14 People Who Discovered the Dark Side of Their Friends

Friends are the family we choose, and we trust them with our joys and deepest secrets, believing we truly know them. But sometimes, even those we think we know best can have a hidden side.

• I had two people who I thought were really good friends. One day, I was hanging out with one of them, and we were about to go out, so she was fixing her makeup. Being too busy to text our other friend about our plans, she asked me to do it.
  While texting, I accidentally scrolled up into their previous messages and saw them talking absolute trash about me. They were making fun of things I had said, sharing my pictures and mocking them, and just all sorts of mean-spirited stuff. I never brought it up.
  Thankfully, we later had a falling out, and I don’t associate with them anymore. © margaret0619 / Reddit

• “I had a friend whom I had known quite closely for years. She claimed to have a wide range of ailments, from Celiac disease to autism. I went out of my way to accommodate her needs, ensuring there was no gluten in her food, taking her to places that wouldn’t overwhelm her senses, and being understanding if she wanted to go home early or needed space. I was also a shoulder to cry on when she struggled with infertility due to her PCOS (or so she claimed), and I was patient with her ADHD.
  It turns out she was faking it all. To this day, I’m not sure why she would do this, but I suspect it was a form of attention-seeking and possibly a sign of narcissism.” CopperHead49 / Reddit

• “I found out that my friend kept his boogers in a jar and ate them as a secret addiction. It freaked me out, so I stopped hanging around him.” skinnnns / Reddit

• “I worked at a coffee shop with a woman who was considerably older than myself. She’s the most lovely, kind-hearted, and friendly person I’ve met, and she was sort of a motherly figure to me. I don’t know how this came up in conversation, but one day she told me she cheats on her husband with her ex-husband every chance she gets. I just don’t know how to feel about that.” Legendairybrew / Reddit

• I studied with Lisa for about six years, and over time, we became quite close. She often talked about wanting a baby with her partner, and after years of trying, she finally shared the exciting news that she was expecting. Sadly, she later told me she had a miscarriage at five months. A few weeks later, I ran into an old friend who also knew Lisa from our course. When I mentioned Lisa’s pregnancy and loss, my friend’s face went pale. She then said, “Are you serious? Lisa can’t have kids; she had a hysterectomy years ago.” I was completely stunned. Lisa and I had shared so much, and she’d even shown me ultrasound pictures. It felt like everything I thought I knew about her had been a lie, and I couldn’t understand why she would make up something so serious.

• “My best friend of 17 years became extremely jealous of my healthy romantic relationship and revealed herself to be narcissistic. She used my grandpa’s death as an excuse to reach out and accuse me of being a horrible person. She’s no longer in my life.” BackgroundChard1 / Reddit

• “A colleague I’d been friendly with for 5+ years faked having cancer. (Shaved head, gaunt makeup, even a cane.) I’d always bring her meals, wear the solidarity ribbon, and offer to cover for her if she wasn’t feeling well and needed to go home. Finally one of the other faculty members informed me it was all a rouse. They all knew and had stopped feeding into it years ago, but whenever they confronted her about it, she denied it.” ligamentary / Reddit

• “I had a friend who always talked about their best friend—the conversations they had, the things they did together. It turned out my friend’s ‘best friend’ was a split personality. My friend was schizophrenic and wasn’t diagnosed until many years later.” PM_ME_THEM_CURVES / Reddit

• After an eight-year friendship, I discovered that this person was only friends with me because she had few friends and wanted access to my work connections. cawfytawk / Reddit

• “A former friend admitted to me that she had faked a pregnancy to stay with a wealthy guy she was seeing. Her plan was for her family to squeeze out some, if not a lot, of money from him before dumping him.” Advanced_Hat_3548 / Reddit

• “I recently found out from a friend that another friend has been spying on their ex for several years. They knew all the ex’s passwords and the system for choosing passwords and had been reading all emails and checking bank transactions. They have several children together, but this person has been systematically malicious. The person doing it has been told to stop, and the other was told to change their passwords.” Wheres_that_to / Reddit

• “My ’best friend’ of 20 years had a secret obsession with my ex throughout our marriage. I recently found out that they even had an affair.” eat_sleep_p**_p** / Reddit

• When my “best friend” died, I discovered that I had never really known her at all. She was a pathological liar. She told me she was born in New Zealand and moved to the U.S. when she was two, but she was born and raised in New Jersey. She also claimed her middle name was different from the one listed in her obituary.
  The craziest lie was that she had a younger sister who was hit by a car and died as a toddler. She had a tattoo of roses that she insisted was for her sister and would fall apart crying every November on what she said was her sister’s date of death. It turned out that sister never existed. mrsmoffbricks / Reddit

• “Not really a very dark secret. But I had a friend that had many friends outside of school. People would always call him and ask him to hang out every day. Turns out he had an app that would fake-call you with the names you put in. He would have actual conversations on the phone (with no one on the other side, obviously). He felt that having no friends or girlfriends outside of school was embarrassing.” KingAltay / Reddit

Many families have secrets that stay hidden for years, but the truth eventually comes out. With the rise of tracing family histories, more secrets are being uncovered. Check this out.