Woman says her fiancé’s best friend kept tormenting her until she had two breakdowns — and the whole friendship circle finally collapsed once her fiancé chose her, quit the band, and the bully tried to paint her as an abuser

A woman on Reddit said the whole thing started with comments that were just small enough to be deniable and just targeted enough to hurt. She wrote that her fiancé was a recovering people-pleaser with a huge heart, and one of his closest friends had slowly turned her into his favorite target. According to her post, this friend was the kind of person who could read a room, figure out exactly who would be most affected by being picked at, and then keep needling that person until they cracked. She said the behavior escalated from rude comments into weirdly elaborate cruelty, including making up lies about things she had supposedly said and once calling her in front of mutual friends just to yell, “you’re a bad friend!” and hang up.

She tried to tolerate it at first, but said it started hitting specific childhood trauma hard enough that she eventually had a full breakdown and told her fiancé how badly the friend’s behavior was affecting her. The first time, her fiancé told her he would talk to the friend, and later claimed the friend was sorry and that he would keep an eye out for more comments. But after a second breakdown a few weeks later, he admitted the friend had never really apologized at all — he had only said he was sorry she was “too sensitive” to understand his humor. That was the point where she decided she wanted zero contact with him, even if it meant missing events and parties she would otherwise love to attend.

What made it worse was the fiancé’s response. She wrote that he agreed the friend’s behavior was intentional and cruel, but still kept asking whether this meant he had to quit the project they worked on together — which later turned out to be a band they had been part of for over a decade. She said she never directly told him he had to walk away, but it deeply hurt that watching her have physical stress reactions was not enough to make him want to cut the friend off on his own. In her words, the issue was not confrontation. It was whether he was actually willing to stand in her corner. By that point, the friend was also about to marry her best friend, and both of them were supposed to be in the wedding, which made the whole thing feel inescapable.

Then, about a month later, things finally shifted. In the first update, she said she and her fiancé spent weeks talking through what had happened and how badly he had mishandled it. She wrote that he took real accountability, and that after a lot of discussion they decided he would send his friend a firm but not hostile message laying out the behaviors, explaining how much they had hurt her, and asking for basic respect. She said the first draft he wrote was so spot-on that it immediately changed the dynamic between them from “you vs. me” into “us vs. the problem.” But the friend’s reaction was explosive. According to her, he denied the events happened the way she described, insulted the fiancé, demanded a private meeting with a mediator, and even threatened twice to go to the fiancé’s parents about the situation, to the point that they had to warn the parents not to answer the door if he showed up.

At the same time, her own best friend chose the bully’s side. She wrote that after the initial confrontation, both she and her fiancé received a giant message from the other couple backing up the bully and telling a version of events so far from reality that she and her fiancé kept cycling between crying, stunned silence, and laughing at the absurdity. She had originally hoped her friend was just manipulated or too passive to push back. By the update, she said she no longer believed that. In her words, they were “a perfect match,” and she was relieved to have learned her friend’s true character before wasting $800 on a hotel for their wedding.

The fiancé also made a real sacrifice. In the same update, she said he stepped down from the shared project — the band — and walked away from something that meant “the universe” to him. She was clear that it was extremely painful for both of them and that she was trying to give him room to mourn that loss, because he had not only lost a friend but an entire long-term creative part of his life. Still, to her, the important thing was that when it finally came down to it, he chose her. They cut off both former friends completely and went no-contact.

Then came the final ugly twist. In a later update, she said the ex-friend sent her fiancé an “unhinged” message saying he believed the fiancé was in an abusive relationship and should leave her “for his own happiness.” He claimed he had evidence, said he had wanted to say all of this in person from the beginning, and even framed the message as concern that she might make things “even worse” if she saw it. She wrote that the real motive became obvious by the end of the message: he said he hoped the fiancé would leave her so he could apologize for breaking up the band and repair the friendship. At that point, she said any lingering doubt vanished. This was not just a mean or immature person. It was someone actively trying to isolate her by painting her as the abuser.

She also added several examples from the past year that made more sense in hindsight. In one, they were all playing the game Lethal Company together, and she kept dying almost immediately every time she split off from the group. Later, after she mentioned it to her fiancé, he realized the friend had likely been going AFK multiple times, which lined up with her in-game deaths and made it look like he had probably been sabotaging her while mocking her for having a “skill issue.” In another, he made a huge deal out of a mutual friend’s “big secret,” insisted she could not hear it before her fiancé did, built it up like some dramatic reveal, and then delivered the absurdly trivial news that the mutual friend was dating someone. To her, the pattern was obvious by then: he liked manipulating situations, making her feel small, and then acting like she was overreacting.

By the end of the update trail, the friendships were over, the wedding they were all supposed to share had effectively split the whole group in two, and the band was gone. But she wrote that she and her fiancé were actually stronger because of it. What started as one friend quietly bullying the “right” target ended with the fiancé finally seeing the whole pattern clearly, stepping away from the band, cutting off the friend, and refusing to let anyone reframe his partner as the problem just because the bully lost his emotional punching bag.

Original Reddit thread: My fiancé’s best friend is making my life a living hell (New Update)