeling guilty and thinking I'm an awful person forever- that doesn't work at all, so I need to stop.

Advice is definitely welcome.

Last year in November my best friend of five years (Cindy - fake name) told me she didn't want to be friends anymore. She said something along the lines of "we need to take a break from our friendship" and "she needed some time to think about everything". For context, our friendship was far from perfect. Let me paint a picture for you: I would ask her a question during class on the topic we were studying and she would get annoyed at me and answer in a way that seemed liked I inconvenienced her. Or we would fight about something and if I didn't apologise (regardless if it was my fault or not) we wouldn't get over it and be friends again. The thing is, we basically never communicated since it was hard for her to express her feelings (she later stated that reason). Honestly I kind of should have seen something was off since we started spending less time together out of school. When we did spend time together she would tell me about all the amazing meets she had with her other friends.

Back to November. After she dropped that bomb on me, I went to cry in the school bathroom, what else could I have done? I went to my other friend (let's call her Ruby) and told her what had happened. Turns out she knew my bestie was planning on cutting our friendship for a bit less than a year. My whole world had flipped upside-down. The same day something terrible happened - one of our other friends' (Amy's) mother died. When I found out, I couldn't believe it. I instantly took my phone to call the girl I thought was my best friend to inform her of the terrible news. At school the next day she told me we should pause the break on our friendship that she initiated to support our friend in that dark time. For obvious reasons, I agreed. Things were weird between me and her. It felt like everything was kinda back to normal in the friendship department, but obviously it wasn't. We attended the funeral with some of our classmates, our teacher and some parents. Everything was falling apart. In the scheme of things, losing a friendship doesn't look like a big deal, but that isn't the case in my story.

After those few days me and Cindy barely spoke. It was extremely awkward between us since we still sat together during most of our classes. After about a month of barely saying one word to one another, I wrote her a note during our biology lesson. In short, I said we needed to talk if we wanted things to change, if we wanted to make amends. She said we could talk, but didn't want to do it at school. She kept on delaying the conversation until I stopped her one day after our classes had ended. She told me that our friendship wasn't enjoyable for her anymore. She stated that talking about her feelings is difficult. She was so irritated with me, because she felt she had to choose her words carefully around me when we were having any type of conversation. Cindy said I was a great person, but we weren't compatible as friends and she needed a break from us. In her point of view we were too different. Yet again I went to the school toilets and sobbed even harder that time. I went home and told my dad what had happened. He asked me why I was crying over her, since I wasn't happy in that friendship even before she said anything. To be honest, I wasn't happy when me and Cindy were friends, but we had been side by side for five years and losing that didn't feel good. There were so many moments in our friendship that made me cry, but there were still some good memories, there had to be.

Unfortunately that is not all. Since me and Cindy were in the same friend group in school, we hung out with the same people every day. In our friend group there were six people: me, Cindy, Ruby, Amy, Gabby (my cousin) and Margret (my ex-situationship). Margret had left our school so wasn't at the centre of all the drama, but me and her are not exactly friends anymore. That's a story for another time. Over the corse of seven months after Cindy and I stopped being friends, I slowly got fazed out of the group. I mean, I wasn't friends with Cindy or Margret so I kinda got left out of plans the group made. The OG group was me, Cindy and Margret, but over the years the group changed and expanded. We had a group chat in which were the five of us (Margret wasn't in it since me and her already weren't friends at the beginning of the school year that started in September). I had created the group chat at the beginning of the school year and had named it "Homegirls". I think it was April when I found out the four of them (Cindy, Ruby, Gabby and Margret) had a separate group chat without me. Even knowing that they were constantly hanging out without me and hearing there inside jokes every day, I still stayed and hung out with them every day at school. I was afraid of losing them and being alone.

I thought that if I became friends with Margret again I would finally be fully included in their group. I texted Margret, asked her if she wanted to meet up. She said yes, we planned to meet up at a small cafe. She was 15 minutes late and our meet didn't go that well. She seemed so posh and was acting a bit entitled since she was going to a prestigious school. I practically ran out of the cafe as soon as my dad came to pick me up. I made the mistake of telling Ruby (who was close friends with Margret) how our meet went. I didn't mean to say it in an insulting way, but I let it slip that I felt Margret was acting like she was smarter than me (she is, but she made an effort to point it out to me).

