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crosswalks are authoritarian

related question: have you ever pretty much cut ties with someone after knowing them for a long ass time?

Yes. A friend I'd known for decades, from primary school. I'd just learned that I'd acquired a 10-year-old step-niece. My sister had started living with her now-current-husband/then-boyfriend. He had custody of his daughter due to the biological mom making a very long string of very bad decisions. I told my friend about this and how much I was looking forward to being the awesome-cool uncle I knew I could be, to this bright kind kid with some lingering trauma.

The first words out his mouth were "Is she cute? Is her mom hot?"

So in the span of about a second I realized I needed to go no-contact with my childhood friend.

(Step-niece grew up to be a professional nurse, and has been making a long string of very good personal-life decisions, and has become the kindest gentlest playfullest aunt of her own to her toddler niece.)

Yeah. I was friends with a person for years. Would stand up for her when people talked bad behind her back. Supported her transition.

Then one day she ghosted me. Which is fine, we all got our lives but I liked our hangouts and kinda left it open if she ever wanted to reconnect. Later on I found out she went all 'truescum' and it was such a ladder pull. I was done. Good riddance.

he thinks crosswalks are authoritarian

holy shit

He sounds bitter that he's still single while all his friends have a girlfriend/partner, and there's definitely some self sabotaging behaviour occuring because of that. Like thinking he's better than anyone else and refusing to change. That way he stays single, can continue being/playing an arsehole, and doesn't need to do introspection or ask himself some hard questions. I know I've phrased that really crudely, but sometimes you need to call a spade a spade.

Other than trying to tell him this somehow and let him connect the dots himself, there's not much you can do.

I think the biggest journey every human embarks on is to not be annoying.

He literally can't admit when he is wrong, even about the simplest shit.

Can't stand this attitude. Would cut him out for this alone. I've cut people out with this mindset before and I don't even slightly regret it.

the silver lining of having zero outlook for making friends: I won't wind up meeting this guy

Halfway through, I thought this is a bit of Lenin complaining about Stalin being rude to his wife.

I’ve pretty much dumped a long time friend during Covid, cause they went full on fash pretty much. It hasn’t been an explicit thing, the dumping, we just no longer talk and I don’t really consider him a friend anymore. A shame too, I mean he never had perfect politics, I mean tbh he was probably always a bit center right, but he was a good guy to hang around. But at one point people change and it’s just not fun to talk with them anymore.

I have other friends who, I wouldn’t say I’ve “dumped,” we still talk occasionally and I see them now and again, but the relationship has undoubtably changed. They got big fancy office jobs whereas I worked a series of absolute shit, no money jobs interspersed with periods of unemployment. The divide was exacerbated when I was on the front lines of Covid and these guys were complaining about work from home. We just no longer see eye to eye and the relationship is hard. It’s sad since at one point a long time ago we were inseparable. But time keeps moving and we all change, you just need to accept that.

I had a long term friend that I made in my freshman year of high school because we both enjoyed fanfiction. It was definitely a friendship of proximity imo.

I didn't like how they became my mom's friend and eventually my mom would go out with her without inviting me.

She talked down about all my interests, was openly homophobic (this is before I realized I was queer), and she hated men. Hated to the point of being vicious to her little brother and using physical violence. When I left my family I went no contact with her too. I understand she had her own baggage and trauma, but she became the definition of gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss.

most of my friend group exploded recently when one of them cheated with another's wife. the weird thing was that friend always said he hated that person, in fact our entire friend group thought she was incredibly toxic and that their relationship with their husband was abusive (i won't get into details but it involved SA).

and then, after that relationship was broken up between the toxic wife and her (now-ex) husband, our friend group further fragmented when the ex-husband, while super depressed and drunk, asked another also super drunk (male) friend if they wanted to kiss, and then that male friend interpreted that somehow as somehow equivalent to sexual assault (nothing violates consent like..... asking for consent before doing anything? i was there the whole time and nothing especially weird happened other than that question) and stopped hanging out with us. i think it was homophobia or less likely some kind of internalized repression.

i also had to stop hanging out with a cousin because he got randomly super pissed at my then-boyfriend while we were trying to play a game of warhammer 40k. my then-boyfriend literally moved ONE MINIATURE 7 inches before my cousin started shouting and saying he did it wrong or was cheating. i measured the move several times to make sure it was rules legal. we literally never got past thte first movement of the entire game, nothing had even happened enough to determine the outcome, no attacks were made, no objectives taken, just the one movement and he ragequit. then afterwards tried to make it about 'respect' or something when my then-boyfriend was acting totally normal like the rest of us that night. like yeah, we took a while to set up, because we were all casually hanign out and talking, we ALL were. it doesn't explain why my cousin got so mad about that one movement phase for one miniature at the very start, its a post-hoc justification for their freakout.

its all good tho 'asking to kiss - SA' guy was an annoying reddit brain who thought chatGPT was as sentient as people (its all just statistics! we are stochastic parrots!), and my cousin always seemed to have problems with gay people, and once said something about how we can't criticize italy electing that fascist Meloni person because 'thats just what they believe in!'. it feels stupid to say but like the vast majority of people are just too ignorant for me to exist around peacefully apparently.

also i will always talk about communist stuff at all times and anyone that doesn't want to hear it can fuck off. i don't need apolitical friends, i need people that are fundamentally on the same page as me in terms of morality. its weird to me that thats such a common complaint OP had abut their example, when the misogynist stuff seems a lot more problematic.

