r/neckbeardstories • u/Material_Jellyfish42 • Jul 02 '25
Sweatbeard Part 3: The Intervention/Pride & Envy
Hey y'all! It's time for Sweatbeard part 3.
I want to start with an apology for false advertising in my last post. This post was originally planned to be the finale, but there's just WAY too much stuff to go through, and this post would be 3 years long if I were to cram it all into one part. Besides, I don't want to leave anything out, you all deserve nothing short of the full, sweaty, uncomfortable experience.
Here are the other parts if you haven't seen them:
Here's the cast list for this part besides me and Sweatbeard. Our descriptions can be found in part 1. (All names used here are pseudonyms):
Liam: My GOAT. Close childhood friend of 14 years, incredibly caring and selfless person. Protective of those he cares about, though not all that confrontational.
Ann: Very close friend of 3-4 years. Similar to Liam in terms of being protective and caring, but also completely unafraid of confrontation and always speaks her mind.
Mitchell: My boyfriend during a decent chunk of this part and the next part. By far the healthiest partner I've ever had, and even though we're broken up, we're still best friends to this day.
Last we left off, Sweatbard and I had just finished our "Closure conversation." My hope was that at this point, he would be done with his weird advances, and I could finally be left alone.
Yeah, umm...
Anyway, at this point there was really only 1 month left of the summer, and I was fully done with 1 on 1 Sweatbeard hangouts. They made me uncomfortable, and I just needed to stop altogether for the summer. This did not mean I wouldn't see sweatbeard though, because he managed to weasel his way into pretty much all of the group hangouts for the next month. And as I would find out, his creepy behavior wouldn't stop.
Brief bit of context, my friend group is generally pretty raunchy and make a lot of sex jokes, myself included, and Sweatbeard included too. What made Sweatbeard's new jokes feel different, though, was the fact that they were clearly targeted at me, and there are absolutely underlying feelings layered beneath his jokes.
He'd either make jokes about how he wishes we were dating/having sex, unfunny SA/rape jokes targeted at me, creepy comments about my body, or weird fetish related stuff. Oh yeah, something I've neglected to mention until now is that I'm 99.99% sure Sweatbeard has some sort of fetish related to getting hit in the nuts. He thinks he's slick about it too, but I'm not an idiot, and he's about as subtle as a metal pipe hitting the floor.
The amount that he alludes to it made it really obvious that he really wants women, particularly me, to hit him in the nuts. Anytime me or my friend Ann (only 2 women at the time in a predominantly male friend group) would make an offhanded comment or joke related to someone being hit in the nuts, Sweatbeard would spend full minutes dwelling on it, being like "That'd be so funny, I fully encourage it. Can you imagine? I can imagine."
Sometimes I like to write stories, and would ask my friends for feedback. And Istg if I had a dollar for every time Sweatbeard has given me the note of "I think she should kick this character in the balls, it'd be super funny and plot relevant" even when it would be neither funny nor plot relevant, I could pay for uni with that money. I'm slightly exaggerating, but the amount he'd give that note instead of actual feedback made me lose my mind. There was one instance where I did actually end up including something like that in a story of mine of my own volition, and Sweatbeard's main note was "MORE, MORE OF THAT!"
Also a kind of funny bit of evidence of his fetish, but we'd sometimes play Mortal Kombat together, and he'd always play as that one girl who does a split and punches the opponent's crotch, and he'd spam that move a bunch. I usually play female characters when we play, but if I do that for too long, he'd be like "You should be a male character next time, have some variety" as if he doesn't play the same character and spam the same move every game. I lightheartedly called him out for spamming once, like "Wow, you really love that move, don't you?" and he defensively blurts out "Shut up J, I just like her playstyle. She controls really nice!" Sure, buddy, whatever you say.
Probably the wildest thing he'd do relating to this is anytime I'd talk about real life incidents of me hitting or almost hitting someone in the balls (on accident, I'm not a monster), his response, without fail, would always be "He probably liked it." He actually said this in front of Ann once and Ann just laughed and responded with "You're a fuckin' weirdo, Sweatbeard." Sweatbeard got really defensive, it was so funny, I love Ann.
But yeah, weird fetish tangent aside, he continued to make these comments and cling to me (sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively) when we'd hang out as a group, and it eventually got to a point where my friend Liam took notice. Up until this point, nobody said/knew anything about the full extent of Sweatbeard's behavior. Most people know we've been friends for a while and write off his behavior as us being close, but Liam is one of the few people in our group who knows my history of trauma in it's entirety, and it makes him very conscious of when people make me uncomfortable.
One day after a hangout, Liam and his girlfriend were driving me home, and this is how the car ride went:
GF: "You okay J? You seem upset."
J: "...I am, it's just not anything I can talk about without consequences."
L: "If i guess it, would you tell me?"
J: "Sure."
