AIO for feeling hurt that my friend ended a 6-year friendship after I told him some of his behavior bothered me?
I was friends with a guy for about 6 years. He comes from a culture/personality background where punctuality and correctness are taken very seriously, and I genuinely tried to be understanding about that.
For example, even checking my phone briefly during dinner - literally for maybe 5 seconds -would be seen as rude by him and he would comment on it. He would also publicly correct me over small things.
One recent example was at a cafe when he suddenly told me another woman was in front of me in line and that I had cut ahead, even though she had actually walked away (not from the line, from somewhere else) to look at coffee cups and later confirmed I was already there first.
There was also a separate incident on an important occasion of mine where he rolled his eyes at another person about me in a way that genuinely felt disrespectful and dismissive, so for me, it wasn’t just one correction - it became an overall feeling that I was being nitpicked or looked down on sometimes.
I finally brought it up calmly and explained that some of these things were making me feel disrespected. I wasn’t attacking him or calling him a bad person. In fact, throughout the entire conversation I was trying to keep the peace and smooth things over, I’m trying to reach a peaceful resolve, that I understood some of this could be cultural/personality differences, that I could understand his perspective, and that I just hoped he could also try to understand mine. When he was denying things or twisting things, or reacting angrily I got upset too and had strong reactions.
So I reacted too, once I felt invalidated.
What shocked me was his reaction. Instead of saying something like “I didn’t mean it that way” or trying to discuss it, he basically said he wasn’t going to change it, it’s how he is and that if he thinks something is incorrect in public, he’s always going to say it. He also became very defensive and denied or twisted details of things that had happened.
The whole time I had to justify myself and basically talk in apologetic way when I am the one facing the injustice.
I kept trying to calm the situation down and even said I could accept that he might never fully change these habits. But he said he felt “cornered” by the conversation.
I also repeatedly told him that I didn’t think he was a bad person at all and that I didn’t think the situation needed to become so black-and-white. I was basically trying to explain how certain things made me feel and hoped we could understand each other better.
We had a long discussion and the cherry on the cake is when he corrected me in public at that time, my phone rang and he told me”you’re not going to take a call now right?” (Which I obviously wasn’t) Which really pissed me off because I had just said that the correcting behaviour bothers me , and I got really angry for a split second and he ended the friendship entirely.
AIO for feeling hurt by this and feeling like after 6 years of friendship, it shouldn’t have escalated into ending the friendship just because I tried to honestly talk about something that was bothering me?