This person's friend has began to change a lot, even with promises not to.

Hello there,

I hope you're staying safe if Covid cases are still high in your area!

I feel like everyone has the wish that relationships could last forever and that includes me. However, real life could not work that way. Relationships, no matter how long that relationship has been, are very fragile. This is because it involves people and people can change.

In your situation, it has started to affect you negatively and that is not good. If you haven't told her about how you feel, that would be a good start towards building a better relationship, but it seems that you have told her, and she said she would change but she didn't.

So the only choice I think you have at the moment, for the sake of your own well-being, is to distance yourself from her. It would be good for your mental health to start hanging out with someone else that would not hurt you and make you feel bad about yourself. You might feel bad or mean for abandoning a long-time friend, but with the way she is behaving right now, she is now a friend only in name and her actions and words are no longer of a friend's.

You don't have to completely stop being friends with her or say it outright that you don't want to be friends anymore. You can just slowly start hanging out with someone else and treat her as that friend you would occasionally talk to. You can also join a club or pick up a hobby so that you can have other things to occupy your time and also have the chance to start seeing new people from the club or because of the hobby.

I hope this helps and I wish you the best of luck. Please stay safe and take care.

Love,

The Advice Team Column