About fake friends

This is my second ulog and I really have a lot to say about my recent experience with a fake friend.

Today, I visited my childhood friend. I know it sounds normal no big deal but it is really a big deal, let me explain.

We have been friends since we were kids, Ayinke and I were born on the same day in the same hospital. We however, discovered each other at age 10. Growing up was fun for us, we had other friends and it became 6 of us. 6 childhood friends who grew up together.

Pixabay image

Church was our meeting point and despite attending different high schools, we had various things to talk about often whenever we saw each other.

We started falling apart in our 4th year (Ss1) in high school, Tola left the country to go join her mum. It was a painful departure especially since Tola and I got closer as we attended the same high school.

Back to Ayinke, we usually referred to each other as twin sisters. But Ayinke changed immediately after high school. I was the first to gain admission into the university pre-degree program, the following year,yemi gained admission into degree in the same university. So yemi and I started seeing each other often, Christy gained admission a year after us, and Bunmi followed too. But Ayinke had to remain at home for few years. It wasn't that she had academic issues, things just never worked out.

I believe Ayinke felt left out because of this, so she changed. She started keeping to herself, avoiding friends, lieng to hide information and she also started dating the youth president, who had just gotten out of a relationship then. She hid this from all of us, because she knew none of us will approve. Despite the rumors and complaints we got, being her friend, I personally still defended her for almost a year before I learnt the truth.

Within this 1 year, she had totally turned into a different person and it became difficult to refer to her as my friend. All of us could not understand if she was still our friend or not. We started to unconsciously gossip about her, most times, conversations about how Ayinke had changed was usually brought up by Yemi. We were all too pained, discussion how unfriendly she had become that none of us suspected anything. As much as Ayinke was wrong to have treated us as total strangers, she was not the fake friend....

Fast forward to now, about 5 years later, Ayinke, who eventually became a nurse, recently got married and I just had to put away our differences and visit her. It was in the course of our discussion that I realized, Ayinke changed because she felt left out and Yemi had been faking a special bond with Ayinke behind our back, telling her what everyone discussed,while she comes to us to condemn Ayinke. Yemi also had other friends she discussed us with, exposing every information she could decipher and worse still condemning her so called friends.

This is just a sumary of my experience, it is a very long and amazing story but I'd like to stop here.

But can we discuss how to recognize fake and deceptive people generally?

We have them everywhere and around us, if a so called childhood friend could turn out to be one,then we must discuss how to recognize such people and be careful.

• They are selfish
  They like to do things only to favour themselves

• They are deceptive , masters of the game

• They are always interested in gossips, always wanting to know what is going on.Sometimes they pretend to really care.

• They have a lot of secrets and they are good at keeping secrets.

As I left Ayinke's place today, I was annoyed. As annoyed and surprised as I was, I however, realized that, everybody has issues and everyone has weaknesses.

There are a lot of people out there, battling negative behaviours and we just have to sometimes let things go and move on. But we must however understand that, a fake person or a deceptive person can kill.