Thread: Feeling disengaged from best friend of many years

Even though I am a guy, I think reaching out to a forum like this will grant me advice I would typically not find in other forums. Long read but bare with me!

We’re in our mid 20’s and have been best of friends with no other serious friends since middle school. He is a passionless person with no hobbies really and so we don’t share similar interests or hobbies but we’ve always shared a mutual understanding of each other with a tendency to agree on the same things. At one point I would have probably said we were soul mates and probably vice versa though he isn’t the type to admit were best friends.

If I would say he has any hobbies it would be that he does frequent the night clubs and is a heavy practitioner of casual sex due to his looks. I stopped going out with him to late night clubs a long time ago, because it just wasn’t my thing.

He’s not quite an insightful person nor is a communicative person and seldom expresses feelings. And so to him it seems things are going great but that’s always been him, he’s not a problem solver type person, not an analyzer type, lacks heavy organization skills and chances are would not attempt to resolve something wrong in a relationship. In fact, when comparing individual qualities I’m quite the polar opposite of him and require these qualities at my current job.

He’s not a virtuous person one might say, he did have a son like a year ago by accident with a girl he does not see himself long term with, so he kind of abandoned her. He still lives at home with his parents and has kept this secretive to just about everyone around him. He has been progressing very slow (you may even call it struggling) at school and has maybe a couple of years left where he wants to be a nurse, and has constantly changed schools.

I on the other hand am not the Dalai Lama but do consider myself very virtuous and it kind of does bother me that he hasn’t been there for his son, since I myself grew up with no father. Myself, I graduated in May with bachelors in Computer Information Systems and am currently finishing an internship for a very large company.

If I would describe the things that really bother me the most about him is that he is a really self-absorbed person who can be narcissistic at times. A while back I had a very important interview for a job that would be my career after college and he didn’t even bother calling afterwards and asking how it went. He’s not very talkative which is the reason why I stopped working out with him (it was just boring) and because due to his lack of organization skills he couldn’t coordinate a solid schedule. I felt I have in the last year that I can’t depend on him to go hang out and go somewhere (like to eat, or go to mall, or a venue).

So we haven’t hanged out in months, and one day I called him to ask him if he wanted to eat somewhere so during our meal I confronted him asked as to why we have not hanged out lately and it seems for him things were going great, his response was that he’s been real busy at school to which I responded “I’m not asking to hang out every day but just once a week is fine with me.” I knew what was going to come next which was him asking me why stopped going out to night clubs with him. I iterated that if we cannot even hang out and do regular things why should I bother going out with him (basically asking if we don’t have a deep relationship like we once had before, why should we do the superficial things?).

It just seems that we have matured in different directions, or it may just seem that I am seeking a deep meaningful relationship and he is not satisfying it. I have no other true friends and it has crossed my mind whether I should cut ties with him. It may just be that I’m just tired of him being this highly self absorbed person. What should I do?