I had a friend I met when I was young (both M). We shared a lot of similar interests and were somewhat close in school. When I moved away for uni, we kept in touch on occasion but things died down some. When I came back to visit, this friend and I had made plans to see each other. After a couple hours of hearing nothing, I didn't really know what was happening until I saw on social media that he went to go hangout with other people. I was hurt by this so we cut contact for awhile. Eventually, after I graduated from uni, we met back up and things instantly went back to how they were when we first met. Lots of hangouts and time were spent together and I thought we had somewhat met on equal ground again.
After awhile, without going into details, they breached my trust badly with a third-party. I felt completely heartbroken that someone I considered a close friend would do something like this to me. We had gone through some similar traumas growing up, and I unfortunately think that led me to believe we were much closer than we actually were. I confronted him about it, and was met with a lot of ambiguity as to why or how it happened which hurt even more that I couldn't get clarity.
Unfortunately, I tried to be gracious since we all make mistakes and tried to keep the friendship going but with stronger boundaries. Fast forward a year and once again he does something that bothers me. When I tried my best to explain why it hurt me, his response just made it clear as day that he saw nothing wrong with what he did and it was my fault for bringing it up to begin with.
I ended up cutting things off and am moving on now, but I have to be honest, this crap hurts badly. Knowing I sort of made the entire depth of our friendship up in my head kills me inside since I thought we were really like brothers. When I politely let him know I couldn't move forward with this friendship, I was left on read and never heard from him again.
How do you guys move on past hurt like this? It's like rationally I know I see now he never really was my friend, but it's so heartbreaking that I was sold this sort of illusion the whole time. He was very good with words, which is why I continuously forgave him, I swear I'm not as gullible as I sound in this post. I have good days now, but from time to time, he crosses my mind and the heartbreak feeling kind of comes back.