Ask Lemmy

Long time friend turned out to be a sexist pos that was groping my female friends, but would only act this way when I had my back turned. I'm very glad my friends trust me enough to actually tell me what was happening. Am perfectly fine cutting that behaviour out of my life and my social circle.

My dad broke up with his girlfriend, and was telling me this plan about fucking with her disability benefits, because she had gone for plastic surgery or some shit. He found this out from stalking her call logs.

I remember just pacing back and forward in my apartment trying to reason with him on the phone. "Dad, you can't do this kind of stuff.."

I talked him down, told him I loved him, and will always love him.

I don't know if it was the next day, but the next time we spoke on the phone he went right back into the same mindset. I couldn't handle it. Sometime after the call I sent a pretty harsh message that I didn't want to be involved with him. Haven't spoken to him since.

Family started to make fun of my pronouns. I'm just tired of people choosing to be cruel for cruel sake. So I deleted Facebook, essentially cutting them out.

My mom refused to use pronouns and I'd given her 6 years to learn and grow, cut her out.

In the past, a coworker on purpose set up a birthday for one of my best friends and didn't invite me. They made up super weird reasons why I wasn't invited. I realized he was manipulative... I cut him out...

Another co-worker was a friend but then one day he wanted to start touching me. I don't like being touched. I kept asking him to stop, he did it more. Til one day he pushed me into a cold case (we worked at a grocery store). I cut him out.

Regardless of who I cut out though, there is ALWAYS room to come back if they change and grow up.

I'm still hoping my mom will before she passes... : /

I cut off a close friend of mine when I decided to get clean from heroin. I used to use drugs with him and he was my weed dealer. He never sold me heroin, but his friends did.

I feel bad because he messaged me 5 or 6 years later saying he got clean too and said he was sorry for anything he did. He honestly didn't do anything wrong, I just felt like I had to prioritize my sobriety.

I still haven't contacted him. He was my closest friend for years. I wonder how he's doing.

Good friend for 5 years or so. He turned into an alt-right fanatic and kept trying to make me upset by spouting "ideas" he knew not only I didn't agree with, by would actually emotionally upset me (e.g. All street animals should be sacrificed without mercy, all immigrants should be returned to their original county, etc). He pulled this shit at my birthday also, ruinning the night not only for me but everyone present. That was the last time I saw him.

Another friend of over 10 years. He met a guy with a very strong personality and started copying everything the other guy did. Started dressing like him, having the same ideas, etc. I didn't play along, so everything about my suddenly became the object of criticism as well. Never talked to him again.

there's been a few. my (very much evil) step-grandmother was visiting my home with the rest of the family for a weekend barbeque. there were two things that happened that day. First, fairly early on, a new neighbor had brought back this ceramic baking dish I had brought them cookies and lemon bars over in. It was nice of them (they come back about half the time. they're nice-ish, but not expensive baking dishes. our entire neighborhood bombards the new families with things. We even have it scheduled out for a couple months so they don't get tossed.)

in any case, the mother was bringing it back and happened to be muslim. My Step-grandmother yelled- intentionally loud enough to be heard by my new neighbor, "YOU'RE NOT GOING TO INVITE THAT DIRTY TOWEL HEAD IN, ARE YOU?" the neighbor bolted before I could apologize, (i've subsequently repaired that damage.) Then my grandfather bitched me out when I told her that it was my house, and I would invite any one in I wanted to invite, and if she has a problem, she can leave.

then, I came back inside to her call my partner a Slut. Because she was a single mother. my partner heard. And my daughter. I WENT BALLISTIC. we were pretty close to going no-contact already. but that alone was enough.

of course, the rest of the family thought I was the bad guy for a couple years- and I more or less put them all on no-contact because they kept trying to sneak them over for holidays. after being told explicitly not to do that and if they had an issue, they can host it and we won't come if they're there. so they had a big "intervention" over it and things got heated. "You shouldn't talk to people like that. What you said hurt" was the general gist of it. and that I should forgive the evil step grandma.

Ultimately, they decided to maybe leave it alone, because, why the hell are you talking to me. the conditions we set for them coming back have yet to be met. (Basically an apology. to me. and to my partner.) and I may have shamed my dad and brother because Evil Step Grandma shifted her vitriol to them. she was a truly vile person.

Me and my best friend of 10 years still talked regularly, but kept spending less time together. We talked about relationships a lot and basically both agreed that marriage is not really necessary for a successful relationship and that marrying is too easy to be dangerous in the sense that if it doesn't work out, you're likely going to be paying for the other person's lifestyle for no reason whatsoever.

