A good place to start is with some definitions

Friendship (noun) a voluntary, close, and typically long-lasting relationship between people (friends) exclusive of sexual or family relations, based on mutual trust, respect, affection, and shared experiences.

Good Faith (noun) done in an honest, open, sincere and fair way and lawfulness of purpose : absence of deception, malicious act, or taking unfair advantage.

User (noun) a person who manipulates someone, often a pretending to be a friend, for personal gain or amusement.

Hostile (adjective) antagonistic, unfriendly, openly resisting.

Purpose

In 2018, when we first met, we discussed "burning bridges". He said he used to do that but now he was more mature and didn't do that anymore.

I am writing this because I believe people should be held accountable for their actions. The actions I want to hold him accountable for are described in this missive. The only way I have of holding him accountable is to let others know how he acts with bad faith and dishonesty.

The termination of our supposed friendship was carried out with planned efficiency and without any regret or remorse or any effort to keep it breathing. His email refusing to give me his postal address was meant to be the bullet to the friendship's head, and it did its job. His sudden and unexpected transition from friendly to hostile, selfish and unempathetic was a very unpleasant experience. If writing this prevents even one person from experiencing that, it will have been worth it.

Synopsis

In the sections that follow each of these is explained, supported, and sometimes documented.

1. I thought we were friends.

2. We were not friends.

3. He was using me to get me to loan him money interest free.

4. When he didn't want to borrower any more money he stopped pretending to be a friend.

5. (A) He lied in order to delay paying me back and (B) withheld his address to make it hard for me to pursue legal action when he stopped paying me back.

6. He signed a contract to pay the loan back then defaulted on that contract.

7. He only paid back the loan after I spent months worrying he would not; and many hours working on contract and documenting everything to ensure he would.

I thought we were friends

For over six years we would hang out nearly once a week, sometimes twice. When he was hit by a car I went to the hospital. During covid, he couldn't get a hair cut, so I learned to do a simple buzz cut and cut his hair. For years after I would often cut, bleach and dye his hair.

He doesn't drive, so I would often give him rides to jobs or to parties or pick him up at the airport when he returned from trips or whatever. When he was sick or felt too tired, I'd give rides to and from work.

I would take him to expensive and fancy restaurants for his birthday and other special occasions.

For some reason I thought all that meant we had a friendship, that we were even close friends. I enjoyed his company and I cared for and about him.

Sometimes we would go on trips together, Portland, Vancouver and the Grand Canyon.

He was not my friend

He invited me to go to Portugal and Spain with him. I went but when we got there he acted like he didn't want me there. He refused to have any pictures taken of us together and didn't want any pictures of his food to include my dishes or drinks. So, I asked if his friends knew I was traveling with him?

Instead of saying, yes they did and that he told everyone the same thing (the truth), he gave some equivocation that some did know and some did not. I didn't know why he was hiding that fact that I was with him from some of his friends, I thought maybe he was ashamed of me. That felt bad.

He lied by implying that he had simply not told some friends I was traveling with him, when in fact, he had explicitly lied to his BF (and maybe others) telling them I was not traveling with him. I didn't learn about that lie until months later, after his lie about moving.

I don't know when he decided we weren't friends, or if in his mind we had ever been friends. I didn't discover all those lies until many months after he told them. Such lies are incompatible with friendship which is based on mutual trust, respect and affection. Therefore, at least from his point of view, we were not friends. It's only in retrospect that I know we weren't friends, at that time I still thought we were friends. I trusted and respected him while he was lying to and disrespecting me.

He was using me

When he got his first apartment I got him a bed so he wouldn't have to sleep on the floor. His first apartment was a dark cave. It was making him depressed so he found another. I helped him clean, helped him move, helped him buy furniture and I put most of it together for him.

He didn't have enough money for both rent and deposit, so he asked me to write checks for both and he would pay my back the next month. Then he asked me to buy stuff on Amazon for him and he would pay me back.

