AITAH for dropping a friendship that was draining?
This happened about a year ago but it still weights on me a bit.
At my university I have been a peer mentor for about 3 years. I am paired with a few first year students and help them feel welcomed to campus and find their community during their first year of university. I love the program and have made some of my best friends through it. However, I had one experience with a mentee that was not my best.
In 2024 fall I was paired with three mentees. One of them was super enthusiastic about the program. She was always interested in meeting up with me, getting advice and suggestions from me about campus life, and participated in a lot of the events that the mentorship team put on. She was honestly the best mentee that I had ever had in the program because of how willing and excited she was about becoming part of the community and learning from/with me. Over the course of the program, which was about 4 months, she continued to be engaged and interested in all the events and always had something to talk about when we would meet up for our mentorship meetings.
Eventually though it started to feel like she was pushing my boundaries. I try to make it clear to my mentees that I am not their “best friend” but am a mentor who will be there for them for whatever they need. Of course I genuinely care about them, but it is a different relationship than I have with friends, especially because there is some sense of a power dynamic just because of the nature of the program. It started to feel like she was beginning to see me as more of a friend figure than I was comfortable with, and also shared some really deep trauma with me that I was not prepared for. I still supported her and let her use me as a sounding board, but it was a bit crazy. At the time I thought I could kind of brush it off and move forward as a mentor, but it only got weirder from there.
At the end of the program (in December because that year it was a one semester program instead of a whole year program), we had a wrap up and awards party where mentors and mentees could nominate someone for a “best of” award. I had nominated her for an award that was along the lines of “most engaged mentee” and she won. While going up to the stage, she INSISTED that I go with her and when I said no she practically dragged me up there, holding my hand the whole time, and it was super awkward for me. I didn’t really say anything because I just wanted to get it over with and not cause a scene or anything, but I was definitely not happy about it.
After that I thought that we would kind of go our separate ways, taking the winter break as a time away to subtly end out mentorship relationship. I was okay with her reaching out to me in the future if she had any questions or needed advice, but I didn’t want to become good friends with her. She was a nice enough person, but because I am more introverted and she super extroverted, and because of the few strange instances we had, she just was not the type of person I could see myself becoming good friends with.
Unfortunately, the ending of the program did not do what I had hoped. Over the winter break she was almost constantly messaging me. We had shared our Instagrams with each other and she would always be commenting on what I would post on my story and asking for more information. I think she was genuinely curious and just wanted to know more about me, but I felt like I couldn’t escape her. Her messages would also be paragraphs long, with her also explaining things that I hadn’t even asked her. I replied with short answers and after waiting a few days, hoping that she would get the hint that I was not interested in messaging so much, but she definitely did not get the hint.
She would also start her messages out with thanking me for how good of a mentor I was to her. She said things like “you are the only reason that I passed all my classes last semester,” and “I am so glad we met, I could not imagine what my semester would have been like if you were not there to help me.” Although it is nice that she was happy we had met, it was just too much praise for me and it felt like she was putting me on a pedestal that I did not want to be on. I did help her throughout the semester, but not to the extent that she was thanking me for.
After this going on for a few weeks, I finally decided enough was enough and sent her a kindly worded message about how I felt she was placing me on a pedestal, and that if she wanted to be able to be okay friends in the future she would have to stop that because it was too much for me. She apologized but said she “didn’t realize that she was doing that.” I thought that was strange given the sheer amount of times she would tell me, but I was just glad that she said she would try to stop.
When the new semester started, she was not messaging me as much, which felt nice. But after the first week or so, she started texting me about getting together to catch up because she “missed me so much” and wanted to talk about how out winter breaks had been. I was genuinely pretty busy so I said as much and she said that was okay and we would find time eventually. This went on for around a month more, with her messaging me about being to hang out and me saying I couldn’t. She wasn’t getting the hint that I didn’t want to catch up with her.
Eventually I got to the point where I wanted something to change, but I didn’t want to be mean about it. So I talked to the organizer of the mentorship program about it (should have done so much earlier but oh well) and she said that if I didn’t want to be super upfront about it and risk hurting her feelings that I could ghost her more fully that I had been and hope that she would actually get the hint.
She did not. After feeling kind of helpless and like I would be evading her forever unless I told her the truth, I finally drafted a text about how I just did not see us being friends and that, although we had been good mentee/mentor, a friendship with her just did not interest me. I really did not want it to be too harsh, but I don’t think she would have actually understood unless I said it bluntly.
She did not take it super well, as was expected, and wanted to know what had “gone wrong.” I tried to explain it the best I could but she seemed to just not be able to understand why I didn’t want to be friends with her so eventually I just told her that was how I felt and I was sorry it didn’t work out but ending whatever friendship she had been trying to form was the best for both of us. I told her that I would still hang out with her at mentorship events (because she wanted to be a mentor the next year) but that I didn’t want to hang out and do things as friends.
I actually thought that would be the end of it, but she went behind my back and asked one of my best friends if “something had happened to me” because I was “acting out of character and broke off the friendship out of nowhere” and that I “hated her.” My friend cam to me and told me what she had said. I had not really told anyone what I was doing because I didn’t want to cause any drama or make it a big deal so I hadn’t told me friend. The fact that she thought I hated her after writing my message to be as kind a blow as I could was a bit shocking to me. It just kind of escalated from that point to where I messaged her back and told her that I didn’t hate her and that even if she couldn’t understand why I said what I said, it was the best thing I could do. She just left me on read after that, which I can’t blame her for.
Fast forward to today and she seems to pretend that I do not exist. I knew that she would not take it super well, heck who would, but I didn’t think that she would take it so to heart and actively avoid interacting with me completely.
I feel really bad that I made her feel like I hated her, but I genuinely don’t know what else I could have done to explain that I didn’t want to be friends. I don’t regret what I did, but I still feel like a bad person for it.
One of my friends (the one my mentee went behind my back to ask) had a similar experience because they had kind of became friends through me when we were mentee and mentor, and she agrees with me that she was tiring and eventually also ended the friendship, but I can’t help but feel like we were in the wrong some how.
Am I the asshole?
