If a friend adds you to a group chat but you find the messages stressful, would you feel obligated to stay a part of the group chat, or do you think your friend would understand if you left?

In this story, one woman decides to leave a group chat her friend set up, and she’s not sure if that was a good idea or a bad idea.

Let’s read the whole story.

AITA for refusing to be in my friend’s “emotional jury” group chat where she submits “evidence” about her boyfriend and expects us to vote on how she should feel?

I (25F) have been close friends with Mandy (26F) since high school.

She’s never been into relationships, so I was shocked when she got with her current boyfriend, Josh (28M) 8 months ago.

Im not sure what it is about Josh that made her want to jump into dating, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it is because he resembles her favorite twitch streamer. She is, and always has been, very into “fangirl” spaces.

Is she playing make believe?

I think she likes to pretend that she’s dating the streamer, which is why whenever there’s issues in the relationship it really upsets her. I think it shatters the fantasy she has.

Josh isn’t abusive, but he’s not really super great for her either.

I just think they’re fundamentally incompatible and I do not like him as a person (but that could be it’s own post)

Mandy wanted some advice about Josh.

About two months ago, she created an insta group chat called “The Council.” It includes me and two of our other close friends, Christie (27NB) and Sam (26F).

She sent a paragraph explaining that she needed help deciphering what Josh is doing and how she should feel about it.

I was a little confused, as were our friends, but I thought it might help her humanize Josh a bit so I was open to it.

She sends us screenshots (DMs, old texts, his recent likes on Instagram), Tiktoks he must’ve posted years ago, and literal photos of her own journal entries, that she annotated.

She asks us to vote on how she should feel about whatever it is and whether or not she should argue with him.

Mandy was freaking out over nothing.

Some of it is just straight up unreasonable.

She found a photo of him with another girl deep in his tagged pictures and crashed out, telling us she was going to ghost him and block him.

Sam did some digging and found out that the girl was his sister, who Mandy has met before. She had just gained a bit of weight and dyed/cut her hair between the photo and now.

She found the group chat too stressful on top of everything else going on in her life.

After 2 months of near daily messages and some stuff happening in my life that stressed me out (my dog had to be put down) I couldn’t handle it anymore, so I left the groupchat and sent Mandy a very polite message about how all of the conflict was very draining mentally and that I had to protect my peace.

I let her know that I’m always here for her, but I need some space right now.

She didn’t ask once about my dog passing or how I was doing, which kinda stung.

She’s wondering if she was wrong for leaving the group chat.

Sam thinks I’m in the right for leaving the groupchat, and that the only reason she’s in it is that she loves the drama.

Christie thinks I could’ve been nicer about it but understands that there’s stuff happening in my personal life.

So, AITA? I can post screenshots of the group chat if anyone is curious, I didn’t get any before I left but I can ask Sam to take screenshots for me if there’s anything anyone needs clarified.

I don’t think it’s really important whether or not she’s in the group chat. If she finds it stressful, then there shouldn’t be a problem bowing out.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person thinks the group chat sounds horrible.

Her friend would be better off talking to a therapist.

It’s ironic.

This person has a good question.

You shouldn’t feel forced to weigh in on your friend’s ridiculous drama.

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.