I’m about to dump a friend. I don’t know how I’m gonna do it because they are like reaaaally attached to me and honestly have told me they have romantic feelings (I have explained multiple times that I feel absolutely no romantic attraction, but they insist that I can develop romantic feelings for them…). Anyway, I just can’t do it anymore, it’s just too much knowing that they feel this way about me because it’s such a mismatch in feelings, like they say that they have never been closer to someone else before and I just… don’t feel that way about them.

This feels like shit because it’s like, not their fault but I just can’t keep going with it. The friendship is literally stressing me tf out when I should be focusing on early transition stuff.

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.

Yea ditch this fucking turd.

I didn’t dump anybody but when a couple friends from high-school were still religiously listening to Joe Rogan and said they had no sympathy for homeless people because they want to be homeless or else they’d just get a job.

So I stopped hanging out with them because I don’t want to be friends with people who act like a bad stereotype of a high schooler.

saying “bros before hoes” still. He calls me and other friends a yuppie or breeder, and he thinks crosswalks are authoritarian so he has to always be a “rebel”

Is this me? Jon, is that you?

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crosswalks are authoritarian

Needs to try different meds.

Depression can really warp your brain.

It took me a while to learn that he doesn’t know how to fucking talk to people, especially once they are in a relationship and have less time for him. He is constantly lashing out at everyone around him, even “friends.” He still gets into fights with his parents too. I recently realized I can smell his nasty dogs on him because he doesnt clean his house or his clothes or maybe even himself so that seems like depression. It doesnt help my gf and him got into a fight of their own, but that stemmed from how he constantly talks like an asshole to literally everyone, and begins most sentences with “well” or “well actually” and can never admit he’s wrong. Ever. Almost everyone he is friends with has a wife or gf, and none of the wives or gfs like him at alllllll. At best they tolerate him. He’s not getting invited to friend vacations or dinners because he’s a fucking pill to be around and when you want him to be a normal person in a social situation (instead of just a rabid anarchist all the time) he will proudly declare because that is who he is and he isn’t changing.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa0x7DaDYP_vMQwyTqckCV7nM7KfNMs-B

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

Sure. Most relationships run their course at some point. That’s neither good, nor bad - it just is. Very few friendships continue until death, those people are very special and it really doesn’t sound like he’s in this category.

There’s something to be said for being there for your friends when they’re going through hard times, even if during those times they’re not their best self. But it doesn’t really sound like there’s much to savour about this guy at all, and as you said he’s not really working on himself.

It’s not your responsibility to hang with this guy and subject your partner to him. Life is short, there are a million cool and rewarding people to spend time with and it sounds like you have put in the effort to give him time to sort himself out.

I know too many people that stopped developing in college, if not before. A lot of them are now in tech jobs where being a selfish self-congratulating contrarian getting all their takes from edgy “adult” cartoons is a norm and a standard so they fit right in.

Sounds like the dude might be on the autistic spectrum with some ADHD thrown in. These people can be toxic in this state and it’s hard to get them to move on without they themselves wanting to.

Have you ever hung out with him and “the guys” in a while? Maybe he misses the “good old days” and hasn’t realized people have changed. Doing another might push him to that conclusion himself, and it would be a good way to get him pointed in a more constructive direction. If the dude is anti authoritarian and hates modern culture, getting him to get a civil engineering degree might be the catalyst to break him out of the cycle.

If you do this, I would have at least one of y’all be prepared not to “refute” his claims but nudge him to a new discovery; if he brings up sidewalks being authoritarian say something like “oh, interesting. Have you read any of Jane Jacobs’ work? I think you’d like it.”

However, it shouldn’t be like an intervention. Try to let him have fun—have drinks, games, a bouncy castle, I dunno—and go at his pace. People like him just need a push in the right direction before they hurt people.

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.)

have you ever dumped a long time friend?

Yes. I recently cut ties with someone I had considered a close friend for decades because I could no longer make excuses for his immature, even violent outbursts. He was dragging down my friend group and making my wife miserable with his tantrums and his deliberate attempts to drag everyone else down around him.

He was also exceptionally brained while under false pretenses of being a leftist, with big time “DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO” treat defender tendencies, including repeated apologia for cartoon depictions of kiddie creeping.

I knew someone who fell down the right wing yt pipeline. He became insecure and combative after, every other thing would result in a massive wall of text and some of them actually devolved into raging at communists. In one moment he would proselytize about peterson and express his disdain for poors who didn’t bootstrap themselves before lamenting that none of it was applicable to him. He was also oddly elitist about video games, first it was old games good new bad, then it was consoles good pc bad, then it became Japanese games good western bad. Last time it was steam good, Epic and Gog bad because China. He also expressed his fondness for occupied Korea and Japan a lot which I thought was weird before I learned it’s a weird common right wing fetishization thing.

In retrospect he was never great to be around but being radicalized by the anti-sjw stuff quickly made him unbearable. Last time I talked to him a few years ago he was still into that shit, insisting it was a debate that was ongoing, and was concerned with a societal collapse because women. He went on this insane rant about a video game woman character and I’m pretty sure he admitted there were days where he would just watch youtube all day. I was already checked out during that conversation so maybe I’m misremembering but I still feel like it was something he actually said even though it seems like something no one would ever admit.

Yes. Literally don’t miss him. Who cares, there’s lots of people just make new friends.