And apparently defriending was not an accident and also "not at all" a sign that they do not want to be in contact. I... cannot think of a reason this would be reasonable behavior. :|
Okay, I can sort of conceive of that. Maybe. Like, sometimes people unfollow me on tumblr because they can't handle the flood of abused kids, and that's totally not about not wanting contact, but... I am not sure that would apply here. I'm really confused here and you are getting some very mixed signals.
Hey, my mom's done that! It's coherent behavior in that they want to have you chase them in order to feel validated and important and also make you feel more like a supplicant for their friendship. Definitely not reasonable, though. Like, that may not be the reason, but it feels consistent with what you've said and I could probably unpack the heuristics that lead me to feel that if you wanted a wildly overlong infodump.
But I'm not very active on social media, and certainly not on emotionally charged subjects, so that seems... implausible. Ugh. I am so confused. Wildly overlong infodumps are always appreciated. I'm not sure if that's the reason, but heuristics are awesome. My current hypotheses on potential motivations: - Overloaded and wants to limit contact to a single well-controlled method. (But that doesn't really make sense because chat is higher-investment than social media posts, and it's the latter that was defriended.) - Wants to limit contact because they believe I'm overly dependent on them and therefore they are obliged to pull away so that I will find my own way. (Inaccurate, but possible.) - Wants to limit contact to private, one-on-one environments because they feel another person on that site will disapprove of me. (Also possible.) But I'm never good at 'chase me' narratives, they usually don't occur to me.
I also note: Wants to limit contact to private environments can often be a sort of abusive thing since it allows them to yell at you about privacy if you disclose anything they've done that upsets you.
This is definitely a consideration. They have very strong feelings about privacy, but I'm inclined to read it as fleas / irl-influenced, rather than an attempt at abuse. However, they have a history of letting their desire for personal privacy spill over into what feels like inappropriate control over my life. (They don't like me saying anything about them in public fora, which is a big part of the reason we broke up, in combination with their being in the closet. I do not like being a dirty secret. It is not acceptable behavior.) They would definitely be upset with me for discussing this, particularly in a public forum, even though I think it would be extremely difficult to trace back to either of us. (I am fairly sure this is appropriate and acceptable level of sharing, though. :P)
The secrecy might have a legitimate basis of some sort, but the way they go about it is really creepy.
Basically, yeah. :\ Damn hard person to be friends with. (The legitimate basis is work/personal-life-related, so I'm not comfortable with sharing, but I think it's at least partially legit.)
Overly long breakdown in the spoiler. Spoiler: I am probably not a sociopath Irrational fear of abandonment tends to be something highly noticeable, so I’m presuming they know this is an issue for you. Also this depends on their neurotype and experience, partly, but generally if someone is scrupulously honest and literal, saying something like ‘casual friends’ would be understood as being a baffling statement. If they haven’t noticed or learned to work with the ways you’re different, I’d interpret ‘casual friends’ as ‘fuck off but still be friendly if we happen to interact in public,’ because that’s how I’d use it. That actually is how I’ve used it, when a friend I was very close with did something I couldn’t forgive but we had enough mutual friends that I didn’t want to cause drama. The reason I did it that way and not straightforwardly was because this person had a history of using histrionics and sexuality to manipulate people pretty blatantly, and they operated very much on the ‘psychic monkey’ wavelength rather than the literalism I’m attributing to you both based on posts here and on the fact that you’re here at all. So part of the interpretation of their statement depends on how long you’ve been friends and how well they know you, but you say it’s been a while. Based on you seemingly having them as an important person for your emotional state - with the hitting them up pretty regularly for RP stuff - I’d understand the ‘casual friends’ thing as either having too much on their own plate to deal with anything else right now (including being straightforward, if that’s more effort for them than being avoidant) or being deliberately baffling. Everything up to this point is irrelevant if your friend is not particularly smart or observant: sometimes people just don't notice things. Somehow. Them feeling like you are being completely reliant on them and that seeming like an overstatement to you (when you’ve seemed to be on the I’m-hysterical-and-always-at-fault