AIO I was very mad at my online best friend for getting a boyfriend

👥 friendship

This happened about a year ago now, but I still wonder if I handled the situation well or overreacted. This requires a lot of context so get ready lol. I met this online friend about 5 years ago. When we first started talking, she just needed someone to talk to, she didn't want a friend, more like a free therapist, and I wanted to help her the best that I could. She didn't really have any friends and was made fun of a lot, so after a while of helping her out and talking to her, I ended up being her only friend. Through the years I helped her through many bad situations, friendships, relationships, and always took her side. Because of all of this, we went from being best friends to actually being very attatched to eachother, and if I'm being honest it wasn't the most healthy attatchment, because we sort of needed eachother to keep going. I am from the US and she lives in europe. One night I was talking with a good friend of mine while playing some games together, and I found myself going on a rant about how much I loved my online friend and wanted to be with her. My friend I was playing with told me she sounds wonderful and that I should confess my feelings to her. With a little help from him on how to word it, I sent her an emotional text confessing my feelings to her. She explained to me that she doesn't want an online relationship, but that she also really loves me and has had a crush on me for a long time. Because of this, we both made a promise to each other that we wouldn't date anybody else until I could save up enough money to move to her country, and we promised to wait for eachother as long as it took. Now, I realize this is very unrealistic, it sounds like something out of a corny romance novel, but I genuinely believed it at the time. Because of these promises we made to eachother, I spent months picking up extra hours at work to save more money, spending hours and hours studying and learning her language, looking at houses and figuring out budgeting, memorizing laws and rules of the country, etc. I was very serious about this, and put in lots of work to make our goal a reality. While doing all of this, she told me a lot about another guy that she would hang out with. She told me they were just friends, so of course I had no problem with them hanging out, and I always asked her about what they did and if she had fun, etc. However, one of the days she was explaining with him sounded a lot like a date. I didn't want to come off as suspicious of her or anything because I trust her, so I just asked her if she "like liked" him, she promised me that she had no interest in him at all and he just offered to buy her some food because she didn't have any money at the time. Again, I trusted her, so I believed her. After about 5 months of my studying, saving, etc, she was telling me about this guy, and the way she described him was like she was going crazy over him, it almost seemed like she forgot that she was telling me this, like she meant to text it to another friend or something. I asked her again, very politely, if she actually likes this guy. She tried to lie about it again at first but eventually I got her to admit it, and not only that she likes this guy and wants to be with him, but that she never even wanted to wait for me in the first place, she lied to me because she didn't want to "hurt my feelings". I told her about how hard I was working to save and about how I was learning her language, and through all that effort she never told me that she didn't actually want to wait. I got very upset at this fact and I told her I didn't want to speak with her for a while and that I needed a break, because I just wasted 5 months working incredibly hard for this dream that was never even real, and I trusted her with all my heart for 5 years and she just broke 5 years of trust. I brought up everything that I did for her through the years, which I know I shouldn't have done, but I was angry and I felt like she didn't understand just how much I had genuinely sacrificed for her and her happiness. She was very mad that I was mad at her, and for bringing up past things, and she ended up ghosting me for a few weeks. We still talk to this day and we got over this incident, but I still wonder if I was overreacting?

Posted Apr 28, 2026, 7:04 PM UTC

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