Apparently we didn't though, because at one point he came out with that he has been seeing a girl the last few weeks and is going to marry her in a few weeks. I and the rest of his friends were like "um, we're happy for you, but are you sure you know who this person is and that you literally want to spend the rest of your life with her? It's only been a few weeks since you met her".

He didn't answer and blocked us all and completely disappeared. Last I heard they did have the wedding a few weeks later, dunno what happened after that. It was his first girlfriend ever, btw.

This guy told me wife he was suicidal and my wife said to call her if he ever felt like that. So he started calling her all the time over the most petty non emergencies. Also he would tell her how he thought they were soul mates. Bear in mind, this isn't one of those "my now wife" stories, we were married. Not that it makes okay otherwise. The two of us were at his place for his birthday and I had gotten too drunk. I go to the bathroom thinking I'm going to throw up. Turns out he tried to make out with her while I was gone. That was basically the last straw. We didn't immediately cut him out after that but that was when we seriously began considering it.

It took so long because we were younger and more naive but also because he is super nice. He's the only person I've dealt with that is so nice and polite but also so toxic. He was so pathetic. He would just use his sadness to try and get everyone to give him more attention.

So we ghosted him. Just stopped asking for him to hang out and made excuses as to why we couldn't. Then just stopped reaching out. I don't feel bad about it either because he's used the threat of suicide to keep people close and gain attention before.

She left us. And hey, if you don't want to be in someone's life, you have the right to just leave. And I'm not saying she should have stayed, if she wanted to go. All I'm saying is, maybe your kids deserve at least a hug goodbye, mom. Or maybe even a note? Especially since we didn't have a dad either?

After becoming a gun nut, They told me it was "ok" to keep a load glock under their pillow (they were paranoid as fuck) because their 5 year old son wasn't strong enough to cycle the slide to chamber a bullet...

This is a long one. My shitty first roommate and now former friend. It was originally supposed to be three of us living together, with my then best friend, but she convinced me that best friend was too financially irresponsible. In retrospect, she just wanted the validation of me choosing her.

Unbeknownst to me, she was extremely emotionally unstable and became dependent on me to keep her level. Lots of crying and big fights over nothing significant. I put my foot down after a couple of months and told her I was moving out if she didn't get her shit together. The next day, she faked a suicide attempt with aspirin and vitamin C pills. I came home to a trail of them from the front door back to her bedroom. Not knowing at the time what she had taken, I called 911 and she was taken to the hospital. The hospital offered to set her up with psychiatric care but she declined.

I insisted she needed to get help but she refused, so I started discretely looking for a new place to live. Word got back to her I was doing so, so cue fake suicide attempt number two. I came home to a similar trail of pills, just to find her bedroom empty this time. Turns out she slammed a bottle of NyQuil and threw down a bunch of vitamin C. She became incredibly ill and called an ambulance before I got there.

I met her in the hospital while she was getting her stomach pumped. She was pretty messed up from the NyQuil and told me she tried to kill herself because I wasn't supportive enough. The literal quote was "I wouldn't have tried to do this if you were a better friend." When the doctor came around and offered to set her up with the local psychiatric hospital, I convinced her to accept. The NyQuil probably helped ease that through.

I moved out a few days later, while she was still institutionalized. I visited her in the hospital and gave her the news there, where she was being watched and presumably medicated. She lost her shit. After being released, she went on the war path, telling mutual friends I abandoned her after emotionally abusing her. We haven't talked since.

Sexually assaulted someone very close to me.

Then also later finding out it had also happened to other people. Disgusting, despicable person who is a drain on society, and I'm extremely happy they are out of my life and, much more importantly, the lives of those more directly harmed.

This conservative and I kind of had a truce where one of us would explain in detail our perspective on a situation (this was in 2019) and the other would try to rebut or sometimes just learn about something we hadn't heard before since we ran in different circles.

This went on for months and it was a pretty interesting series of a couple dozen conversations at least. We shared contact information and even texted each other when we found relevant articles that may influence the other, being as objective as a political article could be.

One time, he asked me to provide him with a list of everything Trump had done since he was sure that every single thing Trump was being blamed for was politically motivated and unsubstantial.

So I went through one of those megalists online, and only cherry picked a few dozen of the things Trump himself had signed, like raising the limit of allowable mercury disposal in the. I got through about 4 legislative actions that Jeff checked on his phone, then for the first time, Jeff interrupted me and told me to stop talking and insisted that these were all politically motivated slights and not actually trump's responsibility.