end of self-assessment) says that this is very much about them and their internal narrative. When things become about narrative, everything makes more sense! If you explicitly told them they could tell you to back off, them defriending you definitely brings it back to being about their narrative. Adherence to internal narrative is something people tend to try desperately for: there's a formal name for the logical fallacy, but I forget what it is. Narrative also becomes more important when coming from an abusive household (because we have lasting cultural narratives about karma and protagonists escaping negative situations) and when one is dealing with narcissism and BPD either firsthand or as fleas. Wanting to control who you talk to about them also supports the idea of wanting narrative control. It being about narrative opens up a few possibilities whose likelihood you're in a better place to gauge than I am: Possibly they are feeling more pressured about not being out and that would explain the wanting distance - particularly public distance. This becomes more plausible because of their privacy concerns. Possibly they are feeling that they have not been getting enough out of the friendship (it does not matter if this is fact-based or not, brains are terrible and feelings happen). This was my initial feeling. It can be easy to feel either lost or kind of vindictive if a friendship feels unequal. In this case, them saying contact is not cut off completely is an invitation to make them feel more valued as a friend, for you to show that you are okay with everything being all about them. It is in some ways an invitation for a friendship courtship, with saying more complimentary things and endeavoring to be entertaining and not saying heavy things that require much emotional investment on their end. Feeling generally unappreciated can happen, especially if one is experiencing stressors from a new direction (sometimes when I am in another country from my moirail and not the same room, I feel unloved and like I'm not communicating with anyone, even though we're usually talking more than when I am at home: it is illogical and a result of brains sucking, but it still happens), but if this is the case they are handling it super badly. Restricting contact to a higher-effort medium where presumably they would wait for you to start conversations also seems consistent with this. Possibly they want to phase out the friendship and are going about it in a terrible flailing way because they do not have a narrative about it. If anything seems wildly inaccurate, please let me know: I will need to adjust my heuristics.
This seems quite accurate and extremely useful, actually; thank you! Your heuristics are awesome. Yes, this is why the "casual friends" thing was confusing. I mean, I wasn't sharing more than I would with anyone else I felt wouldn't totally betray my confidence; I just don't like lying or keeping secrets. "Fuck off but still be friendly" sounds very plausible; that was my initial reaction, but I wasn't sure if it was catastrophizing. Literalism and "hysterical-always-at-fault" are accurate descriptors as far as I can self-diagnose. And yes, I've been very explicit; I've been trying to be Very Clear with them because clearly their feelings of manipulation were caused by just not understanding enough. (In retrospect, infodumping may not have been the best strategy.) I think a combination of #2 and #3 may be accurate - that their internal narrative only allows them to phase out a friendship if they believe that they're the wronged party, so they're constructing a situation in which they feel like they're being wronged? I... don't know, though. I guess we'll see how it works out.
Hope so. I'm inclined to think that it's probably best for me to avoid or severely limit contact at this point because this behavior is... pretty weird and not really okay.
Yeah, looks like it's the "dating someone else" thing, in combination with autistic/allistic conflict. Why can't people just listen to my words, instead of reading into things for some kind of magic emotional cue? This is rhetorical and full of exasperation. Gonna try again, I guess, though; I lost my temper and yelled, which seems to have actually worked out, because logic does not provoke the desired response.
Yeah. I'm really getting fond of this forum. Not that I don't like allistic folks but... god, it's frustrating to find out that someone's been totally misreading what you've been expressing for years, because they were following the emotional cues instead of the actual, contradictory words. I express the wrong emotion, or a totally inaccurate emotional intensity, a lot, so this is kind of a problem. Losing temper also => making blunt statements rather than taking time to consider the arguments and say only what's accurate and balanced, which is also probably part of it. I have a truth/accuracy Thing.
Update - Yeah, the ex apparently kissed someone over New Year's, which suspiciously correlates with when they started suddenly getting weird. Y'all were probably right.
