Have you ever been honest to a friend and lost the friendship because of it?

Oh yeah.

My best buddy in high school. He was dating my ex-girlfiends best friend. His dad owned a firefighting company and after high school he went off to fight fires in eastern Oregon for the summer.

I was at a party one night and caught his girlfriend fucking another dude in the basement while he was off fighting forest fires. And not just another dude, but one of our good friends brother.

I told him and he didn’t believe me. We went from him having a key to my apartment to not talking to me for a decade. And that was just once at a bbq at my sisters house. I pretty much just nodded and bailed.

He later learned that I had told the truth but we never recovered. Your loss Shawn.

Yes. My bestfriend was cheating a week before the wedding. Her fiance was also very dear to me. He asked me point blank, so…I told him the truth.
That ended both relationships, they got married and divorced.

@johnpowell -Sounds like a kill the messenger thing.Did he ever even try to reconcile?

@KNOWITALL – Apparently, the truth is not popular. lol

@lucillelucillelucille :: Never even tried to fix the relationship even when he learned I was telling the truth.

And at that point I really had no interest in it even if he had tried.

@lucillelucillelucille Indeed. I’m a very consistent truth teller and it’s not easy. In my career, brutal honesty about tech and personnel are rewarded, but in real life, most prefer their version of reality over facts.

No @KNOWITALL. Without proof, documentation, sources, you are not a “consistent truth teller” except in your opinion.

Yes. She didn’t speak to me for two years. We never spoke of the matter again. I was right.

In a second case I told my friend to stop seeing someone when she told me he wanted to get married. I knew there was something really wrong with that guy. After her horrible ordeal of that marriage, scandal, divorce, and lawsuit (in which she prevailed), she wanted to apologize but I told her it didn’t matter other than I didn’t want her to be hurt. That man had ‘disaster’ written all over him. We’re all good now…that was probably 25 years ago.

NO, I’ve never lost a friend due to my honesty. Most of my friends say that they love me because they don’t have to worry about what I’m thinking….they KNOW exactly how I feel at any given moment!!!

@Sagacious…thank you for sharing.

@Dutchess I was with her so I was an eyewitness.

Here I still post links and sources, more often than most.

Yes, but I find it’s usually temporary. I don’t like to be dishonest, including for the sake of being liked or saving friendships, if I really think the truth needs to be said I will say it. Not everyone is ready to hear it, so sometimes friendships end at that point (but if there’s a divergence in values it’s going to cause a strain whether you voice it or not… I think?)

Most of the time it seems once the person has worked through whatever they’re going through, they tend to circle back around and appreciate my honesty on the matter. Some have even apologized for responding poorly to it in the first place. I think delivery matters -you have to share the truth out of love and integrity, not out of some need to be right.

Yes, I had to hurt him with the truth, rather than comfort him with a lie. It did bother me that the friendship died, but maybe it was a friendship that i wasn’t meant to have, things happen for a reason…

Although the truth may hurt, it hurts less than a lie!!!