cutting people completely out of your life

If having someone in your life causes you more pain than not having them in your life, a clean break is the best. Better than letting it fester and letting the person continue to hurt you. Out of sight finally equals out of mind, it is the only way that you will ever forget them.

Mind you, this is a last resort. Not to be taken lightly. I've only ever taken the conscious decision to cut someone out about 3 or 4 times in my life. Every time was completely necessary, and I've never regretted it. I've only ever regretted not doing it SOONER and hanging on to something which was so clearly destructive.

When I was on the receiving end, it was a college acquaintance who was so appalled that I'd tried to ring her after 2 years, she made her feelings clear and rung off. I seem to recall staring at the handset, dumbstruck, a la John Shuttleworth's acting masterclass.

When I did the severing, it was a girl I'd met through work, got very friendly with over a period of months, visited (600-mile round-trip) a few times and developed a slightly fractious relationship with. One evening ('Four Weddings and a Funeral' was on the telly) she rang, we chatted amiably for twenty minutes, bickered over some triviality for five, and I thought 'I could end this right now'. Down went the receiver. I never expected to see or hear from her again and I haven't.

I'm cold, me. If you need any kittens drowning, I could do it.

wow kate. that is exactly my personal situation today. but i didn't even really have to cut the person off, i just found out what a revolting person they were, hate came so easily after that. it was a welcome hate because its resolved a lot of shit that had been lingering for far too long.

(I'll be damned if Ned gets all the egomaniac points today!)

Except I already did, since I am so great, so you're damned and off to hell you go. Easy!

I wouldn't drown those kitties. I'd burn them. Only the purifying flames would cleanse them of their sin.

I don't charge for this service.

That's basically the only time -- everything else has merely been a case of falling out of touch. Cutting people off runs contrary to my nature, really -- flagging friendships will usually die a natural death, rather than needing to be pointedly terminated. I guess if someone had actively preyed on my good will, I might have occasion to cut them off. (Almost typed "cut the moff", which sounds rather interesting.) But since I've never had any friends who turned out to be true parasites, or who really tried to screw me over, I've never had to do that.

I've spent years in therapy working out that I'm OK and that its every one else that has the problem.

I have an ex who freezed me out of her life during the worst period of my life. It was just bad timing in most ways, and I understand why she did what she did (while not forgiving it). It was shortly after we split up, and she just disappeared on me, never returned any calls, texts, etc. I hadn't done anything 'wrong', she just couldn't handle the long-distance relationship, and the aftermath of a long-distance breakup. So she disappeared. My father passed away. She re-initiated contact, by way of condolence, but ended up causing more damage by flitting in and out of my life as she could handle it. I wasn't in a state to ignore her, and ended up picking myself apart in dual longing for her and grieving for my father. After a while, we met up, and formally ceased contact.

There's been the odd gesture since then, unwise text messages on both sides during weak moments, attemptedly-latonic email entensions of friendship/contact on both sides that were mostly ignored/rebuffed. Nothing whatsoever for months. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I spotted her staring at me at a gig (she's moved back here, I guess). I blanked her, I guess. I didn't want contact.

So at ATP this weekend, as my girlfriend and I entered the building, there was a monitor standing near the entrance displaying photos taken of revellers the night before. As she chatted with colleagues, I absent-mindedly gazed towards the monitor, which was displaying a photo of her and her boyfriend, I guess, snuggling together. The cosmic weirdness of the timing and everything made me laugh out loud, but it unsettled me. Partly, perhaps, the sense that this girl who I'd loved so much, who'd been unable to commit to the relationship to any concrete degree because she felt too messed up, had somehow made it work with someone else (but then, so had I, I guess). Mostly, however, it was an anxiety of confrontation. In the past, I'd spotted her with her best friend (who, throughout our relationship, morphed from friend of mine to complete stranger/enemy) at a couple of festivals, and tried to pretend I hadn't, convinced that it would engender an unpleasant confrontation (I M WUSS). Instead, I would stand, gazing into thin air, convinced they were laughing at me behind my back. Now she was here, and I started to get the Fear of what this might involve - a confrontation with my girlfriend, perhaps, some kind of shenanigans. I feared looking an idiot in front of her too, a loser. The usual, ugly, emotional-wreck stuff.

