Ask Lemmy

Have you tried getting a second friend to see if they can contact them?

Perhaps they ran out of social energy and decided they need time alone. It happens. I would reach out once or twice just to check and then give it a rest for a long while, to not stress them out. If it's depression, it can last a very, very long time.

For me it was a sharp decline in mental health.

My best friend of 10 years vanished as he was fighting depression and most probably still is.

It’s possible that your friend is experiencing depression.

No real advice to give her, but I thought I'd share this story.

About 6 or 7 years ago, one of my friends unfriended basically everyone we know on Facebook and stopped replying to text messages out of the blue. Some of us had been hanging out with him a few days before, and there was no sign that anything was off.

To this day we don't really know exactly what happened, but we have a pretty solid theory.

My friend was born in the Middle East, but moved here when he was pretty young. His father is from that country, his mother is a white American, and from what I understand is not Muslim. His father apparently got a lot of shit from his family for that.

His father was always very strict, he'd gotten into fights with him before, there was one occasion where his father had threatened to move the family back to his home country, my friend stood up to him about that because his younger siblings had really only ever lived here, and ended up getting thrown out of the house for a while. His father used threats like that and cutting him off from his siblings to keep him in line. There had been some other similar fights because his father didn't approve of girls he was dating and such.

Few if any of us had ever met his father, but I get the impression he probably wasn't a fan of us either.

A couple of us went to his home to make sure he was ok, he answered the door, we didn't really get any answers except that he had made the decision with some other people that he couldn't associate with us anymore.

We later found out that he had been dating a girl, probably not one his dad would have approved of, and had also ghosted her at the same time.

Pretty much everyone left on his Facebook at the time were people with Middle Eastern names.

So we're pretty sure what happened is that his father came down on him with some big ultimatum to cut ties with anyone he didn't approve of or else.

A couple of us saw him in the wild once, he wouldn't acknowledge any of them. I shoot him a text once in a while, I have no idea if he's seen any of them, but I've never gotten a direct reply. A couple years ago, another friend's father passed away, we all used to hang out at his home, so I reached out to someone I knew from high school who wasn't defriended, and asked if they could let him know, and they did, the only reply I got through that mutual friend was a quick thanks.

Sometimes there's some really heavy stuff going on under the surface, and you can't always count on getting a solid answer.

Maybe they lost their phone

They've suddenly landed in a really controlling environment (be it a partner, parents, or a government), and wish to hide your relationship/keep you out of the crosshairs.

If suddenly they ghost you then they aren't a real good friend, good friends make clear if there is any problem and generally it get solved.

Just as a tip: real good friends are counted with the fingers of one hand, they are very rare and unconditional in life.

Try to give them the benefit of the doubt and give them space. Tell yourself things like they may have had a death in the family, or their phone got stolen/broken. Try your best to focus on other things and take on something new and interesting. Use exercise to adjust your brain chemistry if your feelings are overpowering your logic to give them space.

If nothing serious has happened, you learned a valuable lesson about them, and know to maintain more distance.

Stay classy!

i just don't understand. We left off positively.

I noticed for the sending receipts they used to show two checkmarks but now just one :(

I checked message info and one moment they say delivered , the next message it only registers as sent