Real Encounters

*Best Friends Forever*

I'm a woman, and I had a male best friend in high school and college, Doug. We lived together in and after college, but were never romantically involved at all. Very much a sibling kind of relationship.

One day a year or two out of college, we were out at a bar with some friends and we ran in to Meredith, who had been roommates with a friend of mine freshman year and who I'd stayed in very slight contact with online since. We had a ton of fun hanging out that night, and after that we started inviting her out with us more often.

She lived nearby, and suddenly she was hanging out at our apartment a couple nights a week, showing up with baked goods all the time, generally being a great friend. We went on road trips, we binge-watched TV, we texted all day long- I would probably have described her after a couple of months of this as my closest female friend. Doug was still my best friend after so many years, but Meredith and I were probably spending more time together than Doug and I were at that point. Since I did a lot of stuff with Doug, too, though, we all hung out together, and they started to get closer, as well.

After a while, it became clear that she had a crush on Doug, but he had started dating another girl at about the same time. He felt badly because it was clear Meredith was a little hung up on him, so he tried not to bring his new girlfriend around her or talk about her much (not that he hid the relationship, but just tried not to flaunt it at Meredith), but he did send me and another friend (who lived out of state and didn't know Meredith) emails that mentioned details of the relationship with the new girl and how he was falling for her.

One day, he calls me, furious, because someone has anonymously forwarded the contents of those emails to Meredith and she's crushed and humiliated to realize he's infatuated with this other girl. Since the only other person who received the emails didn't know Meredith, it had to be me. I hadn't done it- despite the screenname, anonymity in real life communication is not my style, and I would never want to hurt Meredith like that.

I was pretty crushed he didn't trust me enough to know that I wouldn't do that, but I also couldn't think of another explanation, unless our out-of-state friend had really taken up online snooping to figure out who Meredith was, how she felt, and what her email was. Ultimately, we just kind of dropped it as a sore subject for everyone involved. Around the same time, Meredith tells me she ran in to them at a coffee shop on a date and is extremely distraught- way more than makes sense for seeing people she knew were dating on a date. Which was weird, but, people get odd when their feelings are hurt, right?

Months pass, and Doug breaks up with the other girl. Eventually, he does start dating Meredith- after all, she's always around, and she's clearly way in to him- and at first things seem go well, but she gradually becomes more and more controlling. Eventually, she insists he move in with her, and from that point she stops letting him hang out with me or anyone else. We start to drift apart because he can't hang out without her and she doesn't want to hang out very often.

One night she was out of town and he, excited about a chance to see his friends, decided to come out with me and some other people, and she called him forty times in one hour, and when he finally told her he really couldn't talk anymore right now and silenced his phone, she called me and started out talking in a baby voice that, when I said I had to go, dropped a full octave in to a possessed-sounding growl.

At that point, which capped a bunch of small but weird actions on her part, I decided I was 100% done with dealing with her brand of crazy and blocked her number, and soon after that I stopped hearing from him altogether too. It hurt after so many years of close friendship, but people grow apart, that's life.

Nearly a year later, he shows up on my porch, with an apology, detailing what had happened in the interim.

Meredith had gradually grown more controlling and paranoid, convinced that he was talking behind her back and lying to her at every turn. She grew afraid to leave the house and didn't want him to leave either, and would attack him in rages or threaten to hurt herself to keep him from leaving. One day, they had a particularly blowout argument, and she got very drunk and confessed that she knew "everything he did".

It turns out she had logged in his computer when she crashed at our apartment the very first night we all hung out at the bar, years ago, and set his email account so that it would notify her email account if he changed his password. From that point on, she had gradually gotten access to his credit card and bank accounts, his social media accounts, his cell phone account- she would literally follow him around town even before they were dating via pending charges, and of course the "anonymous email" she had supposedly received had been an excuse to confront him about something she had read directly from his email account. She also told him she "knew" I was trying to keep her from him and that she had "always known it" and had to "keep me close to be sure".

This girl groomed me for 7-8 months, pretending to be my friend, going on vacations with me, giving me gifts and sharing confidences, while secretly viewing me as some kind of archenemy the whole time, just to get closer to Doug. I found out from a mutual friend that even after this was all over, she still believed that I had been aware on some level for our entire friendship that she was "after" Doug and that I was trying to stop her- in her mind, all our time spent together was some kind of elaborate one-upmanship scheme/game of strategy between acknowledged enemies. And here I thought we were just watching reality tv and baking brownies and shit. She apparently always hated me as a perceived obstacle to being with Doug, and set out very specifically to violate Doug's privacy from the first night she met him in order to trap him in her house forever.

He actually had to spend several weeks moving from friend's house to friend's house after leaving her, because when he moved in to a new apartment, he caught her hiding outside his bedroom window, and even then she would show up at each friends' house looking for him, and at one point he came out of a training class she knew he'd be attending to find her sitting in the passenger seat of his car- she'd had a spare key made secretly. I saw her car do slow drivebys on my cul-de-sac multiple times. She slashed her own tires in the parking lot of an apartment where he was staying so she could tell him she needed help changing the tire.

It was straight-up something out of a horror movie. Eventually, she got so paranoid her family realized something was wrong and came and took her back to her hometown for a while. Even once she was gone, it took me years to stop having panic attacks when I thought I saw her in public. She really taught me to be suspicious of people who want to be "instant" close friends. It's been many years, and I'm still a much more cautious person than I was before I befriended Meredith.

Credits: Reddit, Anonymouse278