So I told my girlfriend about the monitor and she laughed, and made a joke about my ex's large bum. We caught some bands, had fun, hung out. I thought I spotted my ex at one point, but she didn't see me, so I moved away accordingly. Later, tripping on mushrooms, I passed her exiting the Slint show. She spotted me, and shot a look I would classify as shock/disgust/anxiety. I sort of smiled wanly through her and walked off. It didn't upset me too much, but I've dwelt on it a little afterwards. I know the worst thing in the world would be to let this girl back in life - she's like crack to me, addictive and utterly destructive. But I can't deny I'm attracted to the chaos in some way - I am compelled to the relationship like picking a scab. I know its ugly and unhealthy, but somehow I can't help it.

Only I can. I have cut her number out of my mobile phone. I shan't email her. If I bump into her out in town, I'll be cool, not-unfriendly, but distant. It hurts too much. She could make me feel the best I've ever felt; she could make me feel like Hell. I don't want the risk and I don't want the ride. I wish I'd never, ever met her. I wish I wasn't compelled to pick apart the meaning of her expression on saturday night.

Oh man, this is SO OTM it's not even funny. I feel like that after every relationship I've ever been in.

xpost

of course

it was my fault, partly, i messed up

it was a long time ago

i regret it

real crackheads wouldn't just smile wanly as the crack was passed in front of them again. i think you're clean. there is no relationship, so there's nothing to be compelled to, except nightmares and ghosts. shrooms aren't exactly the right lens to look thru this stuff either

xposts

The mission failed and I'm still good friends with this person, much to my delight, but I guess if I'd *really* wanted to cut someone from my life I would've done so.

I can't say I miss the friendship of any of my ex girlfriends, and I'm sure they say the same thing about me.

I have also been trying to do this with an ex for a while now. Was slightly complicated by the fact that we were both invited to the same wedding about a year ago and by the fact that we have a few mutual friends, one of whom is now a very good friend of mine. On the basis of these I'd say that it's best to make sure you can go all the way and fully cut them out. If you can't then try to find a workable compromise, even if it's just in your own head. It's bloody hard to stop yourself being aggravated on an occasional basis if you are trying to exclude someone from your life and your life doesn't really allow it.

Yep, yep. Sigh.

Anyway, I didn't make any effort to keep in touch, and thought that as 18 months had passed, that the friendship was well and truly dead. In the last month however, I received one email from her that she sent to a general email address at work, looking for me, and when I responded to it, she sent me another, which I never got round to responding to, and then two chasing up ones, including another to the generic work email.

Now do I just go on ignoring the emails, send her one and then just let it drift off again, or tell her that I was purposely cutting her out and do it again?!

you don't see a qualitative difference to what? yr girlfriends or the friendship cut?

I have to agree. I cut an entire clique of people out of my life in the past year and I've never been happier. Enough said.

change your life then? it's not as hard as it sounds.

i believe there are times when it just doesn't make any sense for two people to see each other anymore, because of simmering disagreements or differing expectations. but i've never been party to a decision such as the one suggested in the thread title, i.e. i've never cut anyone out of my life who was trying to stay in, and have never been in the position of calling or emailing someone who would adamantly not call or write back in an attempt to cut me out of theirs. i imagine that i'd find such a circumstance more puzzling than anything else, just a melodramatic version of the "we shouldn't see each other so much" that probably pretty much everyone's been party to.

this was an interesting comment, tracer, because this happened to me recently... where i ended up at the same event as someone who evidently did not want to see me, or had considerable anxiety about seeing me. (because they felt they had seen me too often recently, and because they had something to tell me that they hadn't yet worked up the courage to say.) this person was, almost literally, shaking like a leaf ... voice quavering ... eyes fixed firmly on her shoes. at the time i simply felt snubbed and frantically confused, although within hours that changed to a sympathetic contemplation of her own anxieties. what bothered me most, however, was that when we did eventually talk she didn't seem aware of the extent to which her own anxieties manifested themselves in her appearance and in her snubbing me. or else she just really didn't want to talk about it. anyway i expect to see her again --i mean, run into her--and told her so.

lol if my close friends got mad every time we didn’t immediately respond to a non-emergency communication, we’d have no friends. My bff and I have been exchanging “yeah I’ll call you this weekend” messages back and forth for several months and still haven’t gotten around to talking.

