I’m now mid-thirties and have remained close with friends I met in high school.. until recently. Last hear I feel like one friend has ‘poached’ all of my other friends, which has left me excluded from the group and somewhat shell-shocked.

For context, I have been best friends with Friend A since age 8- I was maid of honour at her wedding, and am godmother to her son. At age 16, I moved to a different school where I met friends B, C and D. I remained friends with all of them until last year. While they knew each other from events I would organise and invite them all to, usually I would hang out with friend A separately to friends B, C and D. A few years ago, friends A and B got married (to different people) and had babies at a similar time. As a result, they started getting more friendly, which I encouraged because i thought it was nice for them to have support from someone going through the same things. But in the past year, A and B have become much closer to each other than they are to me because they have bonded over both being married with kids and being professionally successful, whereas I am permanently single, don’t have a great job and have a health condition that prevents me from having kids even thought I would have loved to. When I told friend A that I felt hurt by the situation, she said she was going to be friends with whoever she wanted and if I had a problem with that I should talk to my therapist because it wasn’t her problem. That response stung- so I withdrew from friend A. Since then, friend A has gone on to also get closer to friends C and D, and now they all hang out as a group without me. Sometimes I am invited as an afterthought, but I do not attend because the idea of being with them all while they now clearly prefer each other is too painful.

I am still shocked that this has happened- I’ve lost my 4 closest friends in the last year. It feels like I have been ditched for being single, while they prefer to hang out with friend A who has kids, as husband and a good job to talk about. They all say I’ve brought this situation on myself, because they invite me to some events and sometimes reach out to me individually, but I choose not to see them because I feel so upset by everything. I’ve never had a problem with any of them having other friends before in the past 20 years, in fact I have encouraged them to hang out together many times in the past. But now I feel like I don’t want to be friends with people who have replaced me so easily with someone else who was supposed to be my best friend, because (it feels like) she is more successful than me. Am I being crazy? I’m trying to move on and make new friends instead but I feel so betrayed and it’s not easy to casually replace 20+ years of friendship. Would be grateful for anyone else’s perspective or advice because I’m going round and round over-analysing this situation myself!