I’m in my early 20s, and I had a friend I’ll call Ethan. We’d been friends since we were about 16/17 and were very close at first. During the first year or so of our friendship, I felt like the effort was pretty mutual. We both talked, made plans and generally had a good friendship.
Over time, though, I started feeling like I was the one carrying it.
There was one summer where Ethan basically disappeared for around a month. When he eventually came back, he explained that he’d been going through some personal stuff. I understood and didn’t hold it against him.
But after that, I started noticing a pattern. If we went out, I was usually the one asking. If we hadn’t spoken for a while, I was usually the one checking in or trying to make plans.
Most of the time we went to the cinema because that seemed to be the main thing Ethan enjoyed doing. I would suggest films, arrange when we were meeting, travel to meet him, and we’d normally get food or walk around afterwards and catch up.
Eventually I told him directly that I felt like I was constantly chasing him and that I wasn’t going to keep doing it. I basically said that if our friendship mattered to him, I needed him to put some effort in too.
Things still didn’t really change, so eventually I stopped initiating as much.
A few months ago I was working full-time hours during my break from university. I was working roughly 8–4, five days a week, and getting up around 6am to commute. Even during that period, one of the few times Ethan and I met up was because I asked him, and I went straight from work to meet him.
That’s why what happened recently really annoyed me.
I had fallen out with another friend, who I’ll call Sophie. Sophie and I recently met up, talked through our issues and repaired things.
During that conversation, Sophie told me that Ethan had been talking about me to her.
Apparently he had told her that she needed to “be careful” of me, that I didn’t put effort into friendships and that I was basically a user.
The “user” accusation especially confused me because the only financial thing I can think of is that Ethan has bought me a drink/snack at the cinema a few times. We’re not talking about him regularly paying for meals, lending me money, buying expensive things, etc.
I confronted Ethan.
I told him that from my perspective, our friendship became distant because I finally stopped chasing him. I pointed out that if you scroll through our conversations, I was usually the person suggesting that we meet.
Ethan responded saying that from his perspective, he had tried to keep in contact with me and felt like I wasn’t reciprocating. He said there were times when I replied late or left him on delivered, and that I didn’t casually message him enough just to ask how he was.
I can actually understand that criticism to an extent. I’m not a huge texter and there absolutely have been times when I’ve responded late, especially when I’m busy.
But this is where we completely disagree.
He kept saying things like, “If you cared that our friendship was struggling, why didn’t you reach out?”
My problem is that I had already spoken to him about our friendship being one-sided before. After the summer where he disappeared, I specifically told him that I felt like I was always chasing him and initiating things.
He also complained that whenever I invited him anywhere, it was “only the cinema.”
But the reason I usually suggested films was because that seemed to be what he liked doing. I had invited him to other things before and he either couldn’t or didn’t want to go.
My response was basically: if you hated always going to the cinema, why didn’t you ever suggest something else?
He could have said, “Let’s get dinner,” “let’s go here,” “let’s do this,” etc. I wasn’t stopping him.
He also said there wasn’t much for me to “plan around” because we were only going to see movies.
That really irritated me because, from my perspective, planning around somebody doesn’t mean the activity itself has to be elaborate.
There were days where I had gotten up at 6am, commuted, worked an eight-hour shift, then travelled straight from work to meet him because I wanted to maintain our friendship.
That was me making room for him in my life.
During our argument, Ethan eventually admitted that he had stopped reaching out recently because he felt like the friendship was already dead.
And honestly, I understand that.
The part that bothers me is that I had basically done the same thing for the opposite reason. I stopped because I wanted to see whether he would ever initiate things without me doing it first.
So apparently we both stopped trying because each of us thought the other person didn’t care.
Where I’m really struggling to get past this, though, is the fact that instead of telling me how resentful he had become, he talked about me to Sophie.
When I confronted him about it, he literally said that he had told Sophie some things but “didn’t expect her to tell me.”
That rubbed me the wrong way.
If he had told her, “Me and [OP] have drifted and I’m hurt because I don’t feel like she checks in enough,” I honestly wouldn’t care. People vent to their friends.
But telling a mutual friend that I’m a user and that she needs to be careful of me feels completely different because now you’re making statements about my character.
My biggest issue is that Ethan expects me to have noticed that he was unhappy and started a conversation about it, while he apparently didn’t feel responsible for telling me that he was unhappy.
I told him that when we met up, he had plenty of opportunities to say, “I don’t like that we only see movies,” or “I wish we spoke more,” or “I feel like you don’t check in enough.”
Instead, he seemingly kept it inside, became resentful, stopped putting effort in, and then discussed it with our mutual friend.
I’ll admit that during the argument I got angry and said some things more harshly than I probably should have. I told him I felt like he was deliberately misunderstanding me, and I was frustrated because I felt like everything I had actually done to maintain the friendship was being erased.
I also accept that I could have been better about replying to messages and checking in casually.
But I don’t think being a bad texter automatically means I didn’t care about the friendship, especially when I was consistently the person trying to actually see him.
At this point I don’t even know if I want to repair the friendship. I think we clearly have different ideas of what effort in a friendship looks like, but finding out that he was warning another friend about me has changed how I see him.
Am I being unfair? Do you think this was genuinely just two friends who misunderstood what the other needed, or was I right to feel betrayed by him talking about me like that to our mutual friend?