I felt ambushed. After weeks of her telling me she wanted to hear all about my boyfriend and I finally getting together (we had been friends for years). After weeks of hearing how excited she was about the relationship, and she couldn’t wait to talk about it. After begging me to come see her (we lived in different cities), I felt ambushed, bushwhacked. I told her everything I thought she wanted to hear. Suddenly she was chewing me out for being selfish and only wanting to talk about my relationship. She wanted to know why I wasn’t concerned about her problems. Why did I come visit her if all I was going to do was talk about myself? If all I was going to do was talk about my boyfriend, then I should go see him. “Tell him to come get you.” (He lived in another city.) Stunned I called the airline and made arrangements to fly out on the next plane home. I hadn’t been there 24 hours.
I shouldn’t have been as stunned as I was. There were plenty of red flags in the previous six months that she was someone who always had to be the center of attention (I lost track of how many people she thought was stalking her). Her problems always had to be bigger and better than anyone else. She was a master of melodrama. I watched her toss two other friends to the side. It was all their fault (they were selfish too, stole her work, and one of them was stalking her). On the flight home it hit me: this was her. She wasn’t going to change. Unless I admitted everything was my fault, she was right and that was that. She would have an excuse for anything I held her accountable for as she did with the previous friends. I waited too long to even think of salvaging the friendship. At this point, the only choice I could make for my own sanity was to walk away. I stopped all communication: phone calls, email, IM, and blog comments.
There is plethora of advice on romantic relationships from beginning to end. There is a lot of advice on breaking up and how to get out of an abusive relationship. But we rarely see articles on breaking off friendships, especially friendships that become manipulative and abusive. Most friendships putter out over time and distance; it’s not that big of a deal. But every now and then friendships get messy and abusive. Here are the signs of a manipulative and abusive friendship:
