crosswalks are authoritarian

related question: have you ever pretty much cut ties with someone after knowing them for a long ass time?

Yes. A friend I’d known for decades, from primary school. I’d just learned that I’d acquired a 10-year-old step-niece. My sister had started living with her now-current-husband/then-boyfriend. He had custody of his daughter due to the biological mom making a very long string of very bad decisions. I told my friend about this and how much I was looking forward to being the awesome-cool uncle I knew I could be, to this bright kind kid with some lingering trauma.

The first words out his mouth were “Is she cute? Is her mom hot?”

So in the span of about a second I realized I needed to go no-contact with my childhood friend.

(Step-niece grew up to be a professional nurse, and has been making a long string of very good personal-life decisions, and has become the kindest gentlest playfullest aunt of her own to her toddler niece.)

he thinks crosswalks are authoritarian

holy shit

He sounds bitter that he’s still single while all his friends have a girlfriend/partner, and there’s definitely some self sabotaging behaviour occuring because of that. Like thinking he’s better than anyone else and refusing to change. That way he stays single, can continue being/playing an arsehole, and doesn’t need to do introspection or ask himself some hard questions. I know I’ve phrased that really crudely, but sometimes you need to call a spade a spade.

Other than trying to tell him this somehow and let him connect the dots himself, there’s not much you can do.

Yeah. I was friends with a person for years. Would stand up for her when people talked bad behind her back. Supported her transition.

Then one day she ghosted me. Which is fine, we all got our lives but I liked our hangouts and kinda left it open if she ever wanted to reconnect. Later on I found out she went all ‘truescum’ and it was such a ladder pull. I was done. Good riddance.

I think the biggest journey every human embarks on is to not be annoying.

the silver lining of having zero outlook for making friends: I won’t wind up meeting this guy

He literally can’t admit when he is wrong, even about the simplest shit.

Can’t stand this attitude. Would cut him out for this alone. I’ve cut people out with this mindset before and I don’t even slightly regret it.

Halfway through, I thought this is a bit of Lenin complaining about Stalin being rude to his wife.

I’ve pretty much dumped a long time friend during Covid, cause they went full on fash pretty much. It hasn’t been an explicit thing, the dumping, we just no longer talk and I don’t really consider him a friend anymore. A shame too, I mean he never had perfect politics, I mean tbh he was probably always a bit center right, but he was a good guy to hang around. But at one point people change and it’s just not fun to talk with them anymore.

I have other friends who, I wouldn’t say I’ve “dumped,” we still talk occasionally and I see them now and again, but the relationship has undoubtably changed. They got big fancy office jobs whereas I worked a series of absolute shit, no money jobs interspersed with periods of unemployment. The divide was exacerbated when I was on the front lines of Covid and these guys were complaining about work from home. We just no longer see eye to eye and the relationship is hard. It’s sad since at one point a long time ago we were inseparable. But time keeps moving and we all change, you just need to accept that.

most of my friend group exploded recently when one of them cheated with another’s wife. the weird thing was that friend always said he hated that person, in fact our entire friend group thought she was incredibly toxic and that their relationship with their husband was abusive (i won’t get into details but it involved SA).

and then, after that relationship was broken up between the toxic wife and her (now-ex) husband, our friend group further fragmented when the ex-husband, while super depressed and drunk, asked another also super drunk (male) friend if they wanted to kiss, and then that male friend interpreted that somehow as somehow equivalent to sexual assault (nothing violates consent like… asking for consent before doing anything? i was there the whole time and nothing especially weird happened other than that question) and stopped hanging out with us. i think it was homophobia or less likely some kind of internalized repression.

i also had to stop hanging out with a cousin because he got randomly super pissed at my then-boyfriend while we were trying to play a game of warhammer 40k. my then-boyfriend literally moved ONE MINIATURE 7 inches before my cousin started shouting and saying he did it wrong or was cheating. i measured the move several times to make sure it was rules legal. we literally never got past thte first movement of the entire game, nothing had even happened enough to determine the outcome, no attacks were made, no objectives taken, just the one movement and he ragequit. then afterwards tried to make it about ‘respect’ or something when my then-boyfriend was acting totally normal like the rest of us that night. like yeah, we took a while to set up, because we were all casually hanign out and talking, we ALL were. it doesn’t explain why my cousin got so mad about that one movement phase for one miniature at the very start, its a post-hoc justification for their freakout.

its all good tho ‘asking to kiss - SA’ guy was an annoying reddit brain who thought chatGPT was as sentient as people (its all just statistics! we are stochastic parrots!), and my cousin always seemed to have problems with gay people, and once said something about how we can’t criticize italy electing that fascist Meloni person because ‘thats just what they believe in!’. it feels stupid to say but like the vast majority of people are just too ignorant for me to exist around peacefully apparently.

also i will always talk about communist stuff at all times and anyone that doesn’t want to hear it can fuck off. i don’t need apolitical friends, i need people that are fundamentally on the same page as me in terms of morality. its weird to me that thats such a common complaint OP had abut their example, when the misogynist stuff seems a lot more problematic.

Honestly sounds like a couple of people I’ve friend dumped, with a little variation.

Therapy, if it is doing anything, might take years to show any results. You don’t need to put up with that in the interim. If you want, you could give him some notes to take to his therapist, but that may not go down well at all.

Edit: this thread was cathartic. You should talk to your other mutual friends about this though

I dumped a friend of ~8yrs who got weird and standoffish with me after I got a gf (which only lasted a few months!). It’s a real thing that happens.

I had a long term friend that I made in my freshman year of high school because we both enjoyed fanfiction. It was definitely a friendship of proximity imo.

I didn’t like how they became my mom’s friend and eventually my mom would go out with her without inviting me.

She talked down about all my interests, was openly homophobic (this is before I realized I was queer), and she hated men. Hated to the point of being vicious to her little brother and using physical violence. When I left my family I went no contact with her too. I understand she had her own baggage and trauma, but she became the definition of gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss.

Yep. Dude prided himself on being an asshole since highschool. It was funny back then, but the kept it up, became more of a jerk and mocking me constantly, married an ex of mine and turns out he beat her and broke her down emotionally like he always did to everyone else. Went down the AnCap/sovereign citizens pipeline and started posting about how terrible teachers are - my partner is a teacher. No regrets about ghosting him, I don’t even think about him any more and my life is a lot better. We live too short of lives to hang around with people who treat you like shit.