Friendships sometimes end on bad terms, but most people simply move on. However, Reddit user Finishercar1, who shared her disturbing story on r/mildlyinfuriating, cannot.
After a falling out with a woman she was somewhat close to, the situation escalated from mean texts to obsessive and intrusive behavior.
From showing up uninvited at events to booking the same flight and announcing her desire to join a trip, the ex-friend's actions have crossed an increasing number of boundaries. The worst part is that local authorities are not yet willing to help.
You think you know a person, but then they do something that completely changes your perspective on who they are
Image credits: freepik (not the actual photo)
Which wouldn't necessarily be a huge problem if you could just cut them out of your life
Image credits: finishercar1
The sad reality about friendships is that many of them do end
Image credits: freepik (not the actual photo)
This fall, Grace Vieth, a researcher in social psychology at the University of Minnesota who studies friendship dissolution, said, "We [researchers] are just starting to consider how friendships might end, and that it is a very recent phenomenon… the work is really just beginning."
However, a recent YouGov survey found that most Americans (68%) have been in a position where they decided to end a friendship and followed through with it.
Generation X (73%) and Baby Boomers (69%) are more likely than Millennials (65%) or Gen-Zers (60%) to have had this experience.
A smaller share (52%) say they've been on the receiving end of this and had someone end a friendship with them.
About a quarter (24%) claim this has not happened to them, while an equal percentage say they're not sure whether this has happened to them — friendship breakups aren't always as clear-cut as this case.
But, since friendship breakups are generally less talked about, people might feel unsure about how to handle them or how to deal with the powerful emotions that follow.
"There's a very clear societal script for how to break up with a romantic partner," Vieth said. "But there are no normative scripts on how to go about ending a friendship."
Still, as illustrated by the Redditor's story, some people are just too toxic to stay with.
"Friendships are important, close relationships, so I think that we should give ourselves grace in understanding that a loss of a friendship is going to be hard. My advice would be to turn to your other relationships, and hopefully, you have other friends that you also value and can rely on," Vieth added.
Ultimately, numbers suggest that we are increasingly choosing the quality of our friendships over quantity. Just 13% of US adults have 10 or more close friends, compared with 33% of those surveyed in 1990. The downside of this trend is that it can also lead to loneliness — the share of people saying they have no close friends at all went from just 3 percent in 1990 to 12 percent.
This particular stalker may have seen the woman's online post
She continues to disregard boundaries
People who read the story are seriously concerned
Image credits: benzoix / freepik (not the actual photo)
The woman's behavior has been extremely erratic
Image credits: finishercar1
Even though, at first, it seemed like she just wanted to release her frustrations
