u/Ilosc

I've known him since October 2019. We met in our first year of uni.

We have been chatting and doing discord calls every few days for the past 4 years.

He has always been quite private, but I didn't mind. Mostly because he would tell me about his aspirations, hobbies, friends, family and uni experience all the time. He just didn't want to introduce me to his friends or tell me the name of his girlfriends.

After a couple of days at uni I didn't see him anymore. He said he was going to study at home and just give the exams from then on (which in that specific bachelor's course we were doing is a thing you can do) because according to him it was faster to learn that way. And also he wanted more time for his hobbies (guitar and gym mostly)

As i said, we talked everyday. He mentioned a lot of his friends, parties he went to, the girls he would meet and then take home from bars, how his exams went, etc.

Eventually we graduate. I finished my degree on time (and I invited him and my class to my graduation party) but he took an extra year to finish, and explicitly asked me not to come to his graduation because he thinks having friends there would be weird.

To compensate we had a sort of double-date/graduation party with our girlfriends, but his girlfriend couldn't make it in time.

After this I started my masters and he started working in another region on the other side of my country, and we would talk about each of our experiences very often. Every so often he would say he was promoted, and 6 months ago he told me he went steady with a girl at work and are now living together. At this point we went from meeting every couple of months to seeing eachother once a year on christmas.

Three months ago, for the first time ever, he showed me a picture of a guy and told me "Hi OP, sorry to ask this out of the blue, this is John. He is a close friend of mine and my best friend at work. He has never talked to a girl and wants advice from someone that has had a steady girlfriend. Could you give him some tips? I am going to give the phone to him so you two can talk directly"

I said yes, spent close to 4 hours talking to the most stubborn person I have ever met. He had some truly weird, incely and neckbeardy "strategies" to woo a specific girl he wanted, and I ended the conversation after he revealed (again, FOUR HOURS IN) that she was a girl he followed on instagram and not someone he would regularly meet at work. This "John" basically wanted me to agree with him and nothing else. None of my advice seemed to stick.

And most importantly, he wanted to go on a date with this girl and asked me "is it ok to tell her I have a good job, a degree from a good university, and that I have had girlfriends before her even if it isn't true?" to which he didn't accept my "absolutely not ok to lie" answer

At which point I had two very important things to say to my friend.

1 Weren't you living with a your girlfriend of one year?

2 Your friend did not want advice. I am not sure I can help anymore, because I don't know him at all and he urgently needs to get off dating guru tiktok.

He said he broke up with her because he wanted to move somewhere else, and then begged me to give another chance to his friend.

He started to explain his friend is a really peculiar way. Like "he looks kinda like me, as in we are the same level on a 1 to 10 scale for attractiveness", "we have the same mannerisms", "we are the same height"

Every description about his friend was like this. And when I asked about his life, work, or hobbies, he didn't want to give me any answers.

I am trying to be brief here, so I'll jump slightly ahead, but I started to really suspect something for more reasons than just this. I thought he was having a bit of a hard time. Like, maybe he got laid off and his girlfriend dumped him, and he started to consume shitty dating advice on tiktok. I could help him get back on his feet, or at least be there for him. I'll spoil it right now, I was completely wrong.

Last month he said he was out with friends at the club, and that his girl best friend tried to introduce him to her friends. He followed that up with a very uncomfortable 20 minutes of him "jokingly" asking me to have my girlfriend fix him up with one of her friends, and asking me why I never tried introducing me to one of my girl friends. I am not sure how to describe the awful vibes of that conversation, he was just extremely insistent, but in a "joking" way. Even though he was clearly serious, he just never asked in a serious, normal way.

Because he did this the day after my girlfriend posted a picture of her and her friends (her first post in 3 years, she doesn't really use social media that much), and because he had the same uncomfortable conversation with her in her private dms, AND because he fully agreed with "John" on his crappy ways of approaching girls, I decided to sit him down and basically have a serious, friend to friend conversation.

I wanted to chat about his work and his girlfriend, I wanted to know if he was ok and how I could help.

It lasted 6 hours, and it changed entirely how I saw him.

It simply started with me trying to make him open up, but then he slipped an accidentally gave me completely incorrect details of his friend John. He told me he was just 20 years old and from another country, but in this phone call he said he was 27 and from our same region.

I simply asked "You have to PROMISE me that your friend is real. I don't care if these details are wrong, is JOHN real?"

I put pressure oh him for a bit before he admitted that John was in fact him. I had to ask 3 times. He wanted advice from me and didn't know how to ask, so he made him up.

I used the same technique on the two other things I suspected. I asked if he really went to the club that day, he said no. I asked if he really goes to the club every friday, and after 5 minutes of him avoiding the question, he said no again.

Since we were 3/3 on lies, I felt like a switch flpped in my head

I asked about his last girlfriend. Turns out she never existed. The 10 or so girls he slept with? never existed. He tried to defend it by saying he's had 2 steady girlfiends, but I made him notice that that would mean he lied for years, so he dropped that too and eventually confessed that he NEVER had a girlfriend. Not even a date. He never asked anyone out in his entire life. The dates he told me all about, all fake. The description of the girls, all fake.

