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When you make friends with folk in school or college, there’s no way to tell whether that friendship will – or even should – outlast your time studying together. And that’s fine and quite right, because during that time you should be in the moment enjoying the life that you have – after all, you never know where life is going to take you next, or what it will look like in five, ten, or even fifty years. Right now you’re good friends, and that’s all that matters.

And if you are still all good friends in a few decades’ time? Well isn’t that lovely. Because some people really do create those deep bonds with folk that they meet early in their lives and still manage to maintain those friendships. Maybe it’s because you have very similar beliefs or lives, that you want the same things and enjoy spending time together – even if you time together ends up being occasional phone calls from opposite sides of the world. And these are the exact friendships that will stand the test of time.

Other friendships, though, change as you get older. Maybe you find yourselves in very different places in life and find that you don’t have so much in common any more. Or maybe your friend makes choices that you find it difficult to understand or accept. Or maybe, over time, you don’t have any time for one another and realise that you don’t feel like you’re missing anything at all.

Well, the woman in this story has clung onto her three friends from college, and they still meet up regularly for celebrations. However, as those occasions show, these might not be the best folk for one another any more.

Read on to find out why.

AITA for telling my friend a scientific fact?

So I (37, female) am part of a group of four female friends (two others are 35 and one is 41). We’ve been friends since college, but it’s always been rocky and we’ve had our share of drama.

Yesterday we were celebrating the birthday of one of us and talking about what we’d been doing with our lives when one of them said she’d been taking a course in astrology.

I am not a fan of pseudoscience (if you can even call astrology that) and said something along the lines of “okay but the planets don’t actually exert any influence over us.”

To that, my friend retorted that the moon influenced the tides and that our bodies are 75 percent water so it would make sense that the moon influenced us. I figured that was nonsense but had nothing to back it up so I didn’t respond.

But despite this, the party still went well.

We went back and forth a bit in what I would categorise as a joking manner.

The birthday girl said we shouldn’t have conflict at her party but I just said I was disagreeing and astrology friend laughed and said she was just poking the bear. The rest of the evening was really nice.

Today I remembered her remark about the moon so I decided to look it up. Turns out the moon only impacts large bodies of water, so even lakes are barely affected, and that if it did impact us we’d be off balance twice a day.

I have to admit that I do enjoy being right a little too much, but I think facts and truth are important and that people should know them. So I dropped the link in our group chat.

But it turned out this was not the right thing to do.

Astrology girl responded with “o m g” and then left the group chat.

Her best friend (the birthday girl) said I’d really hurt astrology girl’s feelings last night by not supporting her in her endeavours and that sharing the link came across as petty and mean.

I know I can come across harsher than I intend to, but I also feel that especially these two women cannot handle any criticism or disagreements at all.

They have both left the group chat before over things that I always felt were minor but that they feel is huge and mean and rude.

AITA?

Honestly, at least this woman is self-aware and realises that she has an unhealthy need to be right.

But the fact that she’s unaware of her friends’ feelings and how her words are affecting them is concerning.

It sounds like these ‘friends’ maybe aren’t so suited to one another – perhaps that’s the root of all the conflict.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit had to say about this.

This person thought the woman was being really petty.

While others thought her one-upmanship was unnecessary.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman who refuses to change her 4th of July traditions for her in-laws, sparking a family feud.

Meanwhile, this Redditor thought the astrology girl did nothing wrong at all.

When you’re friends with people whose beliefs are different to yours, you really have to learn how to respect them. Because that’s exactly it – it’s not about agreeing with what they believe or even having to discuss it with them in any way. But respecting that they have their beliefs and you have yours, and that you can have different viewpoints without butting heads is the only mature way to behave. You might not respect their beliefs or their choices, but you respect them and that’s enough.

Unfortunately this woman’s insistence on being right is the problem here. She can’t just respect that her friend is doing something that she’s enjoying and believes in, humour her and move on. No, she has to probe and try to disprove the things that matter to her friend, rubbishing something that her friend clearly cares about and is putting a lot of time and effort into, simply because she cannot abide people being wrong and not agreeing with her. And honestly? With behaviour like that, that’s no friend at all.