Chicken Caesar salad wrap with Coke Zero 

I (22M) recently purchased a house in mid-July. I had started looking for a house back in April, and around that time I asked one of my longtime friends, Joe (22M), if he would be interested in moving in with me. I’ve known Joe since I was 11, so we’ve been friends for a long time and I would say we’re pretty close.

Fast forward to the end of June. I told Joe that I was officially under contract on a house and would be closing in July. I asked him again if he was still interested in moving in with me, and he said yes.

At first, we agreed that he would move in on August 1st. I started putting together a lease agreement for him, but when I asked him about signing it, he told me he couldn’t move in during August because he needed to buy a new car. His current car was basically on its last leg. I understood, so we agreed that once he got his new car, he would move in. At that point, we were aiming for September 1st.

September 1st came and went, and he ended up getting his new car on September 4th. After that, I asked him when he was thinking about moving in, and he told me October 1st.

Throughout all of this, I had been keeping him updated about everything since April. I told him about the house search, the rent, how we would split utilities, and basically all of the details about living together. Every time we talked about it, he seemed completely on board.

On Friday, September 18th, I finally finished writing the lease and sent it to him to see what he thought. I had put a lot of time and effort into it. I work for a real estate company doing accounting, and I even had one of the owners, who is a real estate lawyer, look over the lease and help me make sure everything was written correctly.  
Joe didn’t respond, so on Tuesday, September 22nd, I texted him asking if he had read it.  He responded, “Yes.”  That was literally all he said.

So I asked him what he thought, if everything looked good, and if he had any questions. His response was  just, “Looks good.”  I asked if he could sign the lease and get it back to me by Friday.  He never responded.

Then on Thursday, September 24th, at around 4:30 PM, Joe randomly texted me asking if I wanted to hang out. I said sure, and he came over to my house carrying a box of pastries.  At first, I thought he was just doing something nice because whenever we hang out, I’m usually the one providing snacks and drinks.  
We started talking, and eventually I brought up the lease.  That’s when he told me he wasn’t going to move in.

I asked him why, and he told me that he had decided he wanted to move in with his girlfriend instead. They’ve been dating for about four months.  He told me that he and his girlfriend had been talking about moving in together for the last couple of weeks and had decided they wanted to get a place together. I don’t remember exactly what I said because I was pretty caught off guard, but I basically told him that was great and asked when they were planning on moving in together.  He said probably sometime in October and that they had already been looking at places.

I’m not mad that he wants to live with his girlfriend. If that’s what he wants to do, that’s completely fine. What makes me mad is that they had been discussing this for weeks while I was still under the impression that he was moving into my house.  During that same time, I was finishing the lease, sending it to him, asking for his opinion, and waiting for him to sign it. Even when I sent him the lease, he never once said, “Hey, just so you know, I’m thinking about moving in with my girlfriend instead.”  He just told me the lease “looks good.”  I feel like he led me on instead of just being upfront with me.

If he had told me a few weeks earlier when they were looking, I would still have been annoyed, but at least I could have started looking for another roommate. Now school has already started, most people already have housing figured out, and I’m in this weird position where finding someone is going to be a lot harder.

I can afford the mortgage on my own, so I’m not going to lose the house or anything like that. That isn’t really the issue. I was just expecting to have someone living here helping with the expenses, and I was also genuinely looking forward to living with one of my closest friends.  
What hurts more is that I feel like he never really considered how this would affect me. We had been talking about this since April, and instead of telling me when his plans started changing, he waited until basically a week before he was supposed to move in.

And to make everything even more awkward, he’s invited to my sister’s wedding on October 10th.  Right now I’m so annoyed with him that I honestly don’t even want to see him there. At the same time, I feel like telling him he’s no longer invited would be petty, especially since it isn’t even my wedding. I don’t really know what to do. Part of me wants to confront him and tell him how much this bothered me, and another part of me just wants to ignore from him for a while.

And the pastries he brought over I didn’t even eat them. I ended up giving them to a homeless guy on campus. Cuz I felt like if I ate them then I just accepted his apology for not moving in.

Best friend decides not to move in after waiting for months