There comes a time in our lives when we have to cut people out because of their toxic, negative, or destructive behavior. And there's no shame in doing it - tolerance and acceptance can only go so far, and there is always a last straw.
The785 asked: What was the incident that made you cut somebody close out of your life?
Submissions have been edited for clarity, context, and profanity.
15. Some people desperately need to control others.
She said I was becoming arrogant.
All my life I was a very submissive person, full of guilt for any perceived slight I might have made against someone, and generally apologetic for being the huge waste of space I thought I was. This girl I was friends with for 10+ years tended to prey upon that. I was her walking doormat, and would do anything she wanted.
When I met my husband, he helped bring me out of that mentality. Helped me become more assertive, and to stop letting people walk all over me and take advantage of my submissive nature.
This friend saw that and tried to stop it. She said I was changing, but not for the better. That I was becoming arrogant and selfish and a bad friend. At the time I was devastated, but my husband said, "She can't control you anymore, and that scares her."
He was right.
Going 5 years since I cut her (and some of our mutual friends) from my life, and I've never been in a better place mentally.
The same thing happened to me - she didn't like that I didn't need her any more. :(
14. Just mean.
I had a roommate who's BF broke up with her. I went and picked up her stuff from his house and took her out to eat. On the way home she's going on about how he could walk out of the house and get hit by a bus and how heartbroken she would be. I pointed out there wasn't a bus stop next to his house trying to lighten up the mood (they only dated about 3 months or something) so she turns to me and says "I hope your husband dies in Iraq so you know my pain." I told her that was going too far and she kept at it. I pointed out we had been together years not months and he was her friend to but she didn't care and never said sorry, she was drunk so I thought that was why she was being so mean but the next day when she was sober she stood by what she said. I kicked her out and never talked to her again.
Woooow. F*ck that.
Good on you for giving her the drunk pass. I can't believe she doubled down.
13. Grooming.
They started engaging in behavior around my kids which reminded me a little bit too strongly of the way I was treated by a child molester when I was little. And they tried to get my kids to ignore rules that I had set, and replace them with their own rules.
Wise choice. Good for you for noticing
12. Trashy, goodbye.
I used to go to the same pub every week on the regular with the same group of peeps, was an awesome time for a while.
One of the girls got a new, slightly weird boyfriend, and kinda went downhill as a human. This culminated in one particular night, which would be our last time going as a result.
On this night, she started being a huge b!tch to the server because the wings were taking too long. This is wing night, there are like 150 people here for cheap wings, and the server obviously has nothing to do with how long food takes to come out.
So her and her boyfriend literally trash the table we were sitting at, spraying condiments all over, wetting napkins with sauce and sticking them everywhere, and everybody else literally gets up and moves or leaves.
She was laughing like a psycho, her and her boyfriend were clearly getting off on one-upping each others sh*ttiness, and I decided I did not need that type of lunatic in my life.
11. Enabling doesn't help anyone.
When my sister text my mom with a message that read: "You're a horsesh*t c*nt of a mother. I can't wait until you die. It'll be the greatest day of my life!"
All because my mom wouldn't take $30,000 out of her retirement to bail out my sister's house that was to be foreclosed on because she's a lazy f*ck who didn't want to work.
The sad thing is that my mom was going to do it, too. My dad & I convinced her that she's going to piss away the $30,000 to save the house and then in a few more months, right back in the same situation. It was a lost cause.
She's even worse than meets the eye for those of you who want to understand a bit more about foreclosures.
It's not just the fact that she's going through foreclosure due to delinquency, but it's also that she let something entirely preventable from happening by doing nothing.
Contrary to popular beliefs, banks don't like foreclosures. In fact, banks will actively work with you to avoid foreclosures provided you give them 100% effort.
Foreclosures suck butts. The process needs to be done to the tee, the home will probably fall into disrepair, and buying a foreclosure is an entirely different beast than a traditional transaction, short sale, etc. Buying foreclosures sucks major butt, and banks know this, so they try to avoid holding onto these foreclosures.
Basically, your sister played the victim card instead of arranging something with her bank. She could have done a short sale at the very least (and would owe a lot in taxes but w/e) but instead, she wanted a hand out.