The reason no one came to the double date? She wasn't sick with cov*d, she wasn't real.

Before continuing I want to emphasize that between my questions and his answers, there would always be at least 30 seconds of silence, sometimes "jokes" to avoid answering my questions. He never hung up, but it was extremely difficult to get a straight answer immediately. It wasn't a case of him "feeling guilty" and deciding on his own to answer. I pressured him for the entire evening. I went in the phone call expecting a friend that was struggling with a recent layoff or breakup, and I instead spent it discovering everything he ever told me was fake.

I asked about work, turns out he was never promoted. I pressured him more, he finally confessed he never had a job. Not only that, he never even tried to get a job.

I don't think he noticed immediately, but that would mean we were still both in the same city. He genuinely spent close to 10 minutes trying to explain he was with an uncle, and that he "moved" because he thought his uncle would give him a job but then didn't and then he didn't want to move back home, but after me pressuring him again, he confessed he has lived in the same town the entire time we knew eachother.

There was literally no reason for us to not meet more than once a year.

And it's not like I was pressuring him to be my friend and he had to avoid me or something. We BOTH called, we BOTH texted first, and he was the first person begging me to go out with him as much as possible during the christmas holidays. No reason for that. I would move my commitments around for him, I spent less time on christmas with my family and my gf to stay with what I thought was a long lasting friend that I couldn't see otherwise.

He was free and unemployed the whole time, but to keep that stupid lie up he made up that we couldn't meet on any other day during the year because of "work".

And there's more.

He lied about his hobbies, too. His "sleeper build" wasn't because of his passion of calisthenics and tai chi, he simply never stepped foot in a gym. All his talks about how this and that supplement was good for you were just things he heard online and ads he fell for and bought. He looks muscle-less because he is.

The reason he never showed me any guitar playing? The reason he wasn't able to read a simple music sheet? It wasn't because he was shy, or that he palyed by ear. He never picked up a guitar. He just has one somewhere in his childhood bedroom where he still lives in.

So since he never had a job, he never met anyone at said job, he doesn't have any "work friends". He confirmed that he didn't.

I picked up again the club thing. Did he ever go? No.

Since according to him he met his six best friends (1 girl and 5 guys) at a club he never went to, were they real? Of course not.

And, of course, his degree was fake too. He never graduated "just one year" late. He never went to the lessons after the first few days, not because he studied better alone, but because he didn't want to go. He never did a single exam.

Fake hobbies, fake friends with benefits, fake steady girlfriends, fake degree, fake job, fake city, fake friends. The lies didn't quite end here.

Since I can't write the entirety of a six hour phone call, I will make a short list of other things he admitted to: drivers licence, and thus EVERY single time he called me from his "car", and also him even owning a car. Turns out the engine I heard was from an ambiance recording on youtube. Going on a cruise and the holiday stories from said cruise. Being able to make cocktails. The fact his parents never paid for him since he turned 18 (they paid for everything). Him being a health nut (turns out he doesn't know how to cook or eat healthy, he orders all the time and I DID hear him multiple times interacting with a delivery man, he originally explained that by saying it's a group of religious people going door to door for donations), him being popular at work, his favourite beverage (they don't sell it in our region), the pictures of his house, the videos he sent of the park near his house. His low to 0 screentime (yeah i should've known. his "memes and current trends" knowledge was too high for someone that apparently spent his time reading, working, and being with his "girlfriend". The reason he doesn't remember groecery prices and what cleaning product works for what surfaces isn't that he hired a maid, but it's that his PARENTS have a maid and he doesn't have to do anything.

The phone call wasn't linear at all, I actually had to use my notes app to try and make sense of it all. I didn't want to forget the things he admitted to, but also his answers were very weird and long. I tried to write the important parts and summarize as much as I can. I hope my writing is clear enough.

After a couple weeks of us not talking, I contacted an old high school friend of his. (I know I shouldn't have done that. I know.)

My friend used to tell me she was a shitty friend and that she used him for homework, and that after that he lost his high school friend group for "no reason at all", but then made new friends at the club (again, huge lie).

I could already see something was wrong, because this girl's profile clearly stated she was 24, maybe almost 25 (idk her birthday), but not 27. I thought he lied about her, maybe he just "made up" a high school enemy.

What I discover from her instead is that they really were classmates. He was incredibly lazy in high school and was held back twice.

They put him in a 10 person friend group, he fought with half of this group, and because of his behaviour and the difference in age they decided not to invite him again and removed him.

No homework was passed, especially since she was in the top 5 of her class and he wasn't, and before removing him they gave him multiple chances, but all he did was complain about the places they chose to eat at and avoid seeing them most of the time. In the 6 months he knew those people, he met them only twice by his own choice and would only text to fight with them.

