Fallout with my best friend

[miffyxo]

Had a really big thing happen this week and fell out with my best friend of 15 years. 😞

Quite a long story but I chose her to be my maid of honour last year. For some context of what happens next the same time she's been having issues for years with her partner, who long story short took a very long time to propose and then after they started planning the wedding the relationship ended (from her side).

When I made her maid of honour her reaction was happy at first, then she caught me off guard and said "wait, I don't have to do anything do I?"

A few weeks after I had my engagement party. She lives in my home town across the country so her fiancé drove her up and she called me as I was inflating balloons 😅 and getting everything ready to tell me they had got into a huge fight on the motorway on the way to the wedding and he had told her he wanted to focus on driving while she shouted at him that he hadn't booked their wedding venue yet. When she got to the nearby hotel (5 min walk away) she asked me and my fiancé pick her up from the hotel and take her to our house even though we were waiting for guests to arrive.

When they got to ours she started swearing in front of our neighbours kids and laughing about it, had a huge fight with her partner in the middle of the living room while guests were walking around awkwardly, played a song about Chinese people on the Alexa and dedicated it to my fiancé, and made a flirtatious comment to his best friend while his girlfriend and her own partner were in the garden. When she got home she told me she thought my guests were boring because they didn't want to dance with her. I didn't mention any of the drama she had been part of.

A little while after all this she was quite heavily into planning her own wedding and just didn't seem available and whenever I wanted to talk about my own she would just brush me off. It was stressful because I had a bridesmaid dress for her to wear and she kept changing the size she wanted the dress. I also knew I couldn't rely on her to plan my hen after her "do I have to do anything" comment and the way she'd acted at my engagement party. Another very close friend very kindly offered to plan the hen for me, and added my MOH to a group chat.

 A few months went past and my friend and fiancé's sister told me that my MOH was backing out of things and coming up with different excuses. I asked her about it and she told me she had no money and wouldn't give me an answer on what bits of it she'd go to. At the same time she was barely available to talk about anything to do with me and would only ever call me to talk about her partner and how terrible he was and how there wasn't going to be a wedding and that he's a huge narcissist. I'd bring up my own things and she'd be like "okay hun got to go" and the phone call would pretty much immediately end.

In the end they broke up (in a pretty horrendous way I won't go into detail on) and my hen happened. I travelled down to my home city and she got turned up the night me and my friends were travelling down and meeting our friend who'd organised the hen. The activities were all booked for the next day so I thought it was a strange day to come since she'd flaked out on staying at the hotel and we were just having a sleepover that night. She spent the whole time in the hotel lobby bar (where she wasn't even staying) glaring at me and my friends and rolling her eyes whenever we were laughing. My friend asked if she could try her drink and she looked at her as if she was worth nothing. She kept trying to make eye contact with me with a mocking expression at the others whenever we mentioned our pets or fun places we'd been lately. She then suggested we all have a meal and we said we were saving our money for the day after when all the activities were. So we went out to get a small takeaway and she pulls me to the side and says "look, I can't come tomorrow."

I felt really upset and asked her why she couldn't come, and she said she couldn't afford it. I asked if she could come to any of it and she said "look I don't know" so I said it had been planned for months and I didn't understand. She started yelling at me saying how dare I question her personal finances and that I didn't know what she'd been through and did I want to see her finances. She pulled out her phone and then she yelled "YOU want to see MY personal finances?" and looked at me with that horrible look of disgust she gives to people. I couldn't believe I was being shouted at by my own maid of honour on my hen and tried to calm down the situation and said it was fine and she continued to lay into me telling me it wasn't fine because I couldn't even make eye contact with her.

She then looked like she was about to storm off and our friend who planned the hen came out worried and spoke to her. She came back into the chippy but then shortly after spoke to our friend again then left and I didn't see her again. I woke up to a huge message at 2am saying thanks to our friend for supporting her (I trust her and I know she stayed neutral on the situation so not sure why she brought my friend into it) and said the same thing about how dare I question her and she'd been able to borrow some money and "might" come if I put this behind me. It was in a group chat she'd made with me and our friend just to send that message. Our friend replied and said let's just focus on it being the hen and then my MOH messaged again asking me to reply to her. I said it was fine and that I'd love her to come to what she could. She said she would come to the evening events so we gave her all the details again. She never turned up. I'd been really excited to see her and kept waiting and she just completely no showed with no explanation or message to say she wasn't coming.

A few weeks have gone by and yesterday I decided to reach out to her and asked her for a call to resolve it. It's only a couple of weeks until the wedding and my friends said it would be better to speak to her now rather than wait and see if she showed up on the day and then yet let down again.

She sent me a huge text message. She told me I'm selfish, money obsessed, want Kim Kardashian level status 😅 that my friends are pretentious, fake and boring "b*stards", that I'd changed since I moved in with my fiancé and used to have a laugh but now all I want to talk about is things I'd done and "the dog" and pawsecco (she told me how over the top that was and said "give me a break!") and that she disagrees with me going no contact with my parents because "they raised me" and even though they said "some things" to me how I'd basically disowned them as they refused to pay for the wedding. That wasn't true at all and was one very small part of a big problem of abuse I've survived but she chose to highlight the part that would make me look the worst.

To end a long story I uninvited her to the wedding, told her my version of events was very different and that I actually felt she just couldn't be happy for me and then I blocked her on everything.

So that's the end of a 15 year friendship. Anyone have any ideas on next steps or if I even did the right thing? Has anyone faced similar?

[Catothecat]

Wow, Miffy...  Dealing with wedding planning can be stressful enough, but this is adding to the stress on a scale so outside  the norm it's downright ridiculous.

