Y'all were right. My friend wasn't my friend.

I decided to write an update to my last post, which was written when I was still halfway through what was actually a trip I was taking with this friend and still overwhelmed by everything that was going on. After taking a few days to reflect and reading your responses over and over again, I can see how right y'all were about her. There were so many things she said/did that rubbed me the wrong way, and there's a lot more besides what is written below but this post is already long enough as it is. So grab your popcorn 🍿🍿🍿cause I actually wrote a whole damn novel/manifesto here lol.

Last post:

https://www.thefemaledatingstrategy.com//forum/general-dating-discussion/female-friend-subtly-criticizing-me-constsntly

❗️She kept dropping hints about wanting me to take on some of her expenses: paying for a hotel that she picked & booked, paying for the gas in her car(again in a rental of her own choosing), paying for all the food (no offense to her but she eats a lot). But when it came down to it, she was very stingy with her money: she was never once generous with me. She made sure every little expense I had was paid for by me right down to paying $30 for a crappy rollaway so that I could sleep in the hotel room. I didn't actually expect her to finance my stay, but she did invite me to tag along and she had a good idea of what my financial situation was like. If she had gifted me a couple of expenses (like that rollaway or even that one sprinkled donut I bought from dunkin') I wouldn't have thought twice about her apparent lack of generosity. I would have gladly paid half for parking & gas, but in the end, she kept vehemently insisting that we drive our own rentals and just "meet" each other at different places. Because of this we wasted time waiting for each other to arrive at places (after driving through horrendous commutes) and find parking at areas notoriously hard to find parking, paid ludicrous parking fees, and of course spent more money on gas since we both drove hours on our own.

❗️Meanwhile, I shared all my sunscreen and bug spray when she really needed it (she was extremely hesitant to share just a little bit of body wash with me ONCE when I really needed it); I also gave her some of my food (that I paid for) during a boat tour when she forgot to bring her lunch (the program schedule said to bring one and I also reminded her, but she still forgot!) and again when she didn't have any food for the next day when she would go scuba diving. Did she show gratitude? She didn't say thank you, but she gleefully took these items anyways!

Oh, and she never asked for things, she demanded it. "Ok I'm ready for more sunscreen" *she says as she holds her palm out* "Here, tie my bikini straps for me" *I do what she asks; i never hear a word of "thanks"* "Hey SeaGypsy, got anymore of that food?" *she asks after she finished the food I already gave her, never having thanked me once for that generosity*

❗️She was very demanding about me adapting to her schedule instead of having a conversation about what could work for both of us. It was a 6-hour flight for me to reach our destination (she lives in another state that is much closer) and another hour to drive from the airport to the hotel.

I don't get there until midnight and when I finally do, all I want to do is shower then knock out. Before I could unwind in any capacity, she insists that I get up 5 or 6am to get the day started. I remind her that it's literally a 3-hour time difference for me and that I need to rest since I just got there. After some deliberation she finally "agrees" to let me get up at 8am instead so that I can recover a little before we head out. When the morning comes, I get up at 8am like we agreed but turns out, she got up hours before to get ready herself and she tells me to just meet her there instead, because for some reason, she can't stand to just wait a little longer for me to head somewhere that didn't even open until later in the morning.

All for the best though because her car ended up breaking down and she had to go back to the airport an hour away to get a new one, hence producing a stress induced day for her. Meanwhile, I relaxed a little, went shopping for some necessities, and had a cute guy stop me to say that he thought I was "hot" and give me his number. I never did call him but I guess it was kind of a nice confidence boost LOL. This super nice lady also let me go ahead of her while we were in line to pay for groceries. All in all, i was sitting pretty while she was having meltdowns over her crappy day. Petty of me? Yes. Very petty :).

❗️Throughout the same day, she kept sending text after text implying that it was my fault for the day turning out badly. It was "poor planning" on my part, she said. I should have thought about this beforehand so that something like this didn't happen. Eventually, I had enough: I told her that this isn't just my trip, it was both of ours. That means we both need to talk and agree on something TOGETHER. It's not just my responsibility to plan for both of us. She suddenly changed her tune and tried to backtrack. Oh no!! She wasn't actually trying to blame me AT ALL!!! Sometimes, things happen when you travel!!!! It's nobody's fault!!!!!! (Lmao. Right...)

