AITAH for not caring about my “best friends” baby?
Okay so basically my mom and my ex friend’s mom have been best friends since third grade, so our families have always been close. My ex friend is a year younger than me and we grew up together. We spent holidays together, went on family trips sometimes, talked all the time, and were friends for almost 28 years.
For a lot of our adulthood we lived apart, so the friendship was mostly long distance and pretty nonconfrontational. When I eventually moved back home and started seeing her more in person, though, I started noticing things that I either had not noticed before or that had changed over time.
One thing was how she acted toward my husband. I had always been really welcoming to whoever she dated, including her husband, but I never felt like she made the same effort with mine. Even early in my relationship, I sometimes felt like she was jealous of having less access to me. When we were all together, she barely tried to talk to my husband or get to know him. I also started realizing that my ex friend and I did not really have the same sense of humor anymore and maybe just did not have as much in common as we once did.
Then my husband and I bought our first house. We kept it a secret until we had the keys because we did not want to tell anyone before it was official. I was insanely excited and surprised people with it. When my ex friend and her husband came over, the energy just felt weird. Instead of seeming excited, they started pointing out things they did not like about the house. They commented on the flooring, and her husband randomly told me one of my light fixtures was ugly. It bothered me because I was showing them my first house and had not asked for their criticism. I actually texted her afterward and told her the interaction felt weird. She apologized and I thought we moved on.
A few months later I got married. It was a very small, casual wedding weekend at a huge party Airbnb with only our families and a couple friends. Everyone knew ahead of time that the plan was to drink, listen to music, stay up late and celebrate.
My ex friend had recently started practicing photography and volunteered to take my wedding pictures as her gift to me. This mattered because my grandpa has a professional camera and has taken pictures for years, so if she had not offered, I would have just had him do it.
The actual ceremony and pictures were extremely short. I checked afterward and from the first picture she took to the last, everything was done in less than 20 minutes. Later when we were cutting the cake, I asked her to take a few more pictures and she acted like she really did not want to. My other friend actually had to volunteer to go get the camera. My dad noticed it too.
Later that night we were listening to music and having fun when my ex friend’s husband came upstairs and asked us to turn the music down because they were trying to sleep. This was literally our wedding night at a party Airbnb, and everyone had known the plan ahead of time. My dad was completely sober and even he could not believe they were asking us to quiet down.
It gave me anxiety for the rest of the night because I was worried they would come back and complain again and that it would turn into a bigger confrontation. The next morning my ex friend made a comment about not being able to sleep and said they had considered leaving in the middle of the night. I said, “Yeah, you should have.” She clearly did not like that.
A few days later, on the actual day I was leaving for my honeymoon, she sent me this huge message listing everything she was upset about. One complaint was that my husband had bought her a birthday cake even though she already had cupcakes. She also brought up another conversation I had already apologized for, and of course she complained about me telling her they should have left the Airbnb if they wanted to sleep.
Then she started saying she did not feel appreciated enough for everything she and her husband had done for the wedding and brought up her infertility struggles, saying I was being insensitive to everything she had been going through.
That was where I really lost patience. I had supported her through her infertility for the entire year, but I felt like I was allowed to have one day of my life that did not revolve around what she was going through. It was literally my wedding. I basically told her, “Can one day not be about you?”
I told her we needed to stop the conversation because I was leaving for my honeymoon. She did not even say she hoped I had a good honeymoon. The whole conflict ended up giving me anxiety while I was there, which I still resent.
When I got home, I basically told her we were going to have to agree to disagree. Then she said she did not want to be friends anymore because I supposedly did not value the friendship the way she did.
At that point I just wanted my wedding pictures because I did not want her holding them over me. I asked how much she wanted for them, even though she had originally offered to do them for free as a wedding gift and had photographed the wedding for less than 20 minutes.
She told me $500.
I was like absolutely not. If I had known that, I would have just had my grandpa take them for free. I told her to keep them. Eventually she did send them to me and apologized.
The worst part is that I genuinely hate my wedding pictures now. I do not really like how they turned out anyway, but emotionally I hate looking at them because they remind me of the entire situation. Instead of just thinking about getting married, I think about her acting annoyed about taking pictures, her husband complaining about the music, the fight right before my honeymoon and then her trying to charge me $500.
That is probably what I resent the most. Buying my first house, getting married and going on my honeymoon should have been some of the happiest memories of my life, and somehow she is tangled up in all of them. During the house situation, the wedding and the honeymoon, everything somehow became about what she did not like, what upset her, whether she felt appreciated enough or what she needed from me.
Afterward we briefly talked about trying to stay friends, but it felt awkward. Then she found out she was pregnant almost immediately and suddenly started texting me like everything was completely normal again. After everything that had just happened, I was not emotionally in a place where I could pretend we were still best friends just because she suddenly had happy news.
Something else I think about now is that my ex friend has always seemed to have a lot of conflict with people in her life. There is often some issue with a coworker or someone else. I am not saying every conflict is her fault, but I really do not have that kind of drama in my own life. I rarely have serious falling outs with people. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if one reason we went almost 28 years without a major issue was simply because we spent so many years living far apart.
Once we were actually around each other regularly again, I started seeing a side of the friendship that I did not like.
I talked about it in therapy and realized I needed space. I never reached out to her again, and I do not plan to. It was not one single fight that ended the friendship. It was everything building up, especially during a period of my life that should have been incredibly happy. I think that is why I still feel so strongly about it.