When did you realize your best friend, wasn't really your friend?

We were best friends and our partners were best friends. We did everything together, from holidays to vacations. I had felt some weird vibes from her toward my fiancé but chalked it up to over thinking and anxiety. Things started to feel strained between she and I, meanwhile she began to pay more attention to my fiancé than I felt appropriate. My fiancé and I broke up when I tried to tell him I thought she was up to something, because he thought I was trying to force them apart over my friendship with her falling to shambles. They wasn't the only issue between us, it was just the straw that broke the camels back. She encouraged him to move in with them, and took advantage of that situation to emotionally manipulate him. She started lying about her boyfriend abusing her and a number of other things.

This came to a head when he woke up from passing out drunk to her having sex with him and was too shocked to react. This was not even a WEEK after we split up. In the confusion and depression caused by feeling complicit with what happened between them despite not having initiated it, it turned into an affair. I caught on very quickly, and told her boyfriend immediately. He went through her phone and there was more than enough evidence to confirm my accusations. Her whole life blew up in her face. His friendship with my ex fiancé was ruined, and it finally clicked for me that she had been working her way towards trying this for a solid year and a half and was largely behind our break up.

She had used every single thing I ever told her about our relationship to her advantage in the most creatively disgusting ways to push our relationship off a cliff. She painted herself as a broken soul abused by her best friend and her boyfriend for years. She took every situation one of us shared with her and played both sides. She created stories that never happened and told him they did. She destroyed his image of his best friend. She was an absolute. Fucking. Sociopath.

I had seen her do similar things to many people over the years but always thought that I did everything for and with her, only ever supported her and built her up... so she would never hurt me. That she only did the things she did as a result of traumas she had suffered growing up. That she needed a good friend and a lot of love because she was a beautiful person under all of her mental illnesses. That she didn't mean to do the things she did, or truly understand how they affected the people around her.

The reality of it all was that she understood all of it, didn't give a shit, and enjoyed seeing others suffer and feeling power over people. When all of the manipulation came to light and she lost her relationship with her boyfriend and my ex at the same time she came crying to me trying to apologize and claiming that the loss of our friendship was truly the most painful part of all the damage she caused. Everything she did was wrong and I never deserved any of it. I couldn't possibly sum everything she told me that day up in a comment but she managed to phrase her version of events in such a way that she was like schrodingers cat, both guilty and not guilty at the same time. I was so far detached from the situation that I didn't have it in me to react. It was the moment I realized she was utterly unhinged, and always will be. She wanted me to be angry with her, yet by that point I couldn't feel anything anymore. I still don't know how to trust others. I don't know if I ever will again.

/r/AskReddit Thread