Okay, here we go. This starts out pretty innocent sounding, but it got messy so damn fast. A friend of mine, let's call her Sarah, had broken up with a long-term boyfriend a few months ago and was not dealing great, but it was hard to spot because she was mostly angry about the time she had wasted on him.
My bf has a lot of single male friends, and we were trying to spend more time with her and involve her in group stuff to cheer her up. She immediately asks me who of these guys is single. Because there is already a significant issue with all my friends being single girls and all my bf's friends being single guys I kind of go "oh boy here we go again", but I tell her.
So she decides to chat up this one guy via text and he goes for it. I mean really goes for it. He is so totally into her - and she instantly goes "eh, you know, I like these other two guys better". At this point though, everyone has noticed there's something going on between the other guy and her so it's super awkward that she wants to flirt with the other guys in the group. He eventually tells her he has feelings, she shoots him down.
Out of "respect" for him she doesn't hang out with the group for a few weeks, telling me the whole time how "her life is ruined" and she was finally starting to feel ok for the first time since the breakup. Things even out, she's hanging out with the group again. She finds out one of the guys she was interested in was interested in one of our other friends beforehand.
And to be honest, this is where I should have cut my losses and told her to just stop, but I was trying to be nice and supportive. See, this guy, let's call him Sam, had been on three dates with the girl he liked, and nothing had happened on them, the girl had called it off. She wanted me to keep it under wraps because awkward.
So Sarah decides to get mad at me for not telling her this thing that had nothing to do with her and that I had been specifically told not to tell her by someone else. When I tell her this, she just goes on about how hurt her feelings are, about how she hates Sam now and everything is terrible forever.
And then it really went to shit. Dude #1 is still totally interested, and is consistently flirting with her and trying to make it happen, and I keep saying she needs to talk to him or at least stop hanging out with him and giving him hope.
She says "nope, none of your business", which is true, but I feel guilty for starting the whole mess. At the same time, she is secretly dating Sam (I mean, I know about it, and so do half of the guys, but not guy #1). Eventually they are so obvious, my BF decides enough is enough and he has to tell his buddy what's going on because it's really rude.
Literally as soon as guy #1 finds out, Sarah decides she's really not feeling the relationship with Sam. Allegedly because she hurt the other guy so much. This takes place in august. Now, in comes another female friend, Anna.
She's getting out of a super shitty relationship, and another of my BF's single friends, Finn, has been interested for a while. Sarah notices this. Sarah, still in a relationship with Sam that she is not interested in but hasn't told him such, decides now is the time to start confiding in Anna how desperately in love she is with Finn.
Finn asks Anna privately how she is doing, indicating he might be interested in seeing her. Anna thinks, as a good friend, she needs to tell Sarah to save her the disappointment. She did not say yes to Finn, she thinks it would make her a terrible friend. Sarah's reaction? "I know it's not your fault, but I have to hate you now."
I cannot tell you how pissed off I got, because she was STILL DATING SAM. It is now late September. At this point, I am spending my time having endless conversations via whatsapp about how she needs to tell him how unhappy she is, about how it's really not okay to be in a relationship with one guy and have feelings for another, about how she's still prioritising her super flirty friendship with guy #1 over her boyfriend, who is trying desperately to make it work...and how she's being a total dick to Anna, who not only had her own bad relationship ending, whose dad is also possibly terminally ill. Sarah does not get how any of this is her fault.
Sarah does not think she could have done anything different. She just keeps trucking. Finally, in November, she breaks up with Sam and offers him zero explanation for her behavior.
At this point, after she has sidelined Anna multiple times and been excruciatingly mean to her, Anna decides fuck it, she's going to go out with Finn because he is an extremely nice dude and she would like that in her life right now.
After three dates, she tells Sarah about it, still trying to be a nice friend. Keep in mind, Sarah did not tell guy #1 she was dating Sam for about a month. And then only because someone else told him first. Sarah says "oh I'm over it you'll be a great girlfriend to him". Two days later, she goes to hang out with guy #1, and discovers that Finn is out on a date with Anna (Finn and guy #1 are roommates). She then goes ballistic, tells Anna she didn't know they were dating and how could she keep that a secret....after literally saying "you'll be a great girlfriend". She claims she misunderstood that it was a one-time date that isn't going to go anywhere, which is possible if not likely....but not if you literally gave your blessing.
The whole next week is damage control on my part. I'm in these endless conversations trying to tell Sarah she's being way harsh and not okay in her judgements, and also a total hypocrite. I'm trying to tell Anna it's so not worth her feeling guilty enough to give up on Finn. Sarah then decides she is going to break off contact with all of us female friends of hers "for our own benefit" - keep in mind we've been friends since high school and are all now mid-20s.
Plus, several of the friends she broke off contact with had absolutely fuck-all to do with this entire shitshow. We try to work it out. Several times. We try to talk her into meeting up in person. She claims to want that but everytime we suggest actually doing it she shoots it down.
She starts selectively hanging out with people and not telling everyone who she invited, and awkwardly excluding people. I keep on telling her she needs to own up to having been a dick to Sam, guy #1 and Anna. She still sees no reason to tell Sam why she broke up with him, despite meeting him several times to "talk about the breakup". (Why he agreed to that in the first place, no clue.)
Eventually, my BF again decides enough is enough, because literally EVERYONE knows about her feelings for Finn at this point, not because of gossip so much as she TOLD a bunch of us. Sam is like "oh, okay, now everything makes sense. Welp, never seeing her ever again."
Especially because he knows all about how he basically stole her away from Guy #1 and has been feeling bad about it ever since and she apparently wasn't ever really interested in a relationship with him.
Finally, the icing on top of this whole idiotic story is: In a last-ditch attempt to save her status with the boys of the group, because as she revealed, she had far more interest in maintaining that than her friendship with me, she meets up with Finn and tells him me and Anna made up the whole thing about her screwing up her relationship because of him to make her seem bad.
She then tells Anna all about how understanding and kind Finn was to her and how important she must be to him, presumably to make her jealous.
In the end, we had to start collecting her messages to prove we weren't insane and she was in fact lying to all of us in one way or another. The only person she still has any contact with is guy #1.
Bonuses: -She told me "I guess I just know how to be friends with guys better than you do".
-After breaking up with Sam, she texted a bunch of us if we wanted to hang out sometime.
We all said yes. After about a day she texted again saying how shitty of us it was to not come hang out with her when she was feeling so bad -- after literally saying nothing about when or where she wanted to do anything and not responding at all to all of us saying sure, we'd like to hang out. -Literally also said she enjoys having a guy be in unrequited love with her cause it makes her feel good.
/bewires/