Wow. I bet she's the type to trash an apartment when she gets an eviction letter.
10. Someone has issues...
I had a friend who kept insisting I had a mental illness and wouldn't stop even if I told her. She began telling my friends and even asking if they thought the same thing. Because of this incident and her toxic personality I decided to tell her to f*ck off which was definitely for the better.
This exact thing happened to me. She had a lot of mental issues and she tried to mirror them in me.
She has clinical anxiety and subclinical depression and is medicated for it. she said she saw traces in me and that i had to go to the psychiatrist.
I have some issues but therapy once a month is working just fine.
9. Self-destructive behavior is contagious.
For me it wasn't a single incident, but the fact that she was always incredibly negative and refused to get counseling for the issues that she was going through. Every single time we hung out she Would spend two hours complaining about the same for things over and over. One of them being that people never stuck around in her life… At first I felt sympathy for her, then tried to suggest counseling to help talk through her issues, then I got frustrated, and eventually I slowly let the relationship die out. I don't want that kind of toxicity in my life.
she sounds like my ex...
She pushed everyone who cared about her in her life away through her actions and then and treats whoever she gets romantic with as the piece of the puzzle that completes her and can understand her and the pain of losing every around her in her life until she stops being infatuated and inevitable pushes them away too while finding a way to spin the story in her head as them abandoning her.
8. Men who can't keep it in their pants...
The second time I've heard that he was flirting with my girlfriend, a different girl than the first time.
A friend doesn't do that, so he was demoted quite instantly.
Same. I'm a female though. My best friend of 7 years started sexting my new boyfriend she knew I was really into behind my back. She then lied about still talking to him multiple times to my face. Even laughed about it to my face. Turns out like 2 days after I find all this out (this past Valentine's Day), she went on a date with him and lied about it to me, twice. I don't know why she thought I would still be her friend with her blatantly lying like that. I saw them together on my birthday last month and as far as I know they are still together. Friends don't do that sh*t.
7. No excuse.
My older brother and his wife #4 turning my parents home into a crack house while mom and dad were still there. Haven't seen or spoken to him in over ten years.
Good on you for just walking out of that, condolences to your family.
6. Pets' lives are worth saving.
My uncle basically forced my grandma to adopt a cat they found. He say he would pay for all the cat's expenses (vet, food, litter, etc) since my grandma does not work and can't really afford the expenses of owning a pet. After 2 or 3 years of my grandma living with the cat, he got a blatter infection and had to be rushed to the vet since he had not peed in a couple of days (grandma did not notice this). My mom had to drive them (cuz my grandma is not a confident driver) and neither of them speaks English very well. Because of this my uncle was the one who was talking with the vet over the cat's treatments and it boiled down to either putting the cat down or do an expensive medical procedure.
My uncle instead of telling my grandma what the situation was and that the cat needed surgery, he simply told her that they needed to put the cat down and to let me know so I could go say goodbye to him. Once I arrive to the vet and see my mom and grandma crying cuz they are saying their last goodbyes, I talk to the nurse wondering if there is anything we can do whatsoever to save his life, she looks at me confused and tells me that we could do an operation on him that had good chances of being successful. I tell my mom and grandma this and they are confused because my uncle told them the cat could not be saved. I ended up paying for the surgery and Valentino (cat's name) is still wagging his tail to this day. That was the day I stopped talking to my uncle (he has a very well paying job, no kids nor family, money is not an issue to him, yet he still decided to just put him down regardless of all the pain my grandma was going to feel).
5. Some people are never satisfied.
Made a friend in 8th grade, stayed friends through highschool and college. She was a bridesmaid at my wedding, planned my bachelorette party since my MOH wasn't sure what to do. She got engaged 3 years after I was married. At this point we'd been friends close to 15 years.
Her mother had died when she was young, MIL was unwilling to help plan, and no idea what to do so she asked for my help in planning the wedding as it hadn't been too long since my own, then went total bridezilla on me. There were lots of issues with the planning but the main issue had to do with the bridesmaid dresses.
We went to a bridal show one Saturday and she decided she wants all the bridesmaids to match. The problem was she had bridesmaids of every shape and size, from 0 to 5x and she kept trying to choose only dresses that the skinny girls felt comfortable in. Things that were strapless and would not allow the larger girls to wear a bra. More than one came up to me and asked me to see if I could help her choose something so that everyone would be comfortable.
