Should I move on ? Needing objective point of view
I’m looking for outside perspectives on the breakdown of a long-term friendship, because several months later I’m still struggling to understand how we ended up here, how much responsibility I should take for it and if it's even advisable to repatch things up later on.
My friend and I had been close for years, I met her during high school, then we lost contact during higher education (no conflict was at blame here, it just happened) for several years and reconnected 7 years ago. We became rapidly very close, texting or calling almost daily despite living in different cities and then countries when I moved abroad (still living abroad now). Last year, she became pregnant very quickly after starting to try (second cycle). I was genuinely happy for her, but pregnancy is a complicated subject for me. I have one living child, but before we got him, I’ve also had a missed miscarriage and shortly after had to terminate for a severe fetal malformation in the second trimester. She is historically a very anxious person (and characterize herself as such) and we mostly shared our troubles, giving support to each others. She was very supportive during my MMC but decided to distance herself during my TFMR and medical complications that followed. I never really got an explanation from this really besides that it was "too much for her at the time and she couldn't handle other things in her life at the same time".
When my friend got her positive test, she was extremely excited and sent me a lot of messages about how quickly it had happened, how unbelievable it was, family fertility, etc. I initially shared her excitement, but after several days I started finding the spamming messages difficult. I was also much more cautious about early pregnancy because of my own experiences. For example, I would naturally say things like “if the pregnancy continues” rather than talk immediately as though there would definitely be a baby nine months later because that's simply not something I can even tell myself. She told me that this kind of language made her anxious and that she needed positivity. I respected that and stopped making those comments. At the same time, I asked her to moderate the repeated bursts of very enthusiastic pregnancy messages with me. I wasn’t asking her not to talk about her pregnancy or not to be happy. I was basically saying that I wasn’t the best audience for completely unrestrained pregnancy excitement given my history, especially if I simultaneously couldn’t respond in my naturally cautious way.
Unfortunately, this upset her much more than I expected.
What makes this confusing in retrospect is that she later described herself as having been extremely anxious during this period. Her partner actually contacted me after this first argument and told me that, with him, she was almost constantly talking about fears that the pregnancy wouldn’t work out, that she wouldn’t make it to the birth, etc. He described what he saw as roughly “95% anxiety and 5% excitement.” I was genuinely surprised, because that was almost the exact opposite of what she was showing me. I told him at the time that she had barely shared those fears with me and that I actually would have been much more comfortable supporting her through anxiety and doubts. Historically, that was something I had often done for her and she had appreciated it. Even early in this pregnancy, she had called me about a medical worry and later told me I had reassured her enormously. Her partner explained that she didn’t know how to talk to me about the pregnancy without hurting me and was afraid of sharing the positive parts. But from my perspective, she seemed to have interpreted my fairly specific boundary (“please moderate the repeated intense excitement with me”) as something much broader (“my pregnancy hurts her”).
Our communication never completely recovered.
Over the following months, she increasingly shared less with me and very filtered, positive view, of how she was doing. I felt irritated because that is not how she usually shared things with me, exactly the opposite of what I asked and just felt "fake". There were other smaller conflicts. One that I regret happened when she described pregnancy-related pelvic pain as a “pregnancy pathology.” Based on what she had told me, I didn’t understand how severe it was and replied that I wasn’t sure I would call it a pathology, although I acknowledged that it sounded very unpleasant. In retrospect this understandably felt dismissive to her. Then she basically stopped messaging after this message for 6 weeks straight. I was annoyed she didn't even bothered telling me it upset her and just ghosted me so I didn't initiated contact either. During that time, she didn’t wish me happy birthday (which was unusual for her), and largely disappeared from social media despite celebrating her own wedding in the middle of it.
About 3 weeks after my birthday, I contacted her partner because I was worried something was wrong. That was when I learned that her situation was much worse than I had realized: she could barely move because of the pelvic pain, was mostly confined at home, her mental health was very poor, and they had had hospital/ER visits. Her partner also told me she was barely talking to anyone, not just me. I immediately messaged her and apologized. I explicitly said that I had underestimated how much she was suffering based on our recent messages and that I was sorry my comment had hurt her. She replied that the previous months had been very difficult and that since becoming pregnant she felt our relationship had changed. She said she had experienced negativity and comparison from me and felt she had to restrict how she experienced her pregnancy around me. She said our conversations about pregnancy and anxiety were doing her more harm than good and that she needed “calm and positivity” and wanted to stay in her bubble until the end of her pregnancy.
I was hurt, but I took this as a clear request for space and did not reply or contact her again.
She gave birth in July. I didn’t receive a birth announcement. I assumed she still needed space. About two months after the birth and 4 since our last text, I decided to reopen the door once. I was also pregnant again by then and past the stages at which my previous losses had occurred, so I was in a much better emotional place. I sent a friendly message telling her I was expecting another boy and asking how she and her family were doing. She initially replied very warmly. She congratulated me, told me about her baby and said the birth had been wonderful, although postpartum had not always been easy and she had withdrawn from social media for her mental health. We exchanged several messages. She explained how terrible the end of pregnancy had actually been and then specifically asked me how I had coped during the beginning of my current pregnancy. I answered honestly that I had been anxious initially, but that life had kept me distracted, all my scans had been reassuring, I had now passed the gestational stages of my previous MMC and TFMR, and I was much more relaxed. Then I immediately asked about her return to work, her baby, sleep and feeding.
