Ask Lemmy

No real advice to give her, but I thought I'd share this story.

About 6 or 7 years ago, one of my friends unfriended basically everyone we know on Facebook and stopped replying to text messages out of the blue. Some of us had been hanging out with him a few days before, and there was no sign that anything was off.

To this day we don't really know exactly what happened, but we have a pretty solid theory.

My friend was born in the Middle East, but moved here when he was pretty young. His father is from that country, his mother is a white American, and from what I understand is not Muslim. His father apparently got a lot of shit from his family for that.

His father was always very strict, he'd gotten into fights with him before, there was one occasion where his father had threatened to move the family back to his home country, my friend stood up to him about that because his younger siblings had really only ever lived here, and ended up getting thrown out of the house for a while. His father used threats like that and cutting him off from his siblings to keep him in line. There had been some other similar fights because his father didn't approve of girls he was dating and such.

Few if any of us had ever met his father, but I get the impression he probably wasn't a fan of us either.

A couple of us went to his home to make sure he was ok, he answered the door, we didn't really get any answers except that he had made the decision with some other people that he couldn't associate with us anymore.

We later found out that he had been dating a girl, probably not one his dad would have approved of, and had also ghosted her at the same time.

Pretty much everyone left on his Facebook at the time were people with Middle Eastern names.

So we're pretty sure what happened is that his father came down on him with some big ultimatum to cut ties with anyone he didn't approve of or else.

A couple of us saw him in the wild once, he wouldn't acknowledge any of them. I shoot him a text once in a while, I have no idea if he's seen any of them, but I've never gotten a direct reply. A couple years ago, another friend's father passed away, we all used to hang out at his home, so I reached out to someone I knew from high school who wasn't defriended, and asked if they could let him know, and they did, the only reply I got through that mutual friend was a quick thanks.

Sometimes there's some really heavy stuff going on under the surface, and you can't always count on getting a solid answer.

Try to give them the benefit of the doubt and give them space. Tell yourself things like they may have had a death in the family, or their phone got stolen/broken. Try your best to focus on other things and take on something new and interesting. Use exercise to adjust your brain chemistry if your feelings are overpowering your logic to give them space.

If nothing serious has happened, you learned a valuable lesson about them, and know to maintain more distance.

Stay classy!

It’s possible that your friend is experiencing depression.

For me it was a sharp decline in mental health.

My best friend of 10 years vanished as he was fighting depression and most probably still is.

Perhaps they ran out of social energy and decided they need time alone. It happens. I would reach out once or twice just to check and then give it a rest for a long while, to not stress them out. If it's depression, it can last a very, very long time.

Not getting an answer is an answer. I wouldn't insist on contacting them.

As othera have suggested, it could be depression, a decline in mental health, or maybe feelings of betrayal

For me it was that my friend just took one too many opportunities to twist a knife in my gut, and I realized he was only pretending to be my friend in order to hurt me.

This sucks, I know. I just responded to a friend's message from two months ago, and I've felt bad about not responding since then. But life happens, and for me at least it had nothing to do about that friends behaviour.

You know sometimes it has nothing to do with you. Some people's first instinct when things go wrong is to limit the number of people they deal with. Heck I will admit it, I broke up with a girl a long long time ago just because I didn't have the emotional bandwidth to have a girlfriend and deal with everything else.

If someone wants space from you let them have it. Don't creep don't force yourself on them and don't take it personally.

Maybe they lost their phone

Whenever I "ghost" someone, it's usually because the friendship isn't working for me, or it didn't turn out to be what I thought it was. I put "ghost" in quotes because I don't really block people, I'll just stop initiating and then put the onus on them to maintain the relationship for a bit until I feel better about it.

So far, none of them have really cared enough to pick up the slack, so blocking them wasn't really necessary. Good moves on my part I guess.

First thought is some really intense mental health stuff

I don't wanna cause any undue paranoia but it might be worth looking back on anything that might have offended or hurt your friend that you might not have realized.

I once had a friend that was gaslighting me about his attempts to cozy up to my girlfriend / childhood friend and "accidentally" touching her inappropriately after I told him in no uncertain terms that I wasn't comfortable with it and didn't trust him. Eventually, in a drug induced grandiose rant, he admitted my suspicions were correct the whole time, and afterwards he refused to apologize because he didn't believe he did anything wrong. So I ghosted him.

I'm not saying it's likely you did anything that horrible to your friend without knowing, but I am saying my best friend firmly believed he had done nothing wrong and maybe it's worth considering or reconsidering the last month or two of events leading up to him ghosting you.

Have you tried getting a second friend to see if they can contact them?

Sometime a friendship is built for a very specific time in your life and once that time passes you start to see flaws in your friend.

If you want to preserve this friendship the best thing you can do is recalibrate. Talk about hopes and dreams. Things you like and don't like. Reasons you would pick one thing over another.

It's always good to have friends but maybe if there is something you're missing. Maybe something you have comes easy to you and they are constantly jealous because it's much harder for them. The best types of friends are friends that can tell you anything. First, though, you have to be able to tell them anything.

They've suddenly landed in a really controlling environment (be it a partner, parents, or a government), and wish to hide your relationship/keep you out of the crosshairs.

It doesnt matter if they blocked you or not. If theyre not talking to you theyre not talking to you.

I once ghosted a friend of some fifteen years after a friend of nearly twenty years told me he had raped her a few years prior.

I'm not sure I believe it (there was alcohol involved and he's a super kind person, so my suspicion is that she regretted it and saw it as rape because they were both drunk), but I believe she believes it and she is my number one.

Not saying you raped anybody. Just giving an example of a reason.