The next weekend I was supposed to go to a concert that was 4 hours away from home. The plan was for my now-ex and I to go up Saturday morning, sight see from noon to 8, see the concert and then drive home. Since everyone was having problems with the dress I agreed to leave the house at 2 instead, not do the sight seeing and spend the morning with her to figure out the dresses.
The night before the concert she sent me a message on Myspace and said that I was a liar for making plans with her when I was going to be out of town. She proceeded to call me a c*nt for taking over her wedding, said that my mom was a whore, my sister was going to end up being raped if she didn't learn how to say no and that my dad needed to stop being such and abusive a*shat. I cut her out of my life right then, had a great time sight seeing and at the concert.
TLDR: Bridezilla asked for my help then insulted me and my family when I gave it.
4. TV shows understand us better than ourselves.
When I was 12-15 I went through a very bad depression that almost killed me. I went through life like a zombie, agreeing to everything my friends said and having no personality.
This one friend left for an exchange year. When he came back, we were having trouble reconnecting as both of us had changed quite a bit (including me getting through my depression). We met one day to talk about everything that was going on and he said "I don't know who you are now. Do you even know who you are now?" He then told me he liked my older self better, using those exact words. To me, that meant that he liked me better when I was sad and considering taking my life, because I just followed whatever he said in fear of being left alone. It came as such a shock and hurt so much that when I got home that day, I asked my mom if she liked me better before as well.
He also tweeted about me, calling me a toxic person, and treated the whole issue as him being sassy and moving on from me, who had been his friend since we were 4.
Also, when I was going through this depression, I trusted him and told him about the problems going on in my house, to which he replied with "oh my god, this is so similar to a TV show I'm watching called Shameless, maybe it will help to watch it." That's all he said about my father being an alcoholic, ex cocaine addict, abusive father figure.
I watched the first episode of Shameless and it hit too close to home - I hope you're doing better, friend, and if you're not - it gets better, I promise.
I'm doing a lot better now. I still have problems at home, but generally things are going well. Thanks for taking your time to write some kind words. And I can't bring myself to watch the show because I don't think it would help much, so I don't really know what it's about. However, I hope you can find a solution or get over whatever is in that show that hits close to home.
We're all in this together, no man is an island. Yeah the first part of the episode is the kids scrounging together breakfast and putting money together to keep the electricity on - dad is nowhere to be seen. Hits too close to home. But i'm doing better, always on the up and up :) Thank you
3. Good riddance.
- Mother. She told my sister, after she had been raped and beaten into a miscarriage, "that's what you get for being such a little f---ing whore." Sister died some years later due to long term drug and alcohol abuse.
- Step-Father. Did not intervene when my mother intentionally and maliciously tortured my dad and his family with the planning of their daughter's funeral and gravesite.
Step-father had two step-daughters in a previous marriage and no children of his own while my mother had my sister and me. Now they don't see or hear from any of their children or grand children.
2. People who harm animals are the worst. Full stop.
He picked up his 8 month old dog and slammed it to the ground because it pissed in the house. I called the humane society, had the dog taken from him and never spoke to him again.
Thanks for doing that. I respect you for it.
1. Success is a state of mind.
Close-ish.
I hosted a party a while back, Inviting close friends and some slightly more extended friends. Food, drinks, games.
I was talking about work with a close friend. We both work in technology.
Extended friend sees us talking careers, etc. He walks up and asks me if I think he's successful. The guy has been working at a gas station for the last 3 or 4 years or so.
I had had a couple of drinks already, but I could recognize emotional blackmail a mile away. I told him that I think he's successful is if he thinks he is. He though my answer was a cop-out, so he kept trying to bait me into saying that I don't think he's successful. Close friend called him out, and the guy left me alone for the night.
It makes me pretty mad for sure, I haven't talked to him since the incident.
Clearly he had serious self-esteem issues and wanted to be angry at someone other than himself. Glad your friend called him out on it.
That's why I told him that I think he's successful if he thinks he's successful. If he has a problem with where he's at, that's on him. I wanted to project that to him, but he was being too pushy to notice.