Woman finds out Dylan, her best friend of 20 years fabricated his entire life, confirms it with his family, and decides to quietly fade out rather than confront him

Author image for Etai Eshet
Etai Eshet • Editor
Apr 29, 2026 2:00 PM EDT

There are harmless pranks, and there's prankless harm. There are white lies, then there's whatever this guy does, which I never heard a description for

Most lies are manageable because they're small enough to ignore or big enough to be obviously impossible. The dangerous ones live in the middle, just plausible enough to accept, just inconsistent enough to nag at you without ever quite demanding a confrontation. That's the sweet spot for someone who's been doing this for a long time and knows exactly how much to give people before pulling back.

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  • I've (33F) just discovered in the last 36 hours that my best friend (33M) of 20 years is a pathological liar and his entire life is a farce. How do I even begin to approach this?

    I don't know where to start with this, honestly. Yesterday morning I was messaged by a mutual friend (Sam 34F) expressing concern for our buddy Dylan (33M). We all
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  • went to school together then moved apart, Sam and I don't talk but we're friends on social media and Dylan will mention us to each other now and then in the
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  • way anyone would mention their friends in passing.
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  • I had also begun to worry about Dylan lately and had planned to reach out to Sam myself, she just beat me to it. He's always been flaky
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  • it. He's always been flaky and bad at keeping plans, and he's said stuff in the past that I've known wasn't correct but it was never a
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  • big deal. Like he'd contradict a story he'd told me previously but it was always small enough that it just didn't bother me and I'd humour him. I mean, people
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  • exaggerate for effect sometimes, it's not the end of the world. But it's been getting more and more the last few weeks and I've begun to worry it's a medical concern. He's been
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  • things and just acting.. odd. Sam had the same feeling.
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  • However as we started to talk about our worries, we realised stuff wasn't lining up. There were things that he'd told me and not her and vice versa, or different versions of the same story.
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  • We started digging deeper and realised the lies stretch back at least 10 years that we know of.
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  • The lies range from the city he lives in, his job and his finances to marriage,
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  • He told me he had eloped with his partner and got married, he told Sam nothing of this (despite telling me she and I would be bridesmaids at their wedding before they
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  • decided to just do it in Vegas). We reached out to some old friends who neither of us are in touch with but knew he was and turns out they all distanced
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  • themselves from him when they realised they were getting different stories but none of them knew the depths of it. It was odd and frustrating that I'd never met
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  • the partner but not outside the realms of reality because we live in different countries (well, I thought, now unsure. I'm now thinking he might not have ever actually left
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  • Grief that comes from realizing a long friendship was built on fiction sound like a horrible eye-opening experience. It's not like a breakup or a falling out, where at least the good times were real. It's closer to finding out a place you loved your whole life never actually existed. The memories don't disappear, but they all get reruns now, the same scenes playing back with different context, and every warm moment gets quietly audited.

  • the state even) and they both travel for work and I don't have much money or time to go galavanting. Same with Sam she lives in South Africa so similar
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  • experience. We'd spoken to the "husband" on a different phone number and everything so seemed legit. He had candid photos.
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  • We've now realised that they were deep dive pictures from the internet. I actually found the guy on Instagram and spoke to him yesterday (I'd never done this before
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  • because it never occurred to me, it didn't seem weird) and he'd never even heard of Dylan.
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  • He'd alleged a lot of abe from this person as well which is deeply upsetting as he knows I've been in an ab ive relationship previously. He also told us
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  • about 18 months ago that he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He's told us about surgeries and treatments and remission and it coming back. I've spent so many nights bereft
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  • thinking my best friend was going to di. It's now become clear this is not true.
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  • Two decades of caring about someone doesn't just switch off because the facts changed. The people on the receiving end of this kind of long-running deception almost always spend the first hours asking what's wrong with him rather than what he did to them, which says a lot about them and also probably explains how it went on so long.

  • Everything he's said that's not added up has either been so small I didn't care or assumed he was confused or misunderstanding, or so big you'd never question it
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  • because why on Earth would someone do that? Especially since we've known him since we were all kids and he was always so put together, intelligent, successful,
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  • generous.. But we've realised that it's all illusion. Initially we worried it was maybe head trauma from the long term ab e, or that the cancer had spread to his
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  • brain or something but the depth and breadth of it, plus the realistion that the cancer is a lie... Were now not so sure.
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  • Here is where we need advice. We've reached out to a few of his family members, we figure the way to go about this is to come from a place of concern and
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  • The family already knowing is its own revelation. Not that they enabled it exactly, just that they'd made a kind of quiet peace with it and built their lives around it. That's not unusual for families of people who lie compulsively. At some point the exhaustion of confronting it outweighs the confrontation itself and everyone just learns to hold the person loosely.

  • wanting to get him help (which is true, he's obviously not well and we don't want to just abandon him) and get some clarification on some stuff and figure out next steps. However I'm
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  • pretty sure the messages have gone into "message requests" and they've not been notified as none of them have been read. We don't have any other contact
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  • details for his family members, and the people in his life that he speaks to us about we don't know who they are they'll just be referred to by first name.
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  • Ive been avoiding him all day after he had a "medical emergency" but wouldn't let me speak to anyone else there and I just needed the
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  • space today to figure sh out. We've been figuring more stuff out today but.. what do we do if his family don't respond? Neither of us
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  • are confrontational, and we both still care and want him to get help even if we can't continue to be his friends once he's accessed support.
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  • We can't abandon him. Also if his family DOES respond, how much do we reveal? One of the other things we're not certain about was
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  • The slow fade is genuinely the most emotionally intelligent exit available here. A direct confrontation hands someone a new storyline to build around and changes nothing. Walking away calmly while making sure the right people know what's happening is about as much as two people in another country can actually do.

  • an infant death and we don't know how to go about finding that out, if at all. My life has truly been blown up the last day and I just feel lost and sad and neither
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  • Sam nor I know what the f to do in this bizarre situation.
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  • Twenty years is a long time to grieve. The sadness makes complete sense even when the anger would be just as valid.

  • UPDATE: Thank you for replies and concerns. I am in therapy myself, have been in dbt for a year now so will speak to my therapists
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  • about this for sure. We managed to get in touch with a family member yesterday (Charlie), and Sam and I both spoke to them.
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  • According to to Charlie the family have been aware of his lies for his whole life but had no idea the extent of it.
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  • They were really sad to hear how deep it's all gone but they were able to verify our concerns. Sadly the infant death was true, but that's pretty much the only thing
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  • that was. We now know 100% he's lied about his job, where he lives, his partners, his cancer, being abused and raped, a bunch of other medical issues... We really
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  • don't know who this person is. 20 years and none of it has been real. I'm glad that Charlie got back to us because despite all the advice saying to, I don't
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  • think I could have just walked away without alerting someone definitely in his life. Sam and I have discussed it and as a few of you have said, we're not
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  • gonna be the ones to fix this. A confrontation will do nothing but make it all worse. We've decided to both slow fade our respective friendships with him and let his family take
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  • over. Charlie said they're going over to see his mom today just by coincidence so they'll discuss with her and let us know the outcome. So yeah. Really sad.
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friendship bad friend liar friends relationships advice red flags red flag
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