This soon became a revolving account like a credit card. Listed here are the transactions from 2020 to when he lied to me about moving (with all the identifying information removed).

This was not an insignificant benefit for him nor an insignificant sacrifice from me.

• It saved him about $9,000 (based on a simple interest at on cheap credit card charging only 15%).
• It cost me $15,000 to $20,000, Had I put that money toward my retirement instead of loaning it him I would be that much richer than I am today.
• The only thing I asked in return were repayment plans.
• The only thing I expected was honesty, good faith and to be paid back.

What did I get in return? Lies, disrespect and a hostile attempt not to pay me back. If I see him in public he is not going to think "there is that person who saved me thousands of dollars, I should say hi to him and thank him", he is going to turn and walk the other way as if I were the bad guy. Since this is not about feelings, I will leave up to you to imagine how that is going to make me feel.

If you have read this far, thank you for listening to my side of the story!

He stopped pretending to be my friend

Just before the last time I saw him, he asked me to bring a check for his rent. I brought the check, I knew it might be the last check, I didn't know it was our last meeting, but he did and he didn't tell me.

Months later I pointed out the fact that last time I saw was the last time he wanted money form me made it seem like he was using me. He replied "I'm not a saint ...", tacitly admitting he had been using me.

After he got that last check everytime I asked if he would like to meet for happy hour or dinner or anything at all he was always sick or unavailable. That went on for week after week until it was obvious he was avoiding, so I asked if he was avoiding me. I got no answer.

He was passive aggressively baiting me and waiting for me to respond in a way he could use as an excuse to cut me out of his life and blame me for it.

After just a few text messages and despite six years of friendship, a loan with an outstanding balance approaching twenty thousand dollars, all the kindness I had shown him, and without sign of regret or remorse or any attempt to save the supposed friendship, he insisted I never contact him again and walk the other direction if I saw him in public.

He lied in order to delay paying me back

He still owed me money, so we developed a repayment plan. At $900 a payment it was going to take him years to pay me back. Then he immediately asked if he could skip 2 payments because he was moving.

I'm moving beginning of sept, and the cost of moving is worse than i expected, so i wonder if i could defer until sept 19 to pay again? …

I agreed because I was acting in good faith.

… Yes, you can defer until Sept. 19

I didn't hear anything from him so on Sept. 6th I wrote:

I hope all is well and you had a smooth move. As one of your creditors, I should have more contact information than an email address. Please send me your current mailing address.

I waited three days but got no reply.

( The email chain)

He withheld his address to make it hard for me to pursue legal action when he stopped paying me back.

Three days later I tried again and got this hostile reply.

“You don't need to find another way to contact me. You have my phone, my email, my DOB, and my work address, so you can find me using those when I failed to pay you. Thank you.”

I had been nice to him, I cared about him, I was generous and I had been honest with him. He was being hostile and threatening in return. He knew very well that when he failed to pay the only legal recourse I could take would start with a summons "at the house of his or her usual abode" (see RCW 4.28.080 (15)), the very thing he was refusing to give me.

Notice he didn't say "if" he failed to pay, but "when" he failed to pay. He had a plan to fail to pay.

The nearly $20,000 I had lent him was my need to have his address. He had no need to keep it from me, but I am sure there was a purpose to his keeping it from me.

Nothing I had done justified that sort of reply. There are two reasons I can think of for it: (1) He wanted me to react angrily, so he could use that reaction against me (2) He was going to fail to pay me. I'll leave it to the reader to judge which is worse, doing it for financial gain or emotional manipulation.

“Thank you”? He wasn't being appreciative, it would have been more honest if he had signed it “F you”.

Of course, he will now claim he always intended to pay me back, but his actions and his lack of honesty indicate otherwise.

I knew he had planned on moving, but he didn't move, he misled me into thinking he had moved, and he delayed paying me that $1,800. I didn't find out he hadn't moved until months later. And, the address he was withholding from me was the vary address I had been paying his rent on for years. "Bad faith" seems like euphemism for how horribly he was behaving.

