Married Man Tells Female Friend They Can Only Message in a Group Chat, and Reddit Is Split

A 10-year friendship changed after one woman reached out to her longtime male friend with a casual question. Did he want to play League of Legends?

Instead, she received a response that made her realize their friendship was no longer as simple as it once seemed.

According to a post shared to Reddit’s r/AmIOverreacting, the woman said she and her male friend had known each other since high school. Over the years, their friendship had been completely platonic. They gamed together, traveled to visit each other, and even lived together at one point. Their partners knew each other, and she said there had never been any concerns about the friendship.

Then he got married.

The original poster explained that her friend met his now-wife about eight months before the wedding. A month after the couple tied the knot, she reached out to see if he wanted to play a game.

Instead of answering, he asked her to change how they communicated.

“I Thought We Were Friends.”

After telling her he would check whether he was free, the man asked that she stop messaging him privately.

He explained that he did not think there was much reason for them to have one-on-one conversations now that they were both in relationships. Unless they were planning a surprise for their partners, he wanted their conversations to happen in a group chat instead.

The woman was confused.

“I thought we were friends,” she replied. “That’s kinda weird, dude.”

The man insisted that it was not about her personally. He said it was simply a boundary he wanted to have in his marriage and that he wanted to respect his wife by avoiding private conversations with other women.

But for the original poster, the issue was not the request itself. It was the sudden shift in a friendship that had existed for a decade without any problems. To her, the friendship had never been romantic or inappropriate. It was just an innocent friendship.

Many women reading the post seemed to resonate with it.

When Platonic Friendships Suddenly Become Complicated

The Reddit post struck a far too familiar nerve for many commenters, particularly women who said they had experienced friendships with men being viewed differently once those men entered serious relationships.

For years, the friendship may be completely ordinary. Things like sharing hobbies, talking about life, sending memes, or hanging out the same way any two friends would. Then, overnight, the dynamic dramatically shifts.

Suddenly, a friendship that never had an issue becomes something that needs boundaries, explanations, or approval.

Several commenters said they had watched male friends distance themselves after getting married or entering long-term relationships, even when nothing about the friendship itself had changed.

Others said the experience felt frustrating because women are often placed in the position of being treated as a potential threat rather than simply a friend.

Of course, not everyone agreed that the man’s request was automatically a red flag.

Some commenters argued that couples are allowed to set whatever boundaries make them feel comfortable in their relationships. If both partners agreed that private conversations with people of the opposite sex were something they wanted to avoid, they said that decision was between them.

But others questioned whether a healthy boundary should require someone to completely change a decade-long friendship.

The Update Complicated Things Further

The woman later updated her post and claimed that after she and her fiancé left the group chat, her friend’s wife created another group chat to accuse them of being “petty and immature.”

She also said her former friend told them they would need to offer “tons of apologies” if they wanted to continue the friendship.

The update only made the situation messier.

For a lot of commenters, the issue was no longer about whether the boundary was reasonable. It was about how quickly a friendship that had existed for a decade could suddenly be viewed as nonexistent, or an intrusion.

The woman wasn’t describing a friendship that had blurred lines or crossed boundaries. She was describing a friendship that had existed for 10 years without issue.

That seems to be why so many women in the comments connected with this post. That’s the unsettling part — realizing a friendship you thought was simple can suddenly be viewed in a completely different light.

This account is based on the original poster’s Reddit post and has not been independently verified.

(feature image: Kristin Hardwick/Bruce Liu/Petar Milošević)

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.