❌ The Wash Up: Shoutout to my ex (best friend)

A retrospective on red flags...and some tea. ☕️

I don’t know why, but recently I’ve been thinking about the time my ‘best friend’ of 10 years started going weird. Or rather, the time I realised she was actually a terrible friend, quite toxic, and a bit of a manipulative mean girl. Let’s jump in.

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For as long as I can remember, it was all about Brenda* (not her real name). In hindsight, she was a toxic presence for a long time but I was reluctant to give up on the friendship because we’d known each other since before we were in training bras. I think they call that the ‘sunk cost fallacy’.

The sunk cost fallacy occurs when someone makes a decision based on their previously invested time or resources. The classic example occurs when you buy something that you end up not needing or enjoying, but you force yourself to use it anyway because you don’t want the money to go to waste. Source: markmanson.net

That said, with the benefit of hindsight I can say she taught me a few things about friendship red flags. I wondered for a while what the purpose of spilling this tea to you all would be, and to be honest, I think it’s half-catharsis for me, and half-word of warning to anyone reading.

Anyway, without further ado, here are 5 red flags to watch out for in your friend group, based on my own personal experiences:

🚩 Can’t be happy for you unless they are

There are a few examples of this, like when she tanked her A-levels but refused to do resits while I worked my butt off all summer to get the grades I needed to get into the university course I wanted.

The girl was salty because she wanted to party all summer instead, and had to go for her fourth backup. Then there was the time when my career was going well while hers didn’t quite match what she envisioned. The same weird, jealous behaviours—I sometimes felt like I was being thrown into a race I never signed up for. And I wanted no part of it.

Then there was the time she couldn’t be happy for me in a relationship because she was single and wanted one. Having a boyfriend was very important to her, as was having male attention, so not having these things to the degree she deemed suitable would send her on the warpath.

I was generally smack dab in the middle of that path, having to deal with foul moods, drunken meltdowns on nights out, and an overall lack of support for my own life events despite always being a cheerleader for hers.

The tipping point came when I told her I was finally taking the plunge to move to the UK—a dream I’d had since I was a kid marvelling at the book shops and crisp autumn weather, back when Greggs was still a novelty.

She seemed more offended than upset I was leaving, and never even tried to bid me farewell. Not at my leaving party, which she didn’t bother coming to. There wasn’t so much as a quiet coffee or even a text to wish me luck.

🚩 Actively excludes you from social activities

I had built up a nice group of friends after dropping off the surface of the earth in my first (trainwreck of a) relationship. One of the boys in the group—we’ll call him Tom—remains a close friend to this day, and the gals are still tight considering half of us live overseas.

We’d meet up as a group of varying sizes a couple of times a week, especially in the summer months. I started to hear the odd comment here and there that hinted at group meetups I’d not been invited to.

So, I asked Tom* about it, and here’s roughly how it went:

Me: Did you guys meet up last Thursday?

Tom: Yeah, just a chilled one round mine.

Me: Didn’t get the memo!

Tom: I thought it was weird you weren’t there. Brenda said she told you.

Me: 🤬 *Incandescent rage of my early 20s* 🤬

So, yeah. It was tactical; she was icing me out. And then, looking back through the years, I realised she’d done this multiple times before. But I was just too naive to see it at the time.

I trusted that someone who said they loved me, who said they were my ‘BFFL’ (best friend for life for those who are too young to remember the heady days of MSN).

Needless to say, I’ve since stopped giving people the same trust and benefit of the doubt so freely. I meet everyone at a nice, neutral point, then allow them to win trust through consistent actions.

🚩 Double standards

This is an easy one, but at the time I never realised just how often an action or behaviour from me was deemed offensive when it was totally acceptable for her to do the same thing.

Similarly, she’d do things that would simply SEND HER if the shoe was on the other foot.

Here’s a very brief example from when I was about 23, heading to a party I didn’t want to go to but was attending to keep her company during one of her rare bouts of singledom:

Me: I can give you a lift home after the party because I’m not drinking, but would it be okay to stay at yours to avoid driving too far so late at night?

Her: Erm, it depends. I might get with someone so you’ll have to just drop me off and go Lollll.

Well, fuck me then. I don’t know why I never called her out on this at the time—probably something about my personality and that benefit of the doubt I used to lean on so often. Today, I’d suggest she finds alternative transport home, quite frankly. I could have been playing video games in PJs.

🚩 Never wrong and never apologises

When you’re dealing with someone as toxic as my ex-bestie, you’re never the only one who has seen that ugly side come through. When I (years later) broached the subject with one of the other girls (the bestie who replaced me, incidentally) we compared notes.

One of the thickest threads to run through our experiences was her inability to admit fault. Not once in 10 years (for me) and about 5 years for Eve* did our ex-bestie say sorry, or even suggest that she might have perhaps been wrong about something.

Because she truly never thought she was wrong. Not even the time she got physical with one of us at a party for having too much fun and not giving her constant, uninterrupted attention. In her view, that was warranted.

By the law of averages, she should have at least one ‘sorry’ in 10 years of friendship. Even a small one, like: ‘Sorry I started another very public fight with my boyfriend, got drunk, was sick on your shoes, and cried all the way home after cutting your night short’. I’m really not picky.

🚩 Has to put others down to feel good

This one was probably the biggest, most obvious red flag throughout the years. I perhaps didn’t take it as seriously as she did in our youth; poking fun at someone’s appearance if they were mean to us or to someone we knew, or if they annoyed us for whatever reason; we giggled together, like naughty school children and revelling in just how funny we thought we were. Gross.

When I was an idiot teenager I definitely participated in it, but like most idiot teenagers, I grew out of that. She didn’t. It evolved into something uglier—saying ‘I love your outfit!’ and cracking on with a girl only to turn to me 2 minutes later to say how much she hated her, how ugly she was, how much better she was than her.

She would tear a friend down for getting some positive male attention, saying awful things like: ‘You know he was only talking to you because he’s interested in me, right?’

If one of us liked a guy or started seeing someone, she would look down her nose at our chosen crush or companion, casually letting us know that 'he’s not my type, but then I’m picky’. The inference was that we only liked them because we had lower standards than she did.

Honestly, who says things like that to a person? To someone you call a friend? Well, this person and people like her. They need to, because their self-esteem has gone so low that the only thing they feel they can do is pull you down into that dank, dark hole with them. Don’t fall for it, don’t entertain it, don’t do it.

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So, there you have it! Probably one of my more personal newsletters, but I feel like I can share this sort of thing with you all. Substack is a nice space.

If you’ve experienced anything like this, or have seen some red flags of your own play out, share them in the comments—the more we talk about this stuff, the better we’ll feel and the more we’ll learn about our own boundaries, I think.