He signed a contract

Up until this time I kept blaming his actions on the situation he was in. Maybe it was his BF not wanting him to be friends with me or something else causing him to behave in such hostile and unexpected ways. But now I had to admin to myself, it wasn't the situation, it was him, his selfish, dishonest and uncaring nature.

I sought legal advice and learned that without a contract, there was little hope of success using the courts get him to pay me back. If I went to small claims court I would lose $8,000 when I filed the suit because the most you can sue for in small claims is $10,000. If I went to a higher court it would cost me thousands in attorney fees that I could not recoup because I did't have a contract that would allow that. And in either case I would need his home address to start and he wasn't going to give me that.

It seemed being his friend was not only going to cost me the indignity of used by him, but potentially thousands of dollars as well.

I did my research, learned the laws regarding personal loans. I documented every transaction I could and gave up collecting on those I couldn't. Then I sent me a letter with all the details and asked him to choose a repayment plan from three I had created for him.

I had to threaten taking him to court, but eventually he chose a plan. I spent weeks writing up a contract because I couldn't afford an attorney to do it for me. I did have to hire an attorney to review and fix all my mistakes. Then he wanted some changes to it, so we went back and forth until we had a contract we would sign.

Writing a contract to get back money I had lent to him thinking he was a friend was a soul crushing experience. I was constantly reminded that I had cared for and about him and in return he was hostile and mean for reasons I still do not fully understand.

When the contract was ready for him to sign, he changed his mind and wanted a different plan. So I had to do it all over again and get someone else to look it over and make sure it was legally sound.

The one thing he truly and sincerely apologized for was making me rewrite that contact. Still, writing a contract and going through that whole process was an awful experience. He claimed he was going to pay back anyway but if I had learned anything, it was he doesn't always tell the truth. He lied about so many things the one thing I knew is I couldn't trust him.

(The contact he signed.)

The final fraud

Just before signing the contract he let me know he hadn't moved. But it was too late to change the contract and when he signed it, he committed fraud. He delayed making payments based on the misrepresentation (lie) that he moved.

We negociated the contract for weeks, he must have read it several times and Article 7 clearly spells out what a misrepresentation is, that he was required to disclose any he had made, and how to disclose them. He never made such a disclosure. Immediately above his signiture the contract reads:

By signing below, each Party certifies and warrants that all statements and information provided concerning the Loan and prior advances are true, accurate, and complete in all material respects, and that no material fact has been knowingly withheld. Each Party acknowledges that Lender has relied on these certifications in entering this Agreement. A breach of this Certification is a Misrepresentation under Article 7 and an Event of Default under Article 8.

Yet he signed it knowing that all the information me had provided me was not true. That is he knowingly committed fraud. He can not be trusted.

THANK YOU FOR READING THIS !!!!

Afterwords

He paid me everything I could document he owned me.

In the end my friendship with him cost me hundreds of dollars in legal fees, months of worry and my trust in people.

He is smart and he is slick. If you think he is your friend and telling you the truth then please keep in mind for 6 years I thought the same thing.

If you want documentation of what is above true, please write to me and I will provide all that I can. Ask him for my email address, he has my permission to provide to you.

Writing the fable began as a way to deal with the betrayal I felt after being treated so badly by someone I thought was a close and good friend, and who I had cared for and cared about. Then it became an interesting project independent of its origin. When I was much younger I read Ursual K. LeGuin's "The Language of the Night" and now I am rereading it. I never considered being a writer and still don't consider myself one (the grammar and spelling mistakes here prove am I not), but writing this short fable was fun (as long as I didn't think of the actual betrayal). Writing long form fiction doesn't appeal to me, but now I have a character I could follow on other very short mischievous and malodorous adventures.

"Because the name is the thing ... and the truename is the true thing."