My friend wouldn’t come to my birthday over politics
Am I the arsehole for ignoring my friend for not coming to my birthday.
Backstory, I run a local club in my town. It’s been a tremendous success and I’ve made many friends from doing it.
At our one year mark, the local paper ran an article on us and this particular friend was in the group photo.
Six months later he said I needed to contact the paper and get the article taken down from online as it has his face in it and he didn’t feel comfortable.
As a compromise, I contacted the paper and asked them to remove the photo from the article which they did in 24 hours.
He then told me he was interested in a fellow member but thought she was too young. I knew her real age which was just a couple years off from his and he told me to stop as I was being creepy, respected his decision.
Anyway, I’ve always felt like I’m treading on eggshells with him and always tried to get him to talk to other members but, it never works but I always tried to make him feel welcome.
My birthday party was two days ago merged with our monthly club meet up. A local politician was coming down to see our work. He wasn’t going to be sat with her. The police would be on site too for security reasons.
He text me the afternoon of the party to say he wouldn’t be coming as he didn’t want to be seen endorsing politicians or be around police. Once again I was annoyed, but I respected his decision.
When the party was over we moved to another bar and he was sat there. I waved at him whilst I got a drink. By the time I got a drink and accepted a couple of happy birthday wishes I looked behind me to notice he vanished again.
No goodbyes. No birthday wishes. Nothing.
He is known to overreact and overthink and I’ve always tried to work around that. But now I feels like he’s just being rude.
He text me the following morning asking how my party was. I ignored it because I felt like responding saying “well you would know if you were there”
But I didn’t react and chose to ignore the message.
This morning I’ve had a text saying his original text was too harshly worded and he hopes I’m ok.
I think our friendship is done. I’ve always tried to work around him and make him feel welcome. But he would rather not go to his friends birthday because he’s worried someone on the internet might think he’s linked to a politician (when it’s my event) and even when I run into him afterwards he just leaves without saying anything.