A man turned to the Reddit community for advice following a difficult situation with a longtime friend he once tried to help.
He explained in a post that years ago, when he was 22 and his friend was “23–24,” the friend came to stay with him with a simple plan: “get him a job where I worked and get him on his feet and we split the rent.”
The poster said his friend arrived with almost no money, so he stepped in to help. “Being the friend I am with low expectations of him at first helped him out a little,” he wrote, adding that he was working full-time while also driving for DoorDash and letting his friend tag along for company.
From the start, he set clear rules. “When he first came to live with me I told him 1. don’t lie to me, 2. don’t steal from me, 3. don’t do drugs in my apartment,” he shared. His friend agreed, and in the first week claimed he was applying for jobs and even said he had interviews.
But his stories soon stopped making sense. The poster came home expecting updates only to be told the interviews “all cancelled on him.” When the friend later claimed they had been rescheduled, the poster said, “I never heard [of] that but okay maybe it’s true,” noting he didn’t initially believe his childhood friend would lie.
As weeks passed, nothing improved. The friend slept in the living room, stayed up all night and slept all day, leaving the poster’s roommates increasingly frustrated. They accused him of “going through their food and beer like he owned the place,” and tensions in the apartment grew.
Trying to figure out what was happening, the poster reached out to his friend’s parents. “I was told he has been messing up bad and was begged not give up on him,” he recalled. Still wanting to help, he held out hope that something would change.
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But things took a turn when he walked in one night to find his laptop open with his friend’s Facebook page displayed. The friend had accidentally left it logged in. There, the poster discovered messages where his friend was “telling his friends back home that I wasn’t helping him at all and just talking bad about me.”
He also learned that the friend had broken one of the most important rules. “I had also found out he brought pills and weed with him and was smoking weed with one of my roommates when I was at work,” he explained. The roommates admitted they had been afraid to tell him.
At that point, the poster said his frustration reached its peak. “My frustration grew and I called his family members and told them I was done he needs to go back,” he wrote. Instead of support, he learned that his friend’s own family didn’t want him returning.
“They said he is a moocher and they have exhausted all their resources in helping him out,” he recalled, adding that they “didn’t want to let him stay with them anymore.”
Still, he knew the situation in his home couldn’t continue. “I woke him up on a Saturday and told him to pack his s— and that I bought him a bus ticket,” he wrote. He drove him to the bus station, dropped him off and left.
On the ride there, the friend still didn’t understand. “He couldn’t understand why I was sending him back,” the poster said, noting he tried to explain his frustrations but “he didn’t get it.” The two haven’t spoken much since, and he shared that his friend “doesn’t seem to have changed” in the six years since.
One Reddit commenter summed up what many felt. “You gave him a lifeline,” the user wrote, calling the poster “NTA.” They added, “You just stopped sacrificing [yourself] for someone who refused to help himself.”
