Worker says a coworker acted terrified of her for nearly a year after she ended their friendship — then seven women started comparing notes and the whole pattern finally caught up with him

A woman on Reddit said a friendship breakup with a coworker never really stayed personal, because the man spent months turning their professional relationship into something weird, stiff, and exhausting. In a story later collected by r/BestofRedditorUpdates, she wrote that she had been friends with a male coworker outside work for about a year before ending the friendship in July after a pile of frustrations she described as emotionally draining and immature. She said he constantly complained about coworkers over Teams, asked basic questions without trying to solve anything himself, expected lots of emotional support without returning it, and reacted badly to even simple boundaries.

What made the story odd right away was how he behaved after the friendship ended. She wrote that he started acting afraid of her at work, refusing to make eye contact, flinching when he saw her unexpectedly, shrinking away when they passed in person, and communicating only over Teams, even for tiny things. He also reportedly asked another coworker how to “get over his fear of another coworker,” even though, in her telling, she had never threatened him, yelled at him, or tried to get him in trouble. She said she mostly rolled her eyes internally at first, but after months of it, the behavior stopped feeling awkward and started feeling like an ongoing obstacle she could not quite address directly.

Then, nearly eight months later, the whole thing changed shape. In the update, she wrote that another female coworker, Jane, had gone through almost the exact same friendship pattern with the same man and had ended it in almost the exact same way. The two women only really started talking after a social event with other coworkers, where it came out that several of them had each had their own uncomfortable experiences with him. According to her update, once Jane and she finally compared notes, it became clear this was not one weird interpersonal fallout. It was a repeated pattern.

She said that after Jane and she started speaking at work, the man took it as a personal betrayal. He approached Jane and said he felt hurt that she had started talking to the other woman, then asked whether they could be friends again. Jane said no. Two days later, he approached the original poster and told her he had been afraid of her for a year because he thought she was trying to get him fired, but that he now realized they were professionals and wanted to know how to move forward. She said she told him she was not trying to get him fired and that she simply wanted him to interact with her “like a coworker.” That, she wrote, was when something flipped.

Instead of acting scared of her, he suddenly became overly familiar again. She wrote that he started sending her articles, trying to chit-chat over Teams, and even used the phrase “awesome sauce” three times in one day. At the exact same time, she said, he started behaving toward Jane the way he had previously behaved toward her: flinching when Jane walked by, refusing to greet her while greeting others by name, and asking the original poster to take over tasks that would mean crossing paths with Jane. He also started peppering the original poster with anxious little permission-seeking questions, like whether it was okay to ask her work questions, okay to ask her about education in their field, or okay to make jokes. She said this was exactly the same exhausting pattern that had made her end the friendship in the first place.

By then, she had started keeping supervisors updated. In the update, she wrote that another former coworker, Elizabeth, texted a group chat to say she had asked him to stop texting her and stop asking others about her too. Another coworker in the same chat said she was planning to tell her supervisor that he had made her uncomfortable. When she counted up what she knew by that point, she said the total had reached seven women he had either overwhelmed or made uncomfortable in one way or another. She then emailed her supervisor and department head explaining that Jane had gone through almost the same thing she had and that several other women had dealt with similar behavior. She said she worried he would simply fixate on someone else next, including younger part-time staff who might stay quiet.

That email turned out to be the tipping point. She wrote that management had already looped in the head of the organization before she even sent it, and that he was fired the next day. In one of the sharper details from the update, she quoted the organization head saying that in 30 years he had never seen an employee correction situation quite like this — one where the behavior was obnoxious, overwhelming, annoying, and affecting so many people, yet each individual action by itself did not technically cross the line into something obviously inappropriate. She admitted she felt a little guilty at first because she had told him she was not trying to get him fired, but she ultimately said the firing was the result of his own actions, not some vendetta from her. Mostly, she wrote, it was a relief.

What makes the story stick is that it is not about one dramatic offense. It is about a long pattern of behavior that stayed just deniable enough to survive until multiple women compared notes and management finally saw the whole shape of it at once. By the end of the update, the story was no longer about one awkward workplace friendship gone bad. It was about how many uncomfortable patterns only become visible when the people dealing with them finally start talking to each other.

Original Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/1pntfwj/my_coworker_is_making_our_friend_breakup_really/