Little note before I start, this story happens right in between the period of me turning 18 from 17 and me starting to date my most recent girlfriend (the one mentioned in the story). I'll just tell the story talking about me being 18 and talking about my girlfriend as my girlfriend since these details are not relevant to the story itself, I just wanna make sure it doesn't seem like I'm "Changing up the story" if it happens to become relevant for some reason. (Also, this entire thing happened online)

Anyways so, recently I (18F) got invited by my girlfriend (18F) to her friend group, I kinda already knew about the people in the friend group since I interacted with them a few times in games but never properly talked and interacted with them. The friend group had 5 people, by the time I joined, making myself the 6th, but only 4 of us are relevant for this story since the other two just kinda do their own thing.

It had been at the point of joining the friend group over a year since I lost my last friend group so being accepted as quickly as I did on this new one was really nice, I especially started to get close to who I'll call S(19M) and Q(19NB). At the start talking with Q seemed normal enough, but soon he started to say things that just didn't seem right, I don't know how to describe it, there's just a feeling you get when you're talking with someone who's making things up. At first I didn't really like myself for having these suspicions tho, as it was stuff like him claiming to be black and white colorblind (but having passingly mentioned the color of things a few times on VC) or knowing 4 languages (one of those supposedly being japanese, which I know just a bit of, but conveniently disappearing the two or so times knowing what something in japanese meant became relevant when we were hanging out).

Despite this, it didn't take long for the stuff he said to become more serious and at the same time less believable. He claimed to have been in the army in Ukraine at 17, then said that he was able to get off early because of "some shit he saw" (and didn't elaborate on it). He first claimed to be working at border patrol and then at some point just changed it to working in a bar. At one point he claimed to have accidentally gotten pregnant (for what I was told he was AFAB). It just felt like every day he came to us with a different trauma that appeared out of nowhere and never got mentioned before. One day he just told us out of the blue how he got his voice box surgically removed because he didn't feel comfortable with his voice (which my girlfriend cried over because she thought a friend of hers had just gotten life changing surgery out of nowhere without even warning us beforehand).

Every issue he brought up that would matter long term seemed to conveniently go away and never be mentioned again. He just conveniently happened to have a miscarriage due to stress and the pregnancy conversation never came up again, and he just conveniently happened to have gotten the wrong operation and was back to talking after two days.

I ended up talking about it with the other two actually close to him, that being my girlfriend and S, and they agreed with me that a lot of the things he said felt like a lie. While talking we figured out that while he told me and S he was pregnant, he had told my girlfriend he was AMAB and had gotten bottom surgery.

We decided we'd confront him about it, and since I'm the most assertive of the three it was up to me to deal with it (S is way too aggressive and my girlfriend doesn't handle confrontation well). During the entire thing he refused to admit he was lying unless directly asked as a yes or no question, I'd just bring up why it was clear he was lying and I'd get responses like "that makes sense" or "yeah I can see that". The only thing he explicitly admitted to having lied about was having had surgery to remove his voice box, everything else he purposefully was vague about. I don't have to go into much detail, at the end of the conversation I asked him if he was willing to work on himself and once I didn't get a "yes", I decided it was best to cut him off and tell my girlfriend and S to do the same.

The reason why I'm having second thoughts about it is because I genuinely wanted to help him work on himself, he was a genuinely fun and entertaining person to hang out with but I don't know how to help someone who doesn't want to be helped. Shortly after this happened I noticed how other friends of his started cutting ties with him on social media, including friends he had irl, which was probably as a consequence of S telling mutual friends about what happened.

I know I can't be fully blamed for what happened but I still feel like I could've done better, I basically joined his friend group, stole his friends and immediately kicked him out and caused him to lose most of his social circle. I have considered going back and talking to him because I genuinely want to help him stop lying because I don't think he deserved losing his friends, he was a genuinely fun person to have around and I feel like I jumped to cutting him off and telling others to do the same too quickly.

wow this turned out longer than I expected, sorry for that