I’m part of a friend group with seven people total of four boys and three girls and recently two people in the group started dating. I’ll call them Ryan (20) and Chloe (22).
Ryan has always had a reputation for being kind of an asshole. He’s blunt, insensitive, and not really the gentleman type at all. There are also cheating rumors about him from past relationships, and most people see him as someone who likes attention more than commitment. He’s not ugly or anything, but the way he talks about people can make him come off genuinely horrible because he doesn’t think before speaking and honestly doesn’t care if what he says hurts someone.
Before he got with Chloe, he constantly talked badly about her. And I don’t mean light jokes or teasing. I mean genuinely awful comments. Back in February, both of them were literally dating or emotionally involved with completely different people. During Holy Week, Ryan was still openly talking badly about Chloe and saying she annoyed him, disgusted him, and got on his nerves. He also said he didn’t “see her that way” at all.
The weirdest part is that Chloe apparently saw him almost like a brother too at that point. Now suddenly they’ve been together for about three weeks and act completely obsessed with each other. The relationship was also hidden from the friend group at first. Everyone could tell something weird was happening because they suddenly started acting awkward and overly intense around each other, but every time someone asked if they were together, they denied it for over a week. Eventually everyone figured it out anyway because it became way too obvious.
What makes me uncomfortable is how fast and extreme everything became.They say they’re “taking things step by step,” but honestly their “steps” were kissing within the first week and then escalating even more by the third week. In my opinion, that’s not really taking things slow at all — it feels like they’re rushing into something based entirely on obsession and attraction.
Another thing that bothers me is that the relationship feels weirdly one-sided emotionally. Ryan is extremely “50/50” about everything and has openly said before that he doesn’t believe in spending money on dates unless he gets something out of it too He’s the type to think “if she doesn’t invite me first, why would I invite her?” That mentality already made people side-eye him before this relationship even started. Last week was Chloe’s birthday dinner, and honestly the whole situation made me feel even worse about everything.
She showed up almost three hours late to her own birthday because she had been with Ryan all day. Everyone had been waiting on her since 5 PM while the plans kept changing over and over again. First 5, then 6, then 6:30, then 7, and eventually 8 PM. Her best friend eventually left before she even arrived, and her parents were getting increasingly angry because she kept lying about where she was.
What made it even worse was that her phone died at some point, so everyone at the table kept asking where she was and nobody could contact her. The problem is that she had told completely different stories to different people. Her parents thought she was with me, some people thought she was on the way already, and meanwhile she had actually been with Ryan the whole time.
I also ended up arriving around 8 PM because the hour kept changing every single time. Ryan actually waited outside for around 20 minutes until I arrived because he wanted us to walk in together to make it seem less suspicious and cover up the fact that they had been together all day.
So when we walked in, her parents were looking at me weird, almost like they thought I had been helping her lie the whole day. Then when we finally got to the restaurant, Chloe still tried to pretend Ryan was arriving separately, except her dad had literally already seen them arrive together in the same car earlier. They were also tipsy already, which just made the whole situation even messier and more uncomfortable.
The entire dinner itself ended up being painfully awkward too. Because of all the tension and lying, the two-hour dinner basically felt like everyone was playing “impostor” the whole time, pretending nothing weird had happened while everyone clearly knew something was off.
And despite it literally being HER birthday dinner, Chloe was still the one giving HIM gifts. She wrote him a long emotional letter and gave him a matching bracelet with some yin-yang meaning behind it about him being “the bad” and her being “the good.” Meanwhile he didn’t even seem to put in the same level of effort for her. The part that’s really eating at me though is all the things he said before they got together.
Because now he acts obsessed with her, constantly says “I love you,” and acts like she’s the love of his life after previously talking about her like she was annoying and disgusting literally weeks earlier. And I genuinely don’t know if she knows everything he said behind her back.
Part of me feels like she deserves to know. But the problem is that Chloe is VERY boy-centered emotionally. She gets attached fast, bases a lot of her self-worth around relationships, and struggles being alone. I honestly don’t know how she would react if I told her everything Ryan has said about her. Part of me worries she’d ignore it completely because she’s too emotionally invested already, or worse, turn against me and think I’m trying to ruin her relationship out of jealousy or bitterness. I haven’t said anything yet because Ryan is technically my friend too, and I know exposing all of this would probably create drama in the entire group. But at the same time, I can’t stop thinking about how fake everything feels knowing the things he used to say about her literally weeks before calling her the love of his life.
I’m Korean so if it seems like bad at some words English is not my first language and I just know the basics so I got help from a translate in kakao