Should I apologize to my older friend or hold her feet to the fire for possibly grooming me and trying to gaslight me?
Is my much older friend/mentor gaslighting me and pretending to be the victim? Was she the one who groomed me?
I am on the spectrum, and have been diagnosed with OCD at the age of 15.
Ever since I was 5 years old, I (20M) have known this ethnically South Korean woman named Jennifer (now 35F). Just for full disclosure, I am a White American. She used to be my neighbor growing up, the cute girl next door, but now lives farther away from us. Jenny is totally non-neurodivergent and she's actually served in the USAF. Jennifer has always treated me like family. I have so many fond memories of her playing with me when I was little. She looks like a really adorable anime girl, and she’s got very beautiful, shoulder-length black hair and thick bangs. She looks totally feminine, but she’s actually a really tough tomboy, and she played basketball in high school and college. She also has this cute habit of snuggling near me and resting her chin on my head, because she’s a lot taller than me.
I also happen to intern at the same biomedical company she now works at. She's a former nurse who earned her doctorate. I will say that my love for her is what drove me to apply to this company.
This past July, for my 20th birthday, just as a favor for my parents, Jenny took me to a cottage for a few days. It was a roomy cottage, and it had a fully-equipped bathroom with a shower and everything so it was cozy. On one of the days on our cottage trip, we went hiking. It was an extremely hot and humid day, so Jennifer took her shirt off and left it at the cottage. She spent the entire hike (nearly 11 hours) shirtless, wearing nothing but a really low-cut, spaghetti strap sports bra and her basketball shorts. She didn’t put on any backpacks or bags at all, and I carried everything (she wasn't bossy about it though), so I made fun of her for being “a princess”. Early on in our hike, however, I made one quip about her tight shoulder blades and body. I knew that Jennifer has never taken sexual comments about her body very well, but I couldn’t help myself. As soon as I uttered these words, she kept her mouth shut. She also starting sweating so much that she was shiny, and I could see tears coming out of the corners of her eyes. When she saw me peeking at her breasts, she started crying openly. She said something that struck me when she told me "I'm your sister". I dropped everything and grabbed her shoulders and let her rest her chin on my head like she always does, and I kept apologizing over and over again. She quickly calmed down.
although Jennifer knew the mountains in the area really well, she got us lost after two hours of hiking. When she realized that she had no clue where we were, she started crying openly. Starting from then on, she never regained her composure. We spent the next several hours just wandering around aimlessly, and she kept crying, hyperventilating and sweating nonstop to the point where I lost much of my sexual interest in her. She also spent much of the time keeping her arms tightly crossed around her chest, as if she was terrified that I was going to touch her breasts or something. When it fell dark, we had to rely on my phone flashlight combined with her phone’s flashlight (I held both our phones because she couldn’t hold her phone steady enough as she was shaking too much). Every time I angled the lights away from her, she screamed and begged me to keep the light on her, and I thought she was being really selfish. When we got back to the cottage finally, Jennifer headed to the shower, but then she started bawling when she realized that she had to take her sports bra and shorts off and, well, be naked in the shower.
(I must also admit that during our disastrous hike, after I made the quip to Jenny about her shoulder blades (but before she caught me peeking at her breasts), I did yank her ponytail as a prank.)
Nowadays, Jenny is terrified of me just because I glanced at her and touched her hair and think she's cute.
TLDR; Should I apologize to my older friend and take care of her, or should I hold her feet to the fire because our cottage trip alone together was inappropriate? Imagine if the genders were reversed.
Posted Dec 1, 2025, 3:05 AM UTC