Why am i still friends with someone who has violated my dignity!
I need to get this off my chest because I’ve carried it for years and barely anyone actually knows the full thing.
I’m 22(M) I need to let out everything what I have been hiding for a long time.
I met her in secondary school we started properly talking around 14/15,in secondary school, being actual friends. The friendship started because she had a crush on a guy and I found out. I’ve always been a writer, an imaginative person, so she started asking me to write little stories for her scenarios with her crushes, whatever fantasy she had going on at the time. I loved it because I loved writing anyway. It felt nothing to serious at the time .
The friendship itself was never simple, though. She had a short fuse with me specifically. Patient with everyone else, but with me, if I said something impulsive (which I do I speak before I think sometimes and regret it after), she’d shout, snap, talk down to me. Even the two other friends we picked up later in sixth form used to point out how one-sided that felt and this is sign of bullying.
We ended up at the same university. That’s when it changed. After something happened with a guy she’d been seeing he fingered her, then the next day she witnessed he brought another girl back to his accommodation she came to me upset and asked me to reenact it. Play him. Write her the kind of story I always had, but now acted out.
I said yes because I wanted to be there for her as a friend. Wrong idea from the very start.
It didn’t stay there. It became physical, then sexual, and it escalated over months her accommodation, mine, then places I never expected: cars, coaches, hotels. A pattern formed: she’d initiate, we’d have sex, and then she’d go cold and push me away right after, like I’d done something wrong. Then later she’d pull me back in like nothing happened. At one point she told me outright she was using me “like a sex toy.” I remember brushing it off in my head — telling myself any guy would want this, that I should feel lucky a pretty girl wanted me like that.
Around that same time, she developed low iron she wasn’t eating properly, mostly junk food and she’d ask me to come stay over so she wasn’t alone. If I ever said no, she’d start having a panic attack, and I’d end up going anyway. I took her to hospital. I bought her groceries. I looked after her. And at one point she told me, flat out, that the reason she kept doing this with me was because she wasn’t well and needed someone to help her offload her stress. Using me again, like I’m wet wipes.
Nobody in my life knows we were ever really “friends” like this. To everyone else we’re just two people who know each other. I ended up going to therapy over it, and even my therapist knows more of the real story than my closest friends do.
The part that gets me most: I was molested as a kid “playing house” with an older girl when I was young. I hadn’t connected the two until a friend I opened up to said, plainly, “you know that’s not okay, what she’s doing to you.” That’s when it cracked open for me.
We eventually fell out she cussed me out in front of people and something in me finally said enough. Later 8 months down the line, I reached out because I missed the actual friendship, not what it had turned into. She apologized. Then went right back to being herself. I went to her graduation her whole family didn’t showed up for her. So I did to be there for her because she had no one to support her. She didn’t come to mine because i already have people there for me and i didn’t provide her accommodation to get ready to be at mine. I still chose to be friends with her after that as well.
I still don’t know what to call what we were. I just needed to put it somewhere outside my own head for once. Lately I was deeping my whole life, reflecting how am I still in contact and crazy part no one knows we became friends again!