❗️She's not really a girl's girl. Later that same night, she wanted me to pose next to this giant ice cream cone to take a picture. I'm not great at posing, and YES, I felt awkward trying to pose okay. But instead of helping a girl out and giving me some pointers to look better, she just takes the picture then loudly proclaims (with people surrounding us of course) how "lame" I look. She hands off the phone to me to take a picture of her next and of course, she shows me up and poses much better than I could. Gosh, she's sooo cool👏👏👏

❗️The next morning she starts repeatedly HOLLERING at me to wake up. I wake up but don't bother moving; she keeps doing this and I consider telling her to stfu. Eventually she gives up but yells from 5 feet away that she "better see me awake in 5 minutes when she gets back" from having her hotel breakfast OR ELSE. Eventually I get up to use the bathroom. While I'm inside, i hear her coming back into the hotel room and yell "WOW. 👏YOU'RE👏 ACTUALLY👏 AWAKE.👏"

B*tch. I "slept in" ONCE and until 8am and you're treating me like I'm just some sloth that sleeps in everyday until the afternoon.

❗️Doesn't respect my boundaries. At one point, she tried to push me into riding bikes with her (I've never ridden before and I didn't trust she'd actually be patient enough to teach me) despite having told her that I didn't want to do this weeks before the trip even started. She kept trying to push me into it. It was viciously hot and I didn't bring enough water with me so I decided I didn't want to. She kept pushing, but of course she didn't even offer to pay for me if she wanted to go THAT BADLY. In front of us, I see a couple of other girls snickering at me as I keep asserting my position; i keep standing my ground. She finally stops when she notices the irritation blooming on my face.

❗️During the boat tour (different day), she rushes off without me to get ready to go snorkling. It was actually my first time doing this, so as soon as I finish my lunch, I see she's already headed off so I ask the captain to help me with my gear. At some point, he notices my friend off in the distance and remarks that "your friend left you behind." I'll admit, I was flustered by this remark and just said that "she's just excited to get in the water." He just half-scoffs and says "okay" but subconsciously I realized that maybe, just maybe my friend really was being kinda shitty towards me.

I finish getting ready and rush to the back of the boat to get into the water. As I'm going down the ladder, I hear my friend yell to the captain "can you just go ahead and take a picture of me please?" She then sneers: "My friend is going to take awhile"

I'm not gonna lie, as soon as I heard that I wanted to smack her in the face.

Later on as we're headed back from the outing, I go sit on one of the benches to sit next to my friend, but as soon as I do this, she gets up to go the back of the boat to nap and work on her tan (more like fry her skin because the UV rays were peak intensity at this point). Well that's okay, because then I get into a nice conversation with the captain about sailing and he even tells me about some of his own experiences in the outdoors among other things. While we were in the middle of our conversation, my friend suddenly cuts in and starts asking him questions. I was irritated by this, but whatever, I let it go. She peppers him with questions as she is laying on her belly in her ill-fitting two-piece swimsuit, her cleavage totally exposed, smiling at him. He graciously answers all her questions while I sit by and listen.

"Mmmm.. Jeremy... can you teach me how to saiil..." my friend asks in her most sleepily seductive voice. (Jeremy wasn't his actual name btw LOL i just replaced it).

It got noticably quiet for what felt like an eternity. Meanwhile, my face was like

After a hot moment, "Jeremy" replies stoically "No.. but I can tell you about it." He does, and answers other questions we have before we arrive back to the marina. At one point her foot kept lingering on the captain's chair to which the captain asked her to stop and my friend apologized in a "aw shucks. I didn't realize what I was doing!" type of way.

In hindsight, I had a good time... but not because of her.

