broken up amicably for a few years, “stayed friends” and I believed we were friends, only to get cut off completely a few years later, in reaction to which I cried like my beloved pet died
I marked this as nsfw but it’s only because I said the 3 letter word for procreation like once and idk if that’s enough, so I just went ahead and marked that. I am also kinda new to Reddit in general so if it seems like I’m superstitious and making out with the rules out of paranoia, it’s because I am. :)
Tw: I wrote way more than I thought I would
so… I’ve told this story to a few of my friends (that I still have and are indeed platonic) and they all hate on the ex. I understand if I was genuinely, 100% in denial/crazy/clingy/obsessed and they (the ex) were in the right, but I want some opinions from people who are willing to tell me the hard things to hear, to my face.
It all started in high school… I was best friends with my now ex - let’s call them “S” - and life was happening for sure. These years are the ones I bonded with S, a lot of our private conversations on the phone and otherwise (before/during) were mutual venting and bonding over being sad depressed teenagers.
I hold a lot of respect for S, at a mutual 16 years of age back then, and fixate on them as my “person”. (context: Every so often, I have an active, genuine “my person” that I only socialize mainly with them and think about mainly this person, but I think those are crushes or something.) S was the first person outside my family that I felt like I could be around calmly and without anxiety, I loved their family and often daydreamed about different lives or if I had their parents growing up.
S and I, at least as I understood it, were mutual besties. We started dating at some point, being weird art kid variety of the “it’s so obvious y’all should be together” scenario. It had been stated many times to each other, over text or call or face to face, that we were friends before we were romantic partners. Cue the emotional breakup - it was me the first time, actually. I had been praying n stuff for guidance and I was the one who brought it up.
Stayed friends, clearly, got back together once and separated again, S dates other people, I’m hanging around with my little sibling energy that feels weird for a previous romantic interest to have. Then there was the last time we got together, before they move away later. Labels weren’t really used after the first breakup (initiated by me; that one) but there was shifts to the romantic. Gotta love weird teenage situationships 😂
Cue amicable goodbye (we had separated for sure by then, but were still very friendly and interacted a lot - Later, I realize this may have been because of school..)
Anywho. I still think I’m “friend” or even “good friend” status with S, texting them every so often, asking about their life, bla bla. It goes on for a while (by then they had a new partner).
Then… college. I move to the same city that S lives in, right? I’m depressed, oh boohoo, I have no friends because it’s hard to make new ones and the only socializing I do is sex w a singular connection I made and DnD (also with that singular connection).
I get invited to S’s church, because of course, they’re a good faithful Christian and I felt religious guilt all the time just thinking about it, and I say yes, thinking possibly that maybe if I go and see my friend again, it might make me feel better. Keep in mind, I don’t want S back or think about having a life with them or being their partner or anything I think of as romantic and potentially gross (because they have a partner at this time). I am, however, still deeply attached to this first person I spilled my little teenage guts to and think about them often.
Does that mean I’m obsessed and weird? …I’m not sure? The attachment was unhealthy (think “load-bearing sentimental friendship”), I realize this now, but I wasn’t trying to steal them or keep them from moving on with their life intentionally. So I didn’t see them as my ex at all, however I still saw S as my friend.
Big mistake :C
I get there, one more text from S with something like “u can sit down lol, u don’t have to stand in the back”, then service whatever. Fasttrack to end of service, S and new partner wander over to meet me (they had the most amazing purple/colorblocked type jeans… I wanted those so bad when I saw them haha. S’s partner looked good in them; minor tangent). Ya got your basic greetings, ya got your friendly things.
This is the part where I finally started seeing glaring, obvious mistakes that past me had made. I wanted to speak to S - maybe to say that I missed them or something, I was in a really bad mental place and had latched onto the notion that seeing my old friend would make me feel better - but then for some reason, I literally get choked up mid sentence (not something I do), without being able to talk around that lump in your throat and everything, and I wavered there for a moment before completely crumbling IN FRONT OF S AND THEIR PARTNER.
