Have you ever confronted a close friend about the way they had recently been treating you in the friendship? What happened?

I’m friends with someone now who’s turning out to be similar. Needy people are frustrating. I’m a few years younger than you & am still in college, I live with my boyfriend who works out of town from Monday-Friday, I work 35 hours a week on top of class, and I struggle with depression and anxiety, which stem from my BPD. In short- I have a lot going on.

I was feeling lonely recently while all my friends were busy, and decided to reach out to an old friend from high school. She’s a bit younger than me, I’m pretty sure she’s still in her senior year of high school. But I was always mature for my age, and assumed her being a couple years behind me wouldn’t make much of a difference. But I’m realizing that befriending her again may be a mistake.

Sorry if this gets long, I’m trying to compress it but it’s a long story. Basically, I added her to a group chat with me and several other of my friends, who also knew her from high school. She was cool at first, she fit in well with everyone. She seemed to always be having problems in her relationship, but that’s somewhat normal. The first red flag was when she would message the group chat, literally every single day, asking if anyone could hangout with her. All of us are busy people, and when we hang out together, it has to be planned around our schedules. So for a couple of weeks, everyone would nicely tell her that they were busy, and it would have to be another day. But after weeks of her asking the same question every day, we all started ignoring her. You’d think she would have gotten the hint. But eventually I started to feel bad that she was being turned down so often, and agreed to come pick her up to hang out.

For starters, she still lives in my hometown so her house is a 40 minute drive from mine, so about an hour and a half trip to pick her up then take her home. She has no car or license- so I’m the one responsible for that drive every time. I will say that she’s nice to be around, she’s a good person and we have a lot of similarities. The first time we hung out was good. I made the hour and a half trip once again to take her home, and from that point on, the friendship has been hell.

The very next afternoon, she started blowing my phone up. Calling, texting, snapchat- every way she could contact me. I assumed there was an emergency, but all of her messages were just, “Please come get me again, can I spend the night? I just can’t be alone right now, I’m so depressed, please I’m begging, come pick me up I’ll give you gas money,” etc. It was at least 25 messages. I told her that we has JUST hung out the day before, that I was tired from work and didn’t feel like making the drive. Not to mention, my boyfriend was leaving for work the next day & I wanted to spend time with him. She ended up apologizing for her outburst.

But the next day, it happened again. And the next day. It got to the point where every single day, I could expect to have 30 messages and missed calls from her when I got off work, BEGGING to hangout. I’ve given in a handful of times and picked her up, because she’s a massive guilter and manipulator.

It isn’t that I just don’t want to. I liked her, (before all the spamming) but the drive is just too much for a few hours of chilling, JUST to make the drive again. Even if she does give me gas money, I just don’t want to make that trip multiple times a week. She’s asking too much. On top of the drive, once she gets to my house, she immediately starts guilting me about how she “hasn’t eaten all day,” and asking if we can order food. She doesn’t offer any money to pay for it. And once we’ve eaten, she’s usually still hungry and starts asking for snacks. I obviously have no problem sharing food with guests. BUT she literally FINISHES anything she asks for. An entire bag of chips, an entire sleeve of cookies, etc. I can’t afford to feed her on top of myself!

UGH I know this turned into a long rant, but I’ve just been so annoyed recently and your story reminded me of her. Some people are just so needy and have no shame in putting you in stressful situations. I already hate saying “no” to people, and she doesn’t make it easy. She usually tries to convince me after I’ve already given her the negative. I don’t want to cut her off, especially since I’m the one who initiated the friendship, but this girl is driving me crazy.

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