I pointed out that Trump had signed every single item on this list and these were only his actions as president that directly harmed Americans, and Jeff said that schools were in danger because the DOE was distributing sexually explicit books in elementary schools.

That threw me since obviously we weren't talking about that at all (and it was easy to show Jeff that that was like three schools in the whole country that were having discussions about explicit sexual education books in elementary schools, rather than the nationwide curricular upheaval he thought it was).

Jeff said he had to go, left, said it was great talking to me again, and then literally every subsequent time for the next 2 months I saw him at places we used to both frequent, would put his hands on his hips, look around as if there were more than three people at the track, saunter back to his truck and drive off. I even waved a couple of times and said "hey!" and he just pretended like he didn't see me from maybe 20 feet away.

My brother's wife. During the start of the pandemic (six months in?), she threw a Facebook hissy fit, declaring COVID to be nothing more than a bad cold. She declared the real killers as gluten and 5G. She was vehemently against mandatory vaccination (much freedom!), but would turn around and use her next breath to demand the gov't ban gluten from foods and the 5G rollout.

Called her crazy and haven't talked to her since.

My best friend punched me in the face and busted my nose because he got caught cheating on his gf.

I guess that person has to be my ex. We were together for a long time and were even planing a life together. We were expecting a child, which sadly ended in a stillbirth. Then by sheer coincidence I find out she has been texting some very questionable things to her "best friend" and her ex bf. Turns out she was fucking both of them while I was on cloud nine and thought we had something special. When I confronted her about it she talked about her not being able to continue without me, fully knowing I had a depressive and even suicidal past. When I packed my stuff she called the god damn cops and told them I hit her or some shit. Luckily enough they saw what was unfolding when they arrived and only talked to me for like an hour and let me go. I never talked to her again and cut her out of my life on the spot.

After talking to my relatives and friends about her, they all told me they thought she was a psycho bitch but didn't wanna ruin it. I stopped talking to all my "friends" from that time, and even my mother for a while, because I felt like they should have told me that I was making the biggest mistake of my life. I still do in fact.

In retrospective I know now that it was one of the worst times of my life and I am lucky to have dodged that bullet. Though I needed therapy and a lot of time to leave all of that behind.

Whole lot of people here have cut off other people, but no one's yet shared a story about what got them cut off. This one's mine.

I was unceremoniously removed from The List by a group of folks I was close with for years, after clashing with a couple of new additions to the group for a few months. We collectively ran a bit of a sketchy party scene and had been hosting stuff out of the weird end of town for a year or two when it all blew up - we weren't quite on the scale of underground warehouse raves, but we were like the training-wheels version. We'd get a lead on a place that was slated to be vacant for a month or a commercial building gone dark, arrange a couple bands and an escape plan, and pull a couple hundred bucks each in entry charge and dodgy beer.

They were great friends in addition to being sort-of in business together, and we had some absolutely great times.

Except one couple who'd been with us from the start and were OG team members met a new crowd of people. They wanted to bring their friends, we said sure, and ... shit started going downhill. The couple weren't bad. Their friends weren't bad. Their friends' friends were awful. I didn't like the new crowd's vibe, I didn't like who they were bringing in, what they were up to, and I didn't get along with the initial connections in the slightest. I thought they were assholes, they thought I was an asshole, and in hindsight we were both correct.

As much as each new member of our little scene was more money at the end of an event, I didn't want them there. I spent a lot of time and everyone's patience arguing why I felt these specific new people needed to be shown a door and firmly told to be on the other side of it, and I definitely went out of my way to cut them out of anything I had control over. My friends were frustrated, I was frustrated, and everyone was on edge - I was convinced these people were going absolutely ruin what we'd built, my friends were frustrated I wouldn't drop the grudge and didn't see the problem I was focused on.

In my defense, the new people were bringing in their crowd, and their crowd was bad news. It was like they were the scene where all the people other parties didn't want wound up congregating. There was the sketchy "why are you here?" old dudes, there were the people who did too much of many drugs even for our standards, there was the massive collection of edgy at-risk middleschoolers, there were the aggro bros and the dealers with Connections ... to me, inviting those people in the door was a massive heat score and absolutely ruining the vibe for the kind of people we wanted to attract. That said, in my friends' defense - we had agreed we'd make decisions as a team, and I was outvoted but unwilling to let it go; and we didn't have a problem with drugs or kids or even weird old dudes in general - half of us started in that community young and most absolutely dabbled in chemicals. We all were those kids a few years prior. My concerns read as hypocritical or gatekeep-y, rather than genuine, because I'd never been concerned about that shit prior.