Yep. Dude prided himself on being an asshole since highschool. It was funny back then, but the kept it up, became more of a jerk and mocking me constantly, married an ex of mine and turns out he beat her and broke her down emotionally like he always did to everyone else. Went down the AnCap/sovereign citizens pipeline and started posting about how terrible teachers are - my partner is a teacher. No regrets about ghosting him, I don't even think about him any more and my life is a lot better. We live too short of lives to hang around with people who treat you like shit.

Honestly sounds like a couple of people I've friend dumped, with a little variation.

Therapy, if it is doing anything, might take years to show any results. You don't need to put up with that in the interim. If you want, you could give him some notes to take to his therapist, but that may not go down well at all.

Edit: this thread was cathartic. You should talk to your other mutual friends about this though

have you ever dumped a long time friend?

Yes. I recently cut ties with someone I had considered a close friend for decades because I could no longer make excuses for his immature, even violent outbursts. He was dragging down my friend group and making my wife miserable with his tantrums and his deliberate attempts to drag everyone else down around him.

He was also exceptionally brained while under false pretenses of being a leftist, with big time "DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" treat defender tendencies, including repeated apologia for cartoon depictions of kiddie creeping.

I dumped a friend of ~8yrs who got weird and standoffish with me after I got a gf (which only lasted a few months!). It's a real thing that happens.

Have you ever sucked off a long time friend?

Quietly withdrew my friendship with one of my closest friends during the height of the pandemic. Her personality has totally wildly changed since marrying her Israeli tech bro husband and becoming a housewife. She went from being one of the most supportive folks I knew to someone who abandoned my wife and I during a period where we had serious health worries about our newborn kid. She went from pre-birth and pre-concerns being “I’ll be there to help you guys as much as possible”, to “we just have to go on vacation to Hawaii right now as we’re too dynamic as people to stay in one place” while our baby was having MRIs and we didn’t know if they’d live to see their first birthday.

I had to dump my best friend of about 15 years a month ago because he went down a reactionary pipeline. He started spending a very unhealthy amount of time on 4chan and making incredibly racist and antisemitic jokes despite being told countless times to stop because it makes everyone uncomfortable. It almost seemed like he enjoyed how uncomfortable it made people, and whenever he was confronted on it he would play the victim and go around behind my back calling me a "wokescold". It got to a point where all my other friends would ask me why I am still friends with him, and each time I would defend him.

The straw that broke me was when I recently announced that I just found out that I am on the autism spectrum, and he responded saying "If I ever found out I was autistic I would actually kill myself". Which is ironic, considering he is probably the most textbook example of someone on the spectrum. Everyone who meets him instantly recognizes it, even his family suspects it but are too self-absorbed to do anything about it. He refuses to get diagnosed, which fine nobody can force him, but he has so much self-hatred that he takes out on autistic people by bullying them online and openly admitting it. He has been banned from Twitter multiple times for bullying autistic and trans people, even wearing those bans like a badge of honor. I finally said enough is enough. I tried to show him the error of his ways but all it did was make our relationship more hostile. He has become such a hateful person and I just finally had enough.

I know too many people that stopped developing in college, if not before. A lot of them are now in tech jobs where being a selfish self-congratulating contrarian getting all their takes from edgy "adult" cartoons is a norm and a standard so they fit right in.

bro sounds like he needs to do a lot of growing up.

I'm about to dump a friend. I don't know how I'm gonna do it because they are like reaaaally attached to me and honestly have told me they have romantic feelings (I have explained multiple times that I feel absolutely no romantic attraction, but they insist that I can develop romantic feelings for them...). Anyway, I just can't do it anymore, it's just too much knowing that they feel this way about me because it's such a mismatch in feelings, like they say that they have never been closer to someone else before and I just.... don't feel that way about them.

This feels like shit because it's like, not their fault but I just can't keep going with it. The friendship is literally stressing me tf out when I should be focusing on early transition stuff.

have you ever pretty much cut ties with someone after knowing them for a long ass time?

Sure. Most relationships run their course at some point. That's neither good, nor bad - it just is. Very few friendships continue until death, those people are very special and it really doesn't sound like he's in this category.

There's something to be said for being there for your friends when they're going through hard times, even if during those times they're not their best self. But it doesn't really sound like there's much to savour about this guy at all, and as you said he's not really working on himself.

It's not your responsibility to hang with this guy and subject your partner to him. Life is short, there are a million cool and rewarding people to spend time with and it sounds like you have put in the effort to give him time to sort himself out.

I knew someone who fell down the right wing yt pipeline. He became insecure and combative after, every other thing would result in a massive wall of text and some of them actually devolved into raging at communists. In one moment he would proselytize about peterson and express his disdain for poors who didn't bootstrap themselves before lamenting that none of it was applicable to him. He was also oddly elitist about video games, first it was old games good new bad, then it was consoles good pc bad, then it became Japanese games good western bad. Last time it was steam good, Epic and Gog bad because China. He also expressed his fondness for occupied Korea and Japan a lot which I thought was weird before I learned it's a weird common right wing fetishization thing.

In retrospect he was never great to be around but being radicalized by the anti-sjw stuff quickly made him unbearable. Last time I talked to him a few years ago he was still into that shit, insisting it was a debate that was ongoing, and was concerned with a societal collapse because women. He went on this insane rant about a video game woman character and I'm pretty sure he admitted there were days where he would just watch youtube all day. I was already checked out during that conversation so maybe I'm misremembering but I still feel like it was something he actually said even though it seems like something no one would ever admit.