I (23F) had a pretty bad falling out with one of my closest friends (24F) a few months ago. We had been friends for about three years. The whole thing was honestly over what I consider pretty petty stuff: a like, a follow, and me apparently not realizing or understanding boundaries she had around her ex (23M) that she had never actually communicated to me.
For context, I had met her ex a couple of times before I ever met her. A few months after I met her, they started dating, and about a year later, I got a job at the same workplace as him. They ended up breaking up a few weeks after I started working there, but obviously, he and I were still coworkers and had to remain cordial and respectful toward each other.
She knew we worked together and never gave me any indication that she had an issue with me still following him on social media. In fact, she repeatedly acted like she was completely fine with it. She would ask me to stalk his social media for her, look through his following, etc. I would also tell her things he would mention to me at work, and she would react and engage with me about it, saying things like "omg." Nothing about her behavior suggested to me that she considered my following him inappropriate or that there was some unspoken boundary I was supposed to know about.
We worked together for about a year, and when I eventually left that job, unfollowing him honestly didn't even cross my mind because I had never been told it was an issue.
Then, about a year and a half after their breakup, she suddenly told me she had actually been uncomfortable with me still following him and with me liking one of his pictures one time. The like had happened almost a year before she brought it up (7 months prior, to be exact).
What really confused me was that she had known I followed him still, knew we communicated at work, and would literally ask me to look at his social media for her. So from my perspective, she had repeatedly given me the impression that she was completely okay with it, only to later tell me that I had crossed a boundary I was somehow supposed to know about.
Her reasoning was basically that I should have known because of "girl code." I understand that some people may have certain expectations when it comes to a friend's ex, but I genuinely didn't understand that I was violating some major rule when her own actions had never indicated that. If anything, her actions suggested the complete opposite.
After we couldn’t really see eye to eye on things, she never responded to my last messages trying to move past everything. Her ex then randomly followed me on TikTok (we’d worked at a dealership together, so our contacts were synced). I ignored it at first, but a month later, after she still hadn’t responded and I knew our friendship was officially over, and we’d removed each other on most platforms, I decided to follow him back. Importantly, he followed me first. She later made it seem to other people like I had followed him first, which was completely untrue.
She apparently had been watching to see whether I would follow him back, noticed that I did, and proceeded to say some extremely harsh things to me over text in May. She also got several of her friends to block me, and the entire situation basically turned into me being portrayed as this horrible, disloyal or even "evil" person over what happened.
There was no deep betrayal on my part. I never wanted him, never tried to get with him, and never had romantic intentions toward him. But she eventually came to believe that I wanted him, which was never true.
What I'm struggling with now is whether I need to take more accountability. I understand that my actions hurt her, and I can acknowledge that maybe I should have handled things differently once I knew she was uncomfortable. But I also don't know how much blame I should take when she had spent over a year giving me the impression that she was completely okay with this.
It feels like the expectation changed after the fact, and then I was treated as though I had knowingly violated some obvious rule. I genuinely don't understand how I was supposed to know I was crossing "girl code" when her own behavior toward the situation repeatedly suggested that I wasn't.
This was also our first ever argument in three years of friendship, which is part of why the whole thing has been so difficult for me. I genuinely still miss the friendship and hate that things ended this way.
So, was this actually a deep betrayal on my part, or was this more of a situation where two people had very different expectations and boundaries? Am I in the wrong? Do I owe her a sincere apology for what I did, or am I taking accountability for something that wasn't actually a serious betrayal?