The last straw? I paid a guy I knew from the other side of town to drive his dad's charger slowly past our venue a couple times, for several different events, so that people thought we might be about to get raided. Because the people I didn't care for were pretty dodgy, they fucked off at the faintest hint of trouble.

The other people in our crew found out, and I was excised from that group.

In hindsight, we were both right. I was petty and sabotaged the group to get my way - and those new people did absolutely ruin shit for that scene within a couple years. I've connected individually with a few members of that group over the many years since, but am very formally persona non grata at shit they do as a group - I don't think any of the people I still talk to even admit to the rest that they see me sometimes.

I don't want this to read like I was booted for taking some moral highground. I absolutely wasn't. I took the low road and went behind my friends' backs to undermine what we were doing, all because I wanted a specific group of people gone from our scene. As much as an adult's perspective would make it easy to spin this as if I had moral objections to bringing hard drugs and hard druggies and middleschoolers into the same place for underground parties - I wasn't concerned about those things, morally. Having middleschoolers get wasted at parties wasn't a problem to me, or even having creepy dudes trying to pick them up, or people shooting hard shit in the living room ... I just didn't like how there was more of "them" than "us" and our events were slowly becoming that scene, instead of just having a little bit of it off in one corner.

He tried to punch me in the face. Fortunately he missed, but he did manage to pull my shirt so hard that it left a red mark in my neck.

Some background: That guy has a long history of using illegal drugs, and that thing has gradually damaged his head over the years. Consequently, he now suffers from paranoia and a long list of very very bad decisions in general. He suddenly felt that I owe him some money, and got really mad when I said I’m not going to pay up. It’s a long story… I haven’t seen him since that incident.

The person I had to cut out of my life kept pushing religion on me.

My mother was mad my wife didn’t want to wake my daughter up to give her a bottle, she and my grandma didn’t like that we fed her broccoli since she didn’t have many teeth to chew it…my son was also on the low end of weight…finally had to switch to formula off of breast milk as it wasn’t fatty enough. Reported us to CPS. Relationship never recovered even though I feel I gave her way too many chances to respect our boundaries after that.

During COVID, one of my in-laws was strongly anti-lockdown and anti vaccine, while I was pro lockdown and pro vaccine.

I made a point of not replying to anything to he posted, and would curtly respond to him when he responded to me.

He kept sending me the trashiest anti-anything messages via DM, but appeared to stop when I asked him to.

2 weeks later, he sent me another. I reminded him he promised to not send me these anymore, to which he responded first apologizing, and then threatening me because my (then fiancee, now wife) was eligible for an early vaccine due to working in the medical field. Basically saying "well, when she's hurt from the vaccine, and she will get hurt from it, Im coming for you"

Of course, my wife is as much pro-vaccine as I am, and was bragging to friends that she got it early.

I shared the screenshots of the threat around, blocked him. Havnt talked to him since and I think most of the in-laws family have done the same.

In college, I had bought this used bicycle worth substantially more for 50 bucks. I was really happy with it and rode it every day.. My roommate, who up until this incident was becoming a very good friend, told his friend visiting our dorm while I wasn't in the room, that he could take my bike. That other guy never returned my bike, and my roommate kept insisting that it wasn't a big deal since I got the bike for $50.

I stopped talking to him after that for the rest of the semester unless it was to remind him to get my bike back or pay me back. Which, of course, never happened.

Guy was my best friend in middle school. We reconnected after I graduated from college, played and beat L4D and L4D2 together. Then he started sending me political memes, and they were all fascist.

I tried to reason with him, but then he refused to engage with anything that was longer than like a page, or any video/audio source longer than about five minutes, but didn't seem to have any problem sending me stuff way longer than that.

I still wonder if there was more I could have done. But I just didn't need that in my life. I'm not some hero, I'm a downwardly-mobile working-class schlub who's pretty good at playing piano and riding a bike. I shouldn't be responsible for dragging this dipshit back from the depths of fascism just because he sat next to me in seventh grade history class, and honestly, with some of the things he claimed to believe, I probably didn't even want him on my side anymore.

That's what I tell myself, anyway.

Called me while driving across the country to help keep himself from falling asleep. This was fine with me. I'll have a chat with you while you drive.

Then proceeded to fill me in on everything going on in his life for an hour and ended the call. He never asked how I was or gave me a chance to fill him in on my life since we'd last spoke. I already knew he was self-centered, but I was still in shock when the call ended.