❗️I somehow had the foresight to book my own airbnb for the 2nd half of my trip since 1) I wanted to explore on my own and 2) I kept having this lingering fear before the trip that she might be batsh*t crazy despite us getting along perfectly before. However, on my 2nd night there, someone did try breaking inside my airbnb around 3am. Luckily, I was okay in the end as the police were called and I talked to my family who were worried sick and also made sure I was okay. I did call "my friend" but she didn't respond until later in the morning. She texted asking me if I had called, I tell her yes and that someone had tried breaking into my airbnb. All she said was "don't call me!!! Call the police!!!" I tell her I did, but that I also called her because I was so shaken up about it and wanted her to comismerate with me. She doesn't reply after this.

No "are you okay?"

No "omg tell me what happened!!!"

No "I'm so sorry that happened. Are you going to be okay? Do you need anything??"

No nothing.

Just her going on with her day, charming everyone she meets, having a great time, maybe making some quips about her "slow, stupid" friend (me), which maybe gives her a rush of feeling superior and self-righteous compared to me.

❗️A slew of passive-aggressive comments. I'm not even gonna start listing them all because there are so many, but one in particular was when she helped pack my stuff (a couple of grocery bags & I didn't even ask for her help) into may car before I took off for my airbnb. After she places my stuff in the front seat, I asked her if she could quickly help me find where the release for the gas cap was because it wasn't immediately obvious to me. She rolls her eyes and says "do I have to do EVERYTHING for you?"

Um, lol what?

Well she goes and eventually figures out that you have to push the gas cap down to pop it open. She demonstrates this to me like I am a dumb, small child. Just push it.. see???

"Wooowowow. Uhhhh can you do that AGAIN?" i ask her. She falls for it and does it again. "No way!! Can you do that AGAIN?? I didn't catch it that time!!" I make her do it over and over and over again and she is slow to realize that I am just pulling her leg.

Also, comments about how I "don't eat anything" (I do a lot of running and swimming and I eat just fine).

❗️She's horrible at communication... until she's not. She was extremely unresponsive with her texts compared to before during the last couple days of my trip. Suddenly, I felt unimportant. She has more interesting people to meet after all! All those promises she kept making to me before had dissolved: she told me we were gonna be globe-trotting besties, going to amazing places, taking amazing photos that others would envy, trying cool and unique things. But suddenly, I felt useless to her. She didn't bother replying to the last few texts I sent her before boarding my flight home. I don't hear from her until a few days later when she tells me to upload ALL the pictures we took to a shared cloud storage and that "she'll do the same." For context, my phone had a far better camera compared to hers, so we took 95% of all our photos with my phone.

Wow suddenly she knows how to reach out and ask for what she needed. She totally ignored my last few messages but I was still SO impressed by her! This entire time, she's had so many unspoken expectations of me; whenever I didn't meet them, she berated me, blaming me for the poor communication. Blaming me for not "speaking up sooner" when she decided to make other plans, even though she could have brought it up herself. Despite the years of experience she claimed she had under her belt and my own inexperience, she expected me to do all the trip planning. She is also nearly a decade older than I am so I was taken aback by how immature she actually was.

All the amazing pictures we took together; all the amazing places we went to and all the amazing things we did; pictures of the exotic animals we saw and got to hold --- a point of bragging I'm sure for her family and friends back home. The photos are proof that she did and saw what she actually did.

All of it on my phone.

I'm extremely nice to people normally. But it's gotten to the point that I am just so sick and tired of being treated this way repeatedly. I was always quick to forgive, quick to give infinite chances, believe the best in other people.

All those photos of her are going straight to the recycle bin. Once they're all inside, my mouse will click "Delete forever"; those photos will never be recovered. All the photos we took of the both of us I might just crop her out of them.

I spent a couple of days after coming back from my trip reflecting over the whole thing. I honestly felt angry. All the treatment I recieved was unprovoked and I also hadn't seen or expected this side of her before. I never presented myself as someone different, but suddenly she began to complain and ridicule my introverted nature.

I decided that I am going to ghost her. Nothing is worth someone ebbing away at your self-esteem that way. I spent years and years trying to heal---and I'm still vulnerable and trying to heal. I'm sure she was going to ghost me as well, but maybe after I shared all these photos with her. She sees me as "lame" and expects me to upload them after commanding me to. Well, she's about to be surprised.