it's very disorienting to be thrown into a situation where people who were part of your life are suddenly completely and totally gone. when the band i had been playing with for 3 years sent me a text last monday cold-dumping me with no prior discussion or warning, i was stunned. the band shaped hole in my life will hopefully close up before too long, though it remains perplexing to me how people can decide to excommunicate someone completely (I haven't heard from 2/3 of them at all! not even a "thanks" or "no hard feelings" however insincere).

with a little more thought, it feels like a blessing in disguise for me -- i have no idea what they will go on to do (or not do since they removed their drummer) and it's no longer any of my concern. bye!

i do not f/w people who guilt trip about response times (or anything tbh)
maybe i failed to read some signs or properly interpret a silent treatment i didn't realize i was receiving; ultimately, i think when people can't communicate in a mature fashion, they resort to these controlling and unsavory tactics.

LL, this reminds me slightly of how one of my favorite bands broke up (a noise trio I won’t name): the drummer texted the other two saying he just didn’t want to do it anymore. And that was that - a decade or so of amazing explosions ended in a text.

They put out their last full length a year or two after that, resisting the urge to call it “Break Up By Text Message”.

full disclosure - I messaged him on linkedin about a month ago because I saw he had viewed my profile and I missed him. I just checked and before that I last messaged him in 2019. He didn't respond to that and I didn't expect a response to this.

no offense but as someone (weirdly!) who has actually met this dude, you are just fucking with him

he had a crush on you, which you egged on because you enjoyed it, and he cut it off to save his marriage. you may miss him as your friend but you have no respect for him, and you have absolutely no right to complain about it as if you've been done wrong

you succeeded! he finally responded! now fucking leave him alone unless you're willing to back it up by fulfilling his dreams, which you aren't

Wow.

Thanks for the hot take and extremely hostile post! Clearly you are an expert after meeting someone once for two hours max iirc but you are wrong here. I don't consider messaging someone once every 5 years fucking with them. I think ending a 15 year friendship with absolutely zero explanation but then proceeding to look at the person's linkedin profile every two-three weeks for the next TEN YEARS is the fucking with part and if you can't see that then I don't know what to tell you. Also, and I sorta thought this was clear though I guess it wasn't, but my main issue wasn't even the friendship ending (tho obv I have feelings about that) it was the way in which it was handled.

Mookie wtf man

hi -- i very much regret certain word choices and the overly hostile tone. probably should have written it privately or simply not at all. honestly sorry about that!

but i don't think i was wrong

So you wish you had called me a piece of shit in less hostile tone? Thanks. You can think you're right. I don't. We can disagree and end whatever this was because I'm too angry to discuss it rationally any further.

I have rarely deliberately cut people out of my life, because I am endlessly forgiving and carrying grudges makes me feel horrendous. The one exception has been a cousin with whom I was extremely close during childhood through early adulthood; we started to drift at some point, and then many years later I learned that he had been exceptionally abusive to another family member. I saw him briefly after his mother died (he refused to come up for her death; I was there instead) and it was chilly, and then never heard from him again, likely because he assumed (correctly) that I'd learned about his past abuses.

My entire paternal family has cut me out over politics and facebook. I used to feel bad about this but they are frankly horrible people.

The best man at my wedding has decided not to speak to me; we were very close for a number of years, but he was an active alcoholic who periodically went on the attack for no reason. He has sobered up and is better, and we were again on speaking terms until I learned he came to town and didn't contact me and also told mutual friends not to tell me he was here. Bizarrely he requested to follow me on instagram several months ago; I let him but didn't follow back or engage with him in any way and then he unfollowed after a while. This is just narcissistic dumb behavior and I've come to accept that I don't want people like that in my life going foward.

xp ok

agree with akm

I'm old and can remember many times when I deliberately cut people out of my life. Mostly I've regretted it, with friends who offended me (I now see the offending incidents as so ridiculous), and when I was in love with someone who was well meaning but who could not return my affection because it was too painful. But also friendships that ended because someone was in love with me and I couldn't return their affection. I wish I could repair those relationships. I feel shitty about all of them

But not for most. In my 20s and 30s and even into my 40s I was trying to understand my friendships, and most of the time when a friendship ended I was thinking 'this is not a good person' and was happy to see the end of it. But also anyone who was addicted to too much drama in a personal relationship was not for me and I steered clear

I think you have to trust those instincts

Just had to do this with an old college friend, a deeply unhappy and self-righteous person, estranged from her family and most of our mutuals acquaintances, and prone to sending wildly out of pocket text messages. (Our last big fight included her saying "I'm ashamed to know you"; this one ended with her wishing death on my cat.)

