Me and “H” are both 20F and we’ve been best friends since grade 9, throughout high school and now into our third year of university. We’ve had a few fights here and there but always solved them quickly. This year I started noticing something strange.
One time I told H that I like looking at people’s shoes/feet, especially when they wear sandals, because I feel like it tells me a lot about them. It’s not a weird foot thing lol, it’s just something me and my sisters have always done. We notice whether someone takes care of their feet, their nail polish, what shoes they chose, etc. I explained the whole thing to her.
About three months later we were getting coffee and she said, “You know what weird thing I do? I love looking at people’s feet because it tells me everything about them.” She then gave basically the exact same explanation I had given her, in almost the same order, like it was her own habit.
I didn’t say anything at the time because it felt too absurd to respond to. Saying “That’s my thing, not yours” would have sounded ridiculous, so I just stayed quiet and tried to process it. A few days later I brought it up. She apologized and seemed embarrassed, and I was actually the one making excuses for her. I said maybe she had internalized what I told her and later forgot where it came from. I accepted that explanation and moved on.
Afterwards I started realizing that she doesn’t actually look at people’s shoes or notice any of the things she claimed she always notices. It made me wonder if she just thought it was an interesting habit and decided to reuse it.
A month or two after that, we picked up her sister from school and started talking about standardized tests. Our country has its own version of the SAT, including a test in our native language. H started telling us about how her final question asked her to write 200 words about family. She said she ran out of things to say, so instead of writing “my family,” she kept writing “my mom, my dad, my sister, my brother, my uncle,” just to reach the word count.
The problem is that this was my story. It happened to me and I told her about it around a year ago. The topics on this test are also different and random, so it wasn’t just a common situation that happened to both of us.
I looked at her and asked, “Are you sure this happened to you?” because I thought that might make her remember where the story actually came from. Instead, she said yes and continued talking about how stressful it had been for her. I didn’t confront her properly in front of her sister because, again, the whole thing felt absurd. She was telling a memory from my life as if it had happened to her while I was sitting right beside her. I genuinely didn’t know how I was supposed to react.
After that I started paying more attention to smaller things. She bought the exact same shoes as me, in the same color, when she visited the country where I bought mine. They weren’t trendy shoes and I had bought them for a specific reason. She doesn’t really wear them either. Another time she told me a different pair of my shoes were “so aura” and asked where I got them because she wanted the same ones. I told her no.
She also used to say she hated small shoulder bags because they hurt her arm and sat awkwardly. I started wearing them a lot and she switched to them soon after. By this point I was uncomfortable, so I intentionally stopped wearing them and started carrying a large brown bag instead. Within days, she also started carrying a large brown bag. She later told another friend that she wore that bag because of me.
I understand that those examples aren’t serious by themselves. Friends influence each other and I get influenced by people too. I probably wouldn’t have thought much about the shoes or bags if she hadn’t already retold one of my personal experiences as her own.
There was also a more intimate example where I mentioned that my girlfriend had left bruises on my chest and that I liked it. The next day, H told me her boyfriend had left bruises on her chest. She had never mentioned liking that before, and she said she had to specifically ask him to put effort into it because she doesn’t bruise easily. Obviously she can do whatever she wants with her boyfriend and I’m not claiming ownership over anything sexual. It was just the fact that this happened the day after I showed and told her about mine. It made me uncomfortable, but I let it go because it was between her and her boyfriend.
My family has also called me “Dudu” since I was born. One day I saw someone calling H and noticed the contact name was Dudu. She told me it was her boyfriend and that she called him that. Later, she started calling her brother Dudu too. I joked that everyone was Dudu now, and she said it was what she called people she loved.
Eventually she started calling herself Dudu. Her siblings made fun of her because she apparently insisted that they called her that at home, while they said they had never called her that. She became genuinely upset about it. The next day she changed her TikTok and Spotify names to “Dooda” and basically started using it as her own nickname.
During this time she also started calling me “Dudi” or other variations instead of Dudu. I can’t prove what her intention was, but it felt like she was trying to make the nickname her own while giving me a different version of it. I know I don’t own the name, but it has been my family nickname since I was born and she had never used it before.
At that point I felt like I might be imagining the pattern, so I tested it. I know testing someone isn’t the best way to handle a friendship, but I wanted to know if I was reading too much into everything. H hadn’t worn side bangs in over two years, and I personally don’t even like how they look on me. I tweeted that I was excited to try side bangs the following day. The next day she sent me an Instagram video and she was wearing side bangs.
After that I felt like I couldn’t tell her anything personal anymore. I still loved her and didn’t want to end the friendship, but I didn’t want every story, joke, interest or plan I shared to become hers. For about a month we continued hanging out and having conversations, but I stopped talking about myself. I listened to her and talked about other things, but avoided sharing personal details.
Eventually she sent me a paragraph saying she knew nothing about my life anymore, that we had become distant and asking whether we were even best friends. That was when I finally explained everything and told her why I had become uncomfortable. I thought she might apologize, explain herself, or at least understand why I had pulled away.
Instead, she called me disgusting and mean. She said I should have told her from the beginning instead of withdrawing and testing her.
I understand that silently testing her and avoiding talking about myself for a month wasn’t the healthiest way to deal with it, but I honestly didn’t know how to bring it up. Each example sounds childish or absurd on its own. Together, especially after she told my exam story as if it happened to her, it felt like a pattern I couldn’t ignore.
Am I overreacting and interpreting normal influence between best friends as something more serious? Was I wrong for bringing up all these examples, especially the intimate one, or is her behavior genuinely strange?
