How to Effectively Lose All Your Friends and Destroy Your Relationships

A warning from the perspective of a former scumbag that has succeeded in trashing and crippling his past relationships

Just last week, I almost lost the love of my life to a stupid mistake.

In high school, I managed to get my entire friend group to hate me and never talk to me again.

Throughout my life, I seem to have unintentionally put myself on thin ice with, well, quite a number of my relationships.

Honestly, nowadays I’d like to think I’m a very good and honest person who is stoically tackling all his insecurities and learning from his mistakes but that’s not what you’re here for are you?

You came here because you wanted to know exactly how to set your relationships aflame and transform them into dust. Now, what better way to do this than by teaching you exactly what I did in my past that has decimated the quality of several of my relationships and has effectively terminated my ties with those that I cared about.

I have since learned valuable lessons from my many mistakes in getting people to dislike me, so that’s exactly why I’m going to share with you what you should do if you’re trying to tranquilize your relationships (or avoid that for that matter). I’m sure you’d rather not resort to the masochistic option.

Talk mad sh*t about other people

In high school, I had a best friend who I honestly was very jealous of.

What I did was resort to constantly talking crap behind his back and telling other people about how bad of a person this guy was. I mean I wouldn’t let up and I was brutally honest with how I felt about him..to other people.

To him, well, I did say he was my “best friend” right? I guess I held the public illusion of that and convinced myself to stupidly deflect my insecurities by talking badly about him to other people in our group of friends.

A recipe for disaster.

I mean what can I expect? If I talk badly about someone who is supposedly my best friend, how do you think my other friends felt about what I might be saying about them? They ended up telling him about what I was saying and that was the end of that. Had to deal with quite a nasty confrontation that immediately ruptured the relationships I had with my other friends.

Really what you say behind other people’s backs says more about you than about them.

I guess I should have learned sooner to accept people for who they are and instead find ways to praise their good qualities than focus on my perceptually fabricated bad qualities about them.

Deflect your own insecurities on other people by putting them down when you're angry

Several times in past arguments and debates, I’ve unintentionally bludgeoned down egos and personally attacked other people amid anger and desperation to convince them that I’m right and their wrong and that their past mistakes should excuse my current mistakes.

What a brilliant way to deal with conflict right? Deflect your insecurities and deny ownership of your mistakes by manipulating the other party to feel crap about themselves.

This, my friends, is exactly how you get someone to despise you. It most likely makes them feel like you either don’t care about how they feel or that you are just another toxic personality that they shouldn’t associate themselves with.

Never put someone down, ever, unless you want to intentionally inflate their anxiety and insecurities to heightened degrees in due part to your insolence and mindless attitude. It’s always the better option to lift them up — something I still need to work on.

Have intimate relations with multiple people in the same friend group

My horny high school self apparently didn’t care about whose feelings he’d hurt.

I made the mistake of having a relationship and pursuing multiple people in my primary group of friends — at separate times of course but still did it nonetheless.

One of them I secretly dated for several months then I broke it off and later decided to make moves toward her cousin (yes, you read that right) who I knew had a crush on me and was unaware of the prior relationship I had with her relative. On top of that, I’ve also spent a good chunk of my time flirting with another girl in that group. This is peak idiocracy because I knew all 3 of these women were best friends and hung out almost every single day.

Needless to say, they all found out about my separate pursuits. This, obviously, made them all hate me as it probably made them feel like I didn’t think any of them mattered. As if all I saw them as were objects with no personal concept of what boundaries are.

My advice to you, set and recognize boundaries. Treat people like people. And be empathetic with every action you take. Everything you do in some way or another will affect someone else.

Keep secrets and hide things from those you care about

The other week, a secret that I was intentionally hiding from my significant other surfaced and almost destroyed my entire relationship. Not because of what it was I was hiding. But because I felt the need to hide it in the first place.

That really did a number on her trust for me and really hurt her because if there is anybody in the world that I should be able to talk to and be open about these things with, it should be her.

Needless to say, just be open with those you care about. What you’re hiding probably isn’t as bad as you make it out to be in your head. It’s better to come completely clean rather than have them find out themselves. In truth, they’d probably respect you a lot more for doing so.

Hiding only makes you out to be an all-around sketchy individual in their eyes. Hiding eliminates the foundations of trust.

Be ungrateful for what you have and focus on what you’re missing out on

I’ve ended past relationships because of what I felt was missing just to leave the relationship and miss what I used to have.

If you always turn your inner eye towards what you don’t have and can’t do, then how will you ever be able to appreciate what you do have and what you have gained because of this relationship or friendship.

Placing my focus elsewhere made other people feel that I was distant. It made them feel like I wasn’t present with them and providing them with the attention they need and deserve.

The paradox is if you always focus on what you don’t have you’ll never be able to find happiness with what you do have and what you do end up getting. It’ll be a constant and infinite chase.

Focus on the bad things and you’ll get bad reactions. Focus on the good things and happiness for both parties will thrive.

Bottle up your emotions and don’t speak openly about how you’re ever feeling

I am a master of bottling up my feelings, up until my emotions overflow, spill out, and make a huge mess all at once. Bottling up your emotions is a recipe for emotional outbursts and tantrums. There is a very subtle difference between this and philosophical Stoicism — this is denial whereas stoicism is a practical way to deal with life’s obstacles.

You need to communicate your emotions to other people and make them feel important in your life right away. If you don’t, well they’ll be wondering what they did wrong when you decide to randomly have an emotional breakdown over McDonald’s not giving you the side of ranch you asked for (true story).

It’s best to tackle the root of your emotions when you still have the chance. Communication is key to every relationship and if you always hide how you truly feel about something, they’ll likely think you’re either emotionless or a complete mystery that is impossible to uncover.

I’ve always had a hard time showing and expressing my emotions and my relationships have suffered because of it. It made it seem like I didn’t care. My mother even accused me of not loving her simply because of my inability to do so.

Communication is perhaps the most important sign to someone that you do care, so you might as well do it and have the courage to share and be open.

Say you’ll do something and intentionally try to not do it

In high school, I promised one of my friends that I’d go to prom with her if neither of us had dates by the time the fated day came around. She took that as if I was going to ask her to prom regardless.

Thing was, I said that and intentionally tried to avoid doing that by literally trying to get dates with 3 other girls before actually asking her. It made her feel like she wasn’t good enough and it made the other girls I was pursuing reject me because they thought I was simply an asshole for getting her hopes up.

I did end up going with my friend, but this time she went with me thinking that I was a complete scumbag and that she simply was the last resort.

Don’t say you’ll do something unless you intend on and want to do it.

Otherwise, you’ll just be setting up other people’s expectations just to ultimately disappoint them and deem you as someone who lacks integrity and is untrue to their words.

Final Thoughts

Now I hope that all of you know exactly what it takes to lose all your friends, alienate people, and crush your relationships.

I’ve learned a lot from these experiences myself and I truly believe that I have fostered into a much better human being because of my realization of my fatal flaws and their effect on other people.

I only hope that you get nearly as much out of it as I did. Sometimes to learn how to maintain strong relationships, you have to learn how to destroy them first.