Her next message completely changed tone.
She said that there had been a real rupture between us since her pregnancy and that our conversations had caused her enormous anxiety. She cited a phrase she remembered me saying along the lines of “congratulations if it sticks,” which upset me because I never wrote that and even double checked in our text history. We did have conversations about implantation and “sticking,” but this sentence never existed and these conversations happened separately than when we were discussing her first pregnancy tests and when I congratulated her. She also said she had been afraid to tell me certain things, including her opinions about breastfeeding, because she feared I would judge her. This was completely new information to me. I breastfed my own child and enjoyed it, but I have no issue with people choosing not to breastfeed or being unable to do so, and she had never previously told me she feared judgment from me about this.
She then said she had been hurt that I sent no message for her wedding and no messages during the end of her pregnancy, even messages that required no response. This was probably the part I found hardest to understand. Her wedding was during the period when she had already largely stopped talking to me (and was the day after my birthday, which she had not acknowledged). More importantly, her last direct message to me had explicitly said that talking to me was doing her more harm than good, that she needed calm and positivity, and that she wanted to stay in her bubble until the end of pregnancy. I genuinely thought I was respecting her boundary by leaving her alone. She finished by saying she had surrounded herself with family and “kind/supportive people,” had spent months building this protective bubble, did not currently want to reconnect with me, and did not think she could give me the kind of support I might expect from her. The last part also confused me because I had not asked her for support. She had asked me how my pregnancy was going, I answered her question, said I was currently doing much better, and then asked about her and her baby.
I sent one final reply. I acknowledged that some of my comments had hurt her, but I also explained that I didn’t share her interpretation of everything that happened. I clarified the misremembered quote. I explained that I had not contacted her during late pregnancy because I believed she had explicitly asked me not to. I explained why I hadn’t known how to handle the wedding when we were already not speaking for weeks. I also told her that some of her behavior had hurt me too, particularly feeling that my perspective was repeatedly interpreted as judgment or negativity, and the distance she had imposed between us with filtered information on her part. I said that when I contacted her postpartum, I wasn’t expecting anything from her; I was simply reopening a door after several months. I told her that I respected her decision and would stop contacting her. I also said that a relationship involves two people and that I couldn’t accept a version of events in which only her hurt mattered. I had tried to contextualize some of her behavior because I now understood that she had been going through a much harder pregnancy than I realized, and I had hoped she might similarly contextualize some of my reactions in light of my MMC and TFMR rather than assuming they came from judgment, comparison and negativity.
I don’t plan to contact her again unless she reaches out herself.
What I’m struggling with is that I can absolutely identify things I did wrong. I was probably too pragmatic at times when she wanted uncomplicated enthusiasm, and my comment about her pelvic pain was dismissive because I badly underestimated its severity. I apologized for those things. It seems she expected me to be someone I just couldn't be (naive enthusiasm about her pregnancy?). But I also feel that over time I became responsible in her narrative for things I couldn’t reasonably have known or controlled. She didn’t tell me how badly she was doing because of the positive filter she imposed on her texts, then felt unsupported. She explicitly asked for distance, then felt hurt that I gave her distance. She developed fears that I would judge choices she never discussed with me. And some of hurtful things she accuses me of saying that I never said. I’m also confused because when I texted her partner at the beginning of the pregnancy, he told me she was sharing enormous amounts of anxiety with him while showing me almost exclusively excitement, even though historically I had been someone she regularly came to for support when she was anxious. I also find very strong that she accuses me of negativity while I was simply my cautious, pragmatic self and comparison while I never compared to her but yes, my trauma have an influence how I view pregnancy in general and I can't erase that. I would really like to be able to but it's not something I can.
I’m not looking for validation that she is a bad person. She went through what sounds like an extremely difficult pregnancy and possibly a difficult postpartum period (I really wonder if she doesn't have a postpartum depression?), and I believe her when she says some of my words genuinely hurt her. I’m trying to understand whether I’m missing something important about my own behavior, whether her expectations of me were reasonable, and whether there was realistically anything I could have done differently once we got into this cycle.
My partner has said to me multiple times I was better off without her since "she always had problems" because of her anxiety and was asking my support much more often than provided it to me. He is also angry she kind of "dumped" me during her pregnancy because I couldn't be positive, while she was perfectly aware of how traumatic my own experience with pregnancy was, and that it's really not fair to ask this from me in the first place. He thinks she wanted to "win" something against me and that she started unilaterally this comparison and was then upset when her own pregnancy didn't turn up as perfect as she wished... But this is of course a very biased point of view since he is my partner.
From an outside perspective, does this sound like a friendship that broke down because of incompatible emotional needs and poor communication on both sides, or am I minimizing how hurtful my behavior was? Does she minimizes how hurtful her behavior was (and still is) to me as well ?
I know she may not recontact me ever again and never go back on social media (even if she was very active on it so it's unlikely I would say) but I let the ball in her camp now so who knows...