In my experience, people often make choices based on not cool things. Sometimes it depends on the personalities of people involved and they go with who is in a bigger position of power. It can also depend on the information that they provided or have access to. For instance, if you broke up with someone who is vengeful or dishonest, they might spread a lot of lies about you. They can be very sneaky and plant the seeds of suspicion. Unfortunately, I’ve also learned that some people will just believe anything without actual evidence or even logic.

For example, one person I split up with ran a forum about 15 years ago. She immediately banned me from the forum, and then was saying a bunch of really exaggerated or just plain false things about me in a private area of the forum to a couple dozen people we had both known for years. I was blocked from there, so I didn’t even know what she was saying and I couldn’t defend myself, and these people believed all these crazy things about me. It’s nuts to have people spreading really defamatory stories about you and you don’t even know what they are and have no chance to defend yourself or refute them.

More recently I’ve seen stuff like someone had a live stream, and we had a handful of friends and acquaintances who would watch it. After we split up, people doing pretty weird and annoying trolling on there. She just kept saying without any evidence that it was obviously me and I’m so crazy, so nuts, so lonely, so drunk and so on. And then if I go on and I’m like what what the hell? I’m not doing this, I just get blocked and ridiculed.

So in either situation, some people around still talked to me and stayed friends, they said things like “well, we didn’t even know of what she was saying was true”, but it definitely raised a lot of serious distrust and suspicions that harmed friendships. Total smear campaign. However, people stuck with them more than me because I was cut out of contact, and they had more advatanages hanging out with that person than me - stay on the forum, stay on the stream.

So in general, it seems to me like people go to one side or the other. It’s hard to be friends with people who totally hate each other. You have to make sure you don’t mention one to the other. And also, it leads to resentment. Like if there’s this person who totally screwed me over, it irritates me that someone would still be friends with them after seeing what an awful person they can be and I feel like if they’re still friends with them, they’re not standing up for me. I don’t like people trying to dictate who I’m friends with myself, but still I think OK, so my ex lied to me cheated on me stole from me, and is still trying to harm me, and they’re just like oh, that’s cool.