My Friend (36F) and I (34F) Had A Falling Out Because I Asked Her To Clean Up After Herself at My Cottage

Holy crap this is long. It's probably not even that interesting either lmao.

I (34F) have a friend, Rebecca (36F), we have been friends since grade school. We weren’t friends during most of our teenage years but reconnected in our 20’s.

In 2019 my Dad was having trouble selling his cottage so I made a deal with him, if he let us use it (myself and my two best friends Rebecca and Missy) we would do certain repairs for him and fix it up. We all usually spend money renting cottages every year so everyone jumped at the chance. We split the work and the cost and had a great time!

In 2020, my father said we could use it again for 2020.Because of COVID my husband and I never stayed overnight or went indoors, so basically Rebecca and her family (and some of Rebecca’s friends who she brought up) and my other friend Missy and her husband got free use of the cottage and I would just hang out with them during the day.

We started having some problems with Rebecca and her hubby leaving the place somewhat of a mess. Nothing they did was the end of the world, but as I was the person cleaning everything and having to do all maintenance and such, it was getting frustrating so I mentioned a couple of things to her: I had to clean cigarette butts and soaking wet corn cobs out of the metal fireplace, and they were leaving plastic and (unburnable) garbage in the actual firepit instead of just putting things in the garbage, etc, etc, etc.

Whenever I mentioned these things to Rebecca in a “hey just so you know” kind of way, she’d just look away and not say a word. It was awkward. It made me anxious. I HATED having to say anything to them and ended up NOT commenting on a lot of stuff. There were other things I hadn’t even mentioned to them, the grossest being a giant bloody loogie one of them horked onto the bathroom door and left there. I had to clean it and I still gag thinking about it. They were throwing hot dogs and steak bones down the hill to the lake and Missy’s dogs were eating them and puking everywhere. Thankfully none choked on a bone. I didn’t want to be a nag, I just wanted to be able to come back to my cottage after they left and not have to clean stuff up. (Oh god and I forgot, their boys who are 9 and 11 weren’t allowed to pee in the cottage anymore cuz they would just piss all over the plywood floor, and instead of making sure their kids learned to pee into a toilet properly they were told to piss outside instead)

One weekend, they used the cottage and I didn’t do my typical check up afterwards and when I got to the cottage the following weekend they had left a big long fluorescent light on. Problem is this light is sketchy and old (we need to replace it) and I worry about fire because my dads house burned down twice, which slightly traumatized me so I texted her “hey just so you know you left the light on, it’s a bit of a fire hazard so please turn it off in the future”. After that she went dead silent from our FB group chat and since then she barely participated in it. It was extremely unlike her and my other two friends from the chat all noticed and asked wtf was going on. I could only guess that it was because she was pissed at me for asking her to do certain things at the cottage and found out afterwards that I was right, she was pissed about it. I found out later that her husband and her had decided that they were upset enough that they weren’t going to ever come back to the cottage.

Missy was going through some insanely personal shit in her life and her and I and our other friend Sarah ended up in another group chat together. It wasn’t done intentionally to exclude Rebecca- Rebecca wasn’t participating in our main group chat and Missy wasn’t comfortable telling Rebecca about what was going on anyways (especially since Rebecca is judgmental and Rebecca's husband reads all her FB chats and he has a big mouth and would have blabbed), thus the 2nd group chat was started by Missy. Missy needed our support, she was going through a super f*cked up time.

Rebecca eventually messages Missy and was like You guys have ghosted me, how could you, etc etc. Rebecca admits that she was “taking a break from the group” because she was pissed at me (and also says she had a medical scare and didn't want to talk to us) but then was mad when she realized no one was chatting in the group anymore and she figured we had our own chat started. We ended up talking and it did not go well. She was very defensive and angry, and I was pretty pissed at this point too. You ghosted me and are THIS pissed cuz I asked you to clean up after yourselves? What the heck? I know her and her husband are messy people and were both raised in dirty households, so I’ve made a lot of excuses for their cleanliness over the years because I know they come by it honestly but come on, you could just respect the rules of my cottage, I wasn’t asking that much. Nothing I asked was at all unreasonable and I was always careful to word it in a friendly, relaxed way because I didn’t want to start shit.

Her husband and her came to get their boat back from the cottage and then shortly afterwards he deleted me off his Facebook and all hell kind of broke loose between me and Rebecca. She was very cold and uncaring and well, I guess we aren’t friends anymore. A few weeks ago I tried to call her and talk to her to see if she would be interested in meeting in person to talk about things, but she ignored my call and then refused to meet up. I don’t know why I wanted to see her anyways, I guess I just couldn’t believe how cold she was being and wanted to see it in person, or at least have the opportunity to talk without her husband snooping. I don’t know if we could have fixed anything but I thought talking in person might at least give some closure.

If I could go back in time, I would have asked to meet with her once it became apparent that she was ignoring our chat. Maybe we could have talked it out. Otherwise, I’m not sure what I should have done differently? If I had never mentioned anything to her about cleaning up after themselves, I would have had another year of aggravation, cleaning up after them and it would have eventually ended up with them not being invited back. My husbands advice before this all happened was just to tell them we didn’t have the cottage in 2021, but I didn’t want to lie and they would have eventually found out that Missy and Sarah and other people were still coming up to the cottage anyways. Side note that my husband is not so secretly relieved because he dislikes Rebecca’s husband and tried to steer clear of them last year.

I don't know why I'm bothering to post this besides that I need to get it off my chest. I miss her.

TLDR: Best friend and I had a falling out after I asked them to clean up after themselves at the cottage. We aren’t friends anymore and I don’t think there’s any way to repair that, but I miss her and I wanted to make this post to see what other people thought of the situation and I guess just to get it off my chest.

Submitted April 02, 2021 at 11:07AM by TypicalFlourish https://ift.tt/3fIQi3L