The first question I would ask is, has she ever done anything like this before?  Not at this level, of course, because weddings are outliers, but on a smaller scale?  Say, you made plans to do something together which she initially agreed to but then found reasons to back out, or perhaps even started a small-scale argument over in order to get you to agree that perhaps it wasn't a good idea?

Sometimes it's hard to see the smaller red flags because they don't stand out as being very red. 

I think you've pick up on the salient point--her asking for reassurance that she won't have "anything to do".  I suspect that's the key to everything that followed.  She wants the privilege and next-to-center stage attention of being a MOH, but doesn't want to be bothered with anything other than showing up.  Except she can't really express what she feels, and her initial comment was probably blurted out before she had a chance to think.  That's her showing you who she is. 

Everything after that point has been an excuse, a disruption, or an attempt to make you look like the person in the wrong.  She's obviously going through her own personal issues, and I wouldn't discount envy or jealousy as another driving factor.  Her life isn't working out, yours is, and she can't deal with it. 

What she's done can fall into the category of narc or even NPD behavior (and I had a NPD "best friend" who would behave in ways similar to your friend, on a smaller scale, when he didn't want to do something and was looking for a way to get out of it) or she might be acting out due to other psychological issues and is actually neither.  In any event, until she gets herself together and deals with whatever issues are causing her to behave this way, I think you made the right choice. 

[miffyxo]

Wow, Miffy...  Dealing with wedding planning can be stressful enough, but this is adding to the stress on a scale so outside  the norm it's downright ridiculous.

The first question I would ask is, has she ever done anything like this before?  Not at this level, of course, because weddings are outliers, but on a smaller scale?  Say, you made plans to do something together which she initially agreed to but then found reasons to back out, or perhaps even started a small-scale argument over in order to get you to agree that perhaps it wasn't a good idea?

Sometimes it's hard to see the smaller red flags because they don't stand out as being very red. 

I think you've pick up on the salient point--her asking for reassurance that she won't have "anything to do".  I suspect that's the key to everything that followed.  She wants the privilege and next-to-center stage attention of being a MOH, but doesn't want to be bothered with anything other than showing up.  Except she can't really express what she feels, and her initial comment was probably blurted out before she had a chance to think.  That's her showing you who she is. 

Everything after that point has been an excuse, a disruption, or an attempt to make you look like the person in the wrong.  She's obviously going through her own personal issues, and I wouldn't discount envy or jealousy as another driving factor.  Her life isn't working out, yours is, and she can't deal with it. 

What she's done can fall into the category of narc or even NPD behavior (and I had a NPD "best friend" who would behave in ways similar to your friend, on a smaller scale, when he didn't want to do something and was looking for a way to get out of it) or she might be acting out due to other psychological issues and is actually neither.  In any event, until she gets herself together and deals with whatever issues are causing her to behave this way, I think you made the right choice. 

Thank you for your reply Cat I didn't realise so much myself but my fiancé had pointed out lots of red flags before this happened. One time she asked me and my fiancé to be added to a booking to a nice restaurant we'd booked just for us two, then kept making excuses and showed up two hours late with her then partner, didn't order anything and insisted on going to a pub they liked that was ages away. She'd also ask for lifts from my fiancé constantly but when I went to visit her I had to get two trains and then a taxi to her house on my own because she didn't even meet me at the station. At every party she likes to be the centre of attention, she made my fiancé go out and buy her wine glasses at our house warming party because we only had disposable cups. On top of all this she would frequently blurt out horrifying things like clicking over waiters, when a charity bucket came round once she replied "no thanks, I don't like kids". She'd make us all book taxis all the time from bar to bar on nights out because she didn't want to walk 5 mins down the road and frequently overspent on really elaborate items that no one needs. Another time I stayed at her house she had a huge argument with her partner and wouldn't let me go to sleep even though I had to meet my friend the next day and called me boring and told me I couldn't sit down (I was recovering from covid a few weeks before which I'd told her about earlier in the day) because I said I didn't want to drink that night,

I guess I thought this was all a bit tongue in cheek but coming to think of it it was probably all part of a bigger pattern of behaviour.

[treesgrowslowly]

Hi Miffyxo,

I think that you ran right into her anger about her own stuff (her wedding issues and her relationship and where it is at)...and she projected all of that onto you.

What you wrote - I see a lot of reacting out of her, that is immature now that she's older. Back when you became friends this sort of jealousy and being late, being petty, etc... would have been "ok". We expect people to outgrow that stuff as they get older. You said you've been friends for 15 years. So in my mind I'm thinking well 15 years ago when she acted like that, it wasn't as much of a problem as it is now that you are older, it is perfectly normal to expect friends to show up on time, and to be less self-absorbed than they were as teenagers.

I think you are seeing things clearly. We know when people are happy for us. We can feel it.

Especially when you're planning a wedding - you want her to be able to focus on you, not her. But she's focused on herself. She has growing up to do. We can't make other adults grow up. They have to do it. She might still be acting like this 20 years from now! I know people in their 60's who still act like they are in junior high! The way she behaved was really really self-absorbed.

You'll meet other people like this - they act younger than they actually are. She probably expected her life to turn out better than yours, and since your wedding got planned and her life is not going the way she expected - she dumped all her anger onto you. Good for you for uninviting her to your wedding. Who wants someone like that at their wedding day? Sometimes people in our lives are just not in a place where they are able to be happy for us. But they need to own it - not dump on others. That is the sign of an adult. It would be quite different if she had more self-awareness and could see how her unhappiness about her life is causing her to treat people badly. That is on her to figure out. I think that you made the right decision based on what she was doing.

Trees