She sent me all the messages of that group and her old personal chats with him to show me some proof and defend herself.

Seeing the names in that group made me notice another thing.

Every 6 months or so, he would talk about some "crazy thing" a guy he knows/girl he knows" would do. For example last year he talked about a crazy girl stalker that stole his friend's belt.

Most of these "people" had the same names of the people in this old hs friend group.

In the end she told me she's fairly confident he didn't graduate at all.

(to be clear, I didn't tell her about this whole situation and I tried to be as vague as possible)

I called my friend again. He wanted to explain himself but I immediately asked him if the stories he told me about all those people were real, and if he actually ever knew any people named that way after high school ended.

I mentioned them by name one by one (except the girl i interacted with) and he said that all of the stories he told me were "exaggerated" but that they were a little bit real.

I wanted to ask about him graduating high school, but that's when his excuses started so I put it off.

He explained that he didn't see a reason to "admit" he never graduated university, since his knowledge level for our degree was the same as me, a guy with a master’s degree currently working in that field. (I don't want to be mean but he clearly does not. self study can definitely bring results but his knowledge level was on par with someone in their second semester)

He used the same reasoning for work. "if I got a job next month, who cares if he didn't have one before?"

He kept telling me how he never was "completely sincere" about his path towards a good job because I wouldnt "get it", and that his choice to study from e-courses and then apply to as many places as possible until someone offers him a good salary, even if it takes years, was just as likely to get him a job as me doing a bsc, a msc and two internships.

He had no explanation for his lying about friends, girlfriends and hobbies and kept evading the question, all he said was that he "exaggerated" some stories from high school and pretended they happened more recently because to him, it doesn't matter what happened exactly or when, but how he felt about it. So the things he says are "calibrated" on his emotions on it, and not the real facts.

This explanation made no sense because, for example, the crazy belt girl stalker? She was a friend of one of his fake friends, so how is that a thing that "kinda" happened?

Turns out it didn't happen at all. He admitted that the day he told me this story he was afraid to not have any topics to talk about so he made something up. This same thing applies to at least 4 other crazy/wacky stories he told me.

I let him avoid the fake girlfriend thing and the fake hobbies thing, because I wanted to get straight to a specific point.

After 10 full minutes of me insisting for a straight answer, he admitted that not only was he never accepted in my university, but also he never graduated high school.

Two years before he was supposed to finish, he dropped out and intended to come to university lessons and just attend the lectures and give the exams, hoping to receive some kind of honorary hs diploma and bsc (?what?thefck?) and the next year he walked into a lecture and just happened to sit next to me in the stairs. Our very first interaction was a complete lie.

That's the whole story.

The only real thing about him (since we played together) was his LOL ranking. And also his roblox incremental games trophies. That's it.

All the times we were in phone calls "studying together" and keeping eachother company, every time we had lunch together where he complained about how much material uni gave us to study, every time he bitched about his "girls" and his "job". All fake.

I think I spent close to 10k hours of my life with this person, between meeting him, texting him, lunches, dinners, and phone calls. And the only real parts were maybe a couple hundred LOL games from my undergrad years. Even the advice I gave him was for fake situations. All of it.

What...... do I do now? I want to "follow my heart" but my heart is giving me a 404 message. I have never felt like this in my life. I have a hundred thousand questions. I just don't get it. This can't ALL be shame for being unemployed. This has to be some kind of illness. Did he realise I spent hours talking to him about is completely made up problems? Was this just some game to see how many hours he can squeeze out of someone? If he didn't slip up, would I have ever noticed? Am I really this fuc***g blind? I guess I just couldn't imagine a reason why someone would do this. I still can't. I need answers and he's not giving them to me.

He didn't cry or seem upset in the phone call. He was just a bit awkward in his responses, but I didn't detect an ounce of guilt. He made NO admissions of his own initiative, but solely because I wanted him to, and he kept making excuses. As of today, he didn't write anything. He sent me a couple of funny tiktok videos two days ago, as if he was pretending my entire perception of him wasn't just changed.

I am not saying he is evil. I know life is not black and white. Maybe I did something to make him feel insecure, I just don't know what. I think I am respectful of other people's situations and have no arrogant thoughs and feelings about people that don't graduate. But maybe I sould've made that clear? What did he do with the advice he asked me for his fake situations? Were they tests or just a way too keep up this facade?

I know some of you will tell me to ask for advice to my friends and girlfriend, but I need some time. It's easier to talk to a computer, i guess. I will eventually do that, just not immediately. I also used to have a therapist a few years ago, maybe I will contact her if this weird feeling of unease doesn't go away.

Opinions and thoughts are very appreciated. Thank you for reading this long post and sorry for any grammar mistakes. English is not my first language.

if you had a similar situation please tell me about it.

TL;DR, my friend of many years lied about every single aspect of his life that you can think of (social, work, hobbies, normal day to day activities), and i have zero clue on what to do. I could understand lying about being a neet, but what about literally everything else?

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