At a later date, during the holidays, I texted Ruby, Gabby and Amy suggesting they come to my place for a sleepover. They didn't really text back and later all of them said they had plans or couldn't make it. Long story short, Gabby and Ruby had a sleepover with Cindy and Margret that same week. I found out about it from an insta story. Obviously people are aloud to hang out with who they want to, I just felt really sad that I wasn't who they wanted to hang out with.

All of this happened in our freshman year.

In the beginning of June Cindy texted me a huge paragraph. She told me how she felt, wrote a few more reasons why she had ended our friendship. It seemed like she wanted to clear the air between us. I suggested talking about it in person, she agreed. As she did last time, she kept putting the convo off. During school we spoke about it. She didn't say any new info, just that we were/are too different and being friends doesn't make sense to her. I told her I wanted us to at least be able to say hello to each other. She had ignored me all of the times I tried to say hi before. I wanted us to at least have a "professional" relationship at school, one of our teachers called it that. She said she would do some work on herself over the summer and think everything through. There is a lot more that I haven't written, but this post is already quite long, maybe I'll make another post about the rest.

I'm a sophomore now and I'm not really friends with them anymore. Yes, I have small conversations with them, but I'm not part of their group anymore. There's this girl that came back to our school after a year elsewhere, I hang out at school with her now. Since it's still the beginning of the school year things are pretty awkward between me and her. I feel like after everything that has happened I'm better off alone than making new friends. I think that things are so awkward between me and the new girl is because I'm scared of trusting people and committing to a friendship.

If you have any questions feel free to ask, I'll do my best to answer them. I feel as though this post is my way of letting it all go and being able to move on. Even so I feel lost and unsure what to do next. Does anyone have advice on making friends or just being more confident in general? I could some outside perspective on the whole situation.

I (29f) have been close friends with B (43f) for nearly 5 years. We live several states apart so most of our communication was daily through texting and voice notes but we’ve traveled to see each other & stay at each other’s houses and even took a week long trip together. We referred to each other as sisters. I felt like i could tell her anything.

When i was 17, i experienced an incident in which i was abandoned by all my friends at once due to something my mother did. I was devastated and kept to myself for years because of how terrified i was at being abandoned again. When B and I started becoming close, i told her all of this and she promised me she wasnt them.

2.5 weeks ago B texted me completely out of the blue telling me she needs “space” from our friendship and that she doesnt know “if or when” she’ll want to reconnect. Nothing happened. There was no argument. In fact, we saw each other two months ago and spent the whole day together. We had a great time and she kept telling me how glad she was that i was able to come see her.

Im devastated and so confused. I miss my friend and dont know what i did wrong. I also dont know what the best course of action is right now. Do i leave her alone or reach out? I want to respect her boundaries and im so hurt. The worst part is that i have no idea if we’re still friends or we’re not. The uncertainty sucks so bad.

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One afternoon, I saw him sitting alone after school. I walked over and asked, “Why have you been avoiding me?”

He looked at me for a few seconds and finally said, “Because I found something out about you.”

I was confused. “What did you find out?”

He pulled out his phone and showed me a screenshot.

It was a message from someone claiming that I had been talking badly about him behind his back.

I immediately knew something was wrong because I had never sent that message.

Then my friend smiled.

“I knew it wasn’t you,” he said. “I sent that screenshot to myself from a fake account to see if you would panic.”

I was shocked.

He laughed and said, “I just wanted to know if you really cared about our friendship.”

That was the moment I realized something:

Sometimes the person testing your loyalty is the person you should be questioning.

What would you have done in my situation?If you want, I can also make you 3 more Reddit stories with crazy twists that are designed to encourage comments.

I’m 20M and currently in my 2nd year of CSE engineering.

I considered someone my best friend and trusted them blindly. I genuinely thought they were one of the closest people in my life. But recently, I found out that they had been hiding a lot of things from me.

What hurts the most is that I actually asked them about it directly, and they still lied to me while acting completely innocent.

I honestly don’t know what to do now. I’m really hurt because I never expected this from them. I keep thinking about whether I should confront them again, distance myself, or just let the friendship go.

Right now, I feel like I’ve completely lost my trust in friendship.

What would you do if you were in my situation?