We used to have a lot of shared musical and literary tastes, which is why we were friends (that, along with an unrequited crush I had on her). But somewhere along the way, she turned into an anti-woke complainer who calls me up to rant about people on Goodreads giving high ratings to a book just because the author is a disabled queer Black feminist. Her world seems to get smaller and more hateful each day, while I have been on the opposite journey.

Fittingly, the conversation that led to me blocking her number began with her gushing about Lauren Oyler, another person who spends too much of her time thinking about Goodreads. (To be clear, any amount of time is too much.)

Whatever, they deserve each other.

I cut someone out of my life maybe 6-7 years ago because she got super mad that my best friend of 20 years, who lived out of town, came into town and we went out for the night without her. I had introduced the two of them shortly after meeting her 5 years before.

I have her blocked on everything. I guess she is a newspaper obituary reader (friend thinks she has a Google alert on me) because when my Grandma died in December, within a day of the online posting there was a note saying she was sorry to hear of my Grandma’s (& Dad’s, mentioned as predeceased) passing. Then she signed it as just two initials so I could never be totally sure.

I was weirded out but thought the message was sweet enough - hate the just vague enough initials bit - the other friend is less charitable and was very much “why is she so fucking obsessed with you and weird about it”

Also for those who know my Twitter username etc is Lexy + dee to stand in for my D last name.. (now stee for my married S last name..) and a while after we met she, also an LD named woman, changed hers to the same format. Why so fucking weird LD

She can change her name but she can’t grow an extra foot tall

I have probably been cut out of former friends’ lives but if so, they are people I had already drifted away from either geographically or in terms of interests or politics and hadn’t even thought about them much… As in, if they have blocked me, I wouldn’t notice…

Oh wait! There was this chick Lori… 24 years ago who I had been good friends with and she sent me this really nasty email saying how I and partner were horrible and she can’t be friends with me or him anymore… I kept my distance from her after that, then she moved away about a year later … about 8 years ago she moves back and just acted like that never happened… I am nice to her but I definitely didn’t feel like rekindling that bff friendship we had before

And because there’s a l cohen thread in SNA, I remember hearing Chelsea Hotel in my late teens, and struggling to understand the experience of “I don’t think of you that often.” And now as an older person, I know that feeling really well… so many people who i had been close to at points in time that I don’t think if that often

about 8 years ago she moves back and just acted like that never happened

ugh that is the most obnoxious behavior, I despise it

I've only ever cut complete contact with a friend once that I can think of. It was a slightly fraught friendship to begin with, he's high maintenance person with a lot of issues, and when he got drunk he had a hard time not hitting on me even though he knew very well I wasn't interested. I could mostly deflect without incident. But then when I got into a new serious relationship he was super bitchy about my gf (now wife) even tho she was never anything but nice to him, and one time he was staying overnight at our place and he and I ended up getting into a really stupid argument that I knew was him kind of sublimating his own emotional stuff and he basically stormed out and drove 4 hours home in the middle of the night, and I was just like, "Well, that's enough of that." Literally not talked to him in the dozen years since, he lives on the other side of the country, and I hear from mutual friends that he's basically still as impossible as ever. I wish him well but don't miss being his emotional support, it was a lot.

Was he out?

Oh very.

OK. I asked because I've met guys like him and when I was younger and decidedly not out was probably that guy without being high maintenance or so obnoxious (I hope!).

I also realize that there are people who I wish I could cut completely out of my life, but I have to interact with them in some capacity because of work or other community things… so I have the category of “avoid/ignore as much as possible, but don’t make it dramatic “

Then I really start feeling old when people i used to think were annoying af become more tolerable because they actually are pretty good to work with in a professional way

xp Alfred yeah I’m sure you weren’t anything like this guy. He’s sort of a grand Southern queen, or that’s his chosen role. Which could make him a lot of fun, lots of acerbic wit, but plenty of downsides.