Woman says her childhood best friend demanded she leave her fiancé — and the fallout only got stranger once her mom started believing the wrong story

A Reddit user says the friendship that had shaped most of her life finally broke when her best friend stopped pretending her concern was about love and started making it obvious it was about envy. In the original post, the 21-year-old woman said she and her childhood friend Mary had been raised almost like sisters, but distance after university made her realize how controlling Mary had always been. She wrote that when she got engaged to her now-fiancé during a dream vacation, Mary immediately downplayed the proposal and later demanded she break up with him. According to the post, Mary’s reasoning had little to do with the relationship itself and a lot to do with comparison, including complaints that the fiancé made more money than her own boyfriend and could offer things she felt she did not have.

What pushed the story into a bigger mess was that cutting Mary off did not end the drama. The woman wrote that after she told Mary to leave and later sent a message ending contact, mutual friends and even some family members started reaching out to say she was being harsh. She said it became clear Mary had already been working the phones, painting herself as the injured party and framing the breakup like a betrayal rather than the end of a friendship she had been quietly poisoning for years.

The first update showed just how ugly that campaign had gotten. When the Reddit user visited her parents, she learned Mary had told them the fiancé was cheating on her. The woman said her father eventually believed her side, but her mother was still wavering and seemed more ready to accept Mary’s version than her own daughter’s. She also said this was not the first sign that Mary knew how to look harmless in front of adults while acting very differently behind the scenes.

Then the story widened again. In later updates, the woman wrote that her father admitted her mother had long been more entangled with Mary and Mary’s family than she ever fully understood, and that her mother had even contacted her future mother-in-law to complain about the fiancé “changing” her. She also said Mary’s own boyfriend ended things after learning she was treating him like a placeholder while openly obsessing over the Reddit poster’s fiancé. By that point, the woman said Mary had also started sending explicit videos to the fiancé, which made the whole thing stop looking like jealousy and start looking obsessive.

By the final update, the best friend relationship was done, Mary’s boyfriend had left, and the woman’s mother had finally begun apologizing after more of the truth came out. Even then, the Reddit user did not sound totally settled. She wrote that the whole mess left her questioning not only Mary, but her mother, her wider family, and how many people had quietly seen the dynamic for years without stepping in. That is part of what gives the story its sting. It starts as one friend getting weird about an engagement and ends with a young woman realizing the problem may have been woven through her life much longer than she thought.

The BORU thread is here.

What do you think — was the friendship already over the second Mary told her to leave the fiancé, or was the real damage in how many other people seemed willing to help Mary sell the lie afterward?