tl;dr: have a friend who has historically always been mad when his friends got a gf/wife. He acts like he’s 15 years old and 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” and make it seem like he has the most unique viewpoint in the world. He doesn’t change anything about himself, and he’s stubbornly proud of having “no filter.” This has caused every wife/gf of his friends to not like him. He will never be invited to any kind of social event because he will say stupid shit. Like, nobody has to be a rabid commie all the fucking time. Him and my gf got into a huge fight because he always talks like an asshole, and i live with my gf, so he doesnt come to my house at all because he’ll say some shit. He still brings up this fight when im around him, and it’s like get the fuck over it. I basically don’t share anything about my life that involves my partner now, because he’ll say something fucking stupid about her. He also begins a lot of sentences with “well” or “actually” which is never helpful. He literally can’t admin when he is wrong, even about the simplest shit.

This really all seemed to get worse once I started my current long term relationship, and then it got way worse when my gf got sick of his shitty attitude and how he treats everyone like an asshole. He literally just can’t be chill at all. No leftist(or similar) should be ranting constantly about every single injustice during every single social situation. That is exhausting to be around, and there is a time and place for it, but there has to be an ability to switch that shit off.

Finding and keeping relationships requires changing yourself just a bit, and making compromises, and it’s now become apparent he isn’t capable of that.

related question: have you ever dumped a long time friend? This is all a somewhat recent change, like the past 3-4 years, and it really seems to be because im in a relationship like most of our friend group, so now he’s totally alone. Ive heard him say he’s in therapy but i have to wonder if that’s true, because it clearly isn’t working. I’m annoyed by him but I pity him too because he can’t fucking change for anybody at all.

  • daisy@hexbear.netEnglish
    39·
    2 years ago

    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.)

      • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        17·
        2 years ago

        We called it the paraphilic continuum in Crim Psych.

        And yeah. It’s not a road to go down. I know some pretty disturbing statistics. Maybe one day I’ll make a post about them. But I’d have to CW the whole thread.

          • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            11·
            2 years ago

            It’s been like 18 years but I can do some digging and see if I can find some academic sources. I mostly studied serial killers.

            I can tell you this off the top of my head:

            Extreme CW:

            spoiler

            If a serial rapist begins to use a knife or scissors to remove clothing the chance that they will murder their victim go way up. Like you got 2-3 victims before they start cutting and stabbing as part of their assault.

            It’s some grim shit. I had to stop studying it because it was fucking with my head. It’s why I can’t do all that “True Crime” shit. It’s a Nietzschean fucking abyss I’d rather not gaze into.

  • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    32·
    2 years ago

    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.

      • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        26·
        2 years ago

        Pretty much. Like you couldn’t actually be trans without hormones and surgeries. Pretty shit take. I never wanted to deal with her shit again.

      • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        29·
        2 years ago

        I’ve thought about that angle myself. Oh, so nobody was trans before modern medicine? Two-Spirits in Native culture were just playing pretend? Poor people can’t be trans? What’s next? Too old to transition? The argument has so many holes you could use it for a colander.

        • RedQuestionAsker2 [he/him, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          18·
          2 years ago

          I think a lot of trans people want so badly for there to be an objective measure of when you should be considered a particular gender.

          To them, the gender spectrum being a sliding scale leaves them open to accusations of “not really” being their preferred gender. Medicalism, which is not an objective measure, at least approaches a level of objectivity that can provide more structure and “proof” than cultural approaches.

      • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        15·
        2 years ago

        its really crazy. i like to think a lot of them grow out of it, the pain of surgery can kinda fuck your head up for a couple of years sometimes

  • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    31·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • TupamarosShakur [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    23·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • tactical_trans_karen [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    21·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • SuperNovaCouchGuy2 [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      10·
      2 years ago

      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.

      I hope he gets blown up by a creeper when mining diamonds in Minecraft so he falls into lava and loses all his diamond armor (too much of a noob for netherite).

      • tactical_trans_karen [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        I just hope he becomes a better person. After his second divorce he married some chud woman that he quickly got pregnant and they moved to the middle of nowhere. We have a mutual friend from high school who also went off a different deep end (religious), but is a lovely person - him and his wife helped the asshole guy’s second wife escape the violence, so they learned a lot of details they don’t want to repeat. But one time he said to me “I think he’s moving out into the sticks so no one can hear his wife scream”…

        • SuperNovaCouchGuy2 [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          4·
          2 years ago

          “I think he’s moving out into the sticks so no one can hear his wife scream”

          Horror movie material. This means to me that he is truly a dangerous person and I pray that he never meets you guys again, unless you’re all armed and ready to deal with him.

          • tactical_trans_karen [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            Def armed up, and he’s blocked by us on social media. Last time he reached out was over 3 years ago so I think we’re in the clear. Thing is, personality wise he’s almost a clone of my brother, whom we know is much more of a danger to us (christo-fascist and active III%er). We don’t see him unless he shows at holidays, and we refuse to be alone with him. Shits fucked, but I have no regrets keeping these kinds of people out of our lives.

  • TraumaDumpling@hexbear.netEnglish
    21·
    2 years ago

    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.

      • TraumaDumpling@hexbear.netEnglish
        16·
        2 years ago

        i have to mask the entire time i’m in public, i need my friend group to be a safe space. if i have to conceal my views we aren’t really friends anyway.

        edit: also i would unironically love to be around someone giving lenin speeches constantly lmao

          • TraumaDumpling@hexbear.netEnglish
            9·
            2 years ago

            i mean i do talk about other stuff sometimes but not as like an exclusive either or thing. theres often a political element to talk about and i and the people i hang out with unironically enjoy that kind of critical analysis.

            edit: but its fine to have different needs and comfort levels, i’m not trying to relitigate your disagreements with your friend. even in the best of scenarios different people have different needs, and any interpersonal problems can be compounded by all of the toxic and oppressive systems in our world, not to mention unrecognized or untreated trauma. its a world writhing in suffering.

      • TraumaDumpling@hexbear.netEnglish
        8·
        2 years ago

        i think its like a trade in of self worth for a sense of intellectual superiority and knowing ‘how it really is’ like with some reactionary misanthropic new-atheists. maybe a bit of techno-worshipping ‘AI is the offspring of our species’ stuff as well.

    • RedQuestionAsker2 [he/him, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      8·
      2 years ago

      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

      Tabletop 40k claims another relationship

  • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    21·
    2 years ago

    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

  • thisonethatone [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    21·
    2 years ago

    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.