It’s the ugly crying, too. I’m in my first semester of college and deeply overwhelmed, I’m far away from any of my friends that I had from school, there’s a boatload of family stuff that’s been happening all my life (fun!), and on top of it all, I couldn’t stop thinking about this friend I made in some of the worst years of my life.
They said, “come see us before you go”. LIKE HELL I WILL. I’m crying like some obsessed stalker who just realized that their object of attention was “cheating” on them in the imaginary relationship that said stalker had built up in their brain 😭😭 hell no I’m not gonna talk to you, I can barely keep from stress-vomiting (also something I have never done) out of mortification and what I think was some kind of panic attack. Hell no.
I get in my car, cry some more, I drive back, crying more, like really annoying hysterical sobs like I watched someone kill my brother or something. I get to the campus, get to my dorm, and lay down in bed. I text a slightly chunky apology text about “sorry for being weird” and “idk what that was” (bs!!!) and wait in my bed to pass out. I don’t get a response.
So… S either ghosted me or blocked me, on a social media app and my normal messages? Which to me, that’s like kicking me in the face - I wouldn’t take it well since it was S, but at least tell me you’re never talking to me again. Give me undeniable proof so I don’t hope for over a month that they’re getting ready to send me a reel back, or a dumb photo, or whatever. And… this could end there. It really could.
But it gets better.
I have a YouTube channel that I post to sometimes, I had made it about a year prior to The Incident, and I posted a video some time after the whole debacle, about a month later. Unrelated video, nothing about the drama, the vid had been in the works months before Incident.
This mfer LEAVES A COMMENT ON THE VIDEO LIKE NOTHING HAPPENED??? HELLO??? Why are you interacting with me if you don’t want to talk to me?! Hello? Are you keeping me at arm’s length because you still wanna be in my business on a surface level but are done with me entirely otherwise? Am I a hamster on a wheel to you?
This didn’t happen once. Almost every video or community post I’ve made since then has a comment from S on it. I am going insane. I have been agonizing whether or not to reach out - I know their email and some other accounts, I figured reaching out an alternate way like that after getting ghosted so thoroughly was a really obsessive thing to do, so I haven’t so far, but like… I’m a “don’t know until you tell me” person. To such a degree that I don’t trust information that isn’t explicitly stated, and usually I might need a repeat of it depending on the circumstances.
The latest one… says something that’s bs, but mentions his wife? Hello? You’re my age and you’re married? What the hell? I am doing something wrong for sure, I thinks.
Okay, that’s everything lore-wise. I’m bad with over explaining but I did my best to keep from being too weird over details so I hope this post isn’t like… what obliterates me from this subreddit lol. Overall I am to the point where I’m done with the bs and emotionally tired but still mentally confused and tangled up over it. I am in the place where I finally let myself get angry over things, even if I’m not sure that I’m in any kind of “right” over it. It’s been a couple years. I posted something two, maybe three months ago and S commented on it, like bs evil clockwork.
Thinking about it makes me upset. Like, there’s this person I view as a close, treasured friend, and not only am I “just the ex” (presumably..) to this treasured friend, I am also specifically mentally investing in something that the other pulled away from a long time ago and I just didn’t realize, like the dunce I am. I figure that maybe you’d have the respect enough to tell me that you don’t want anything to do with my creepy acting self, but straight ghosting and then DOING THAT… it feels disrespectful, it feels like ragebait, and it really feels like maybe this person I treasured was a tad more shallow than I thought. But I do understand that I also have attachment issues that stem from other things that S had nothing to do with. I am aware many of my issues outside of my platonic/romantic life still affect those relationship very deeply. It sucks. But I could be missing my own red flags out of bias, so I want more opinions than just two besties who I’m pretty sure would’ve said S was a bad person regardless.
Okay… I’m done for real. I hand it over to you, my fellows and comrades in whatever the hell this messy bs is. The end.