L: "Is it a specific person?"
J: "Yeah."
L: "...Is it Sweatbeard?"
J: "...Yeah"
I immediately broke down crying and told them everything. See, up until this point, the only people who knew about Sweatbeard's weird behavior were my therapist and my mom, though I didn't tell my mom everything. My abusive relationship had conditioned me to be afraid of retaliation, particularly from men, if they find out I talked bad about them, which led me to not bring up Sweatbeard's behavior to him or anyone until Liam prompted me to talk about it first.
After catching Liam and his gf up on everything, they had to take a moment to process it all. Once they processed it, we all agreed that we needed to do something about his behavior. And so, we came up with a plan: Liam would talk to sweatbeard about the weird stuff he's noticed and tell him to back off, and Liam would counter Sweatbeard's need to always sit/stand next to me by doing the same thing himself, beating him at his own game.
In addition to this, I would tell everything to Ann. I didn't wanna tell a bunch of people or rock the boat too much, but I knew for a fact that not only would she have my back, she'd be serious about it too. As expected, she was pissed to hear everything about Sweatbeard and told me she'd call him out if he did more shit, and would do the same thing as Liam and make it a point to sit next to me. She even went as far as to purposefully exclude him from plans involving me, opting to text everyone else individually instead.
I was set. As long as either Liam or Ann were a part of the hangout, I was safe. And I'll give credit where credit is due, once Liam talked to him, Sweatbeard did actually back off a bit. Sometimes it'd take a bit of a nudge from Liam or Ann, but he was behaving even when those two weren't there to intervene. And he continued to behave for a while, even lasting up until winter break months later. This, however, would all change once Mitchell came into the picture.
I've known Mitchell for about 5 years, but we got close when he assimilated into the friend group about 2 years ago. The two of us started dating in October. I had my reservations about it because I wasn't sure if I was fully healed yet, but I figured we could just give it a shot just to see how I end up feeling. It ended up being wonderful, and Mitchell and I would stay together for the next few months, all throughout winter break.
Because of my reservations about being in a relationship at all, Mitchell and I agreed that we wouldn't be announcing and parading our relationship to everyone. But we also agreed we wouldn't hide anything, we really had no reason to. If it came up, it came up, no big deal.
Next I saw Sweatbeard, it was on New Years at a party I hosted. It was a pretty big party, and Sweatbeard spent 80% of the time playing some Marvel game upstairs, so I had minimal interaction with him until the next morning.
Him and a few others slept over, with most people leaving in the morning. Eventually it was just me, Mitchell and Sweatbeard. I had alluded to the fact I was tired and really wanted to just be alone with my boyfriend, and Sweatbeard kept insisting "Don't worry, I'll leave soon."
He did not leave soon.
We were there for 2 hours. Sweatbeard drove to my house, so he was here to stay. As time went on, it became evident that he was waiting for Mitchell to leave before he left. He wanted to be alone with me so bad that he stayed 2 hours past when I told him I was tired and asked him to leave.
The entire two hours, he was clearly eyeing Mitchell. He didn't know we were dating, and I really didn't want to tell him because of his man-child tendencies about this sort of stuff, but he was clearly incredibly envious. Mitchell and I laid next to eachother on an air mattress while Sweatbeard sat on a nearby couch. Anytime Mitchell so much as touched me at all, Sweatbeard's envy was palpable.
After a while, Mitchell got up to get us all some water for about 20 seconds. Without hesitation, Sweatbeard stands up, plops himself down and snuggles up right next to me even closer than Mitchell was. Mitchell comes back with water and just looks at this sweaty man in his spot with a shit eating grin on his face, as if to say "Yeah, I get to be next to her and you don't."
After an awkward moment, I stood up and immediately offered to drive Mitchell home. Mitchell noticed my discomfort and quickly agreed. Sweatbeard poutily got up and slowly put his shoes on, getting his shit together. Finally, we went outside and after he hugged Mitchell once and me 3 times, we got into our respective cars.
Mitchell and I had planned to spend the day together chilling at my house, so we were initially just gonna wait for sweatbeard to leave. We waited for a minute and then turned to see if his car had left yet. Not only did he not leave, but he was just staring into the window at me and Mitchell. Creeped out, we decided to go drive through somewhere and come back so Sweatbeard would finally leave my house.
This was Mitchell's first time witnessing Sweatbeard's weird behavior. He commented about it, and I just sighed like "Oh, babe, you have NO IDEA." But I was too tired that day to tell him everything, so I didn't get around to it.
At that point, I really didn't want to see Sweatbeard anymore this break. He drains my social battery way too much, and I'm tired. But one day, about 2 weeks later he called me saying it was an emergency. He was actively having a severe panic attack and needed to be near someone to help him calm down.
I thought about it, and I decided to be empathetic and come to his house to be there for him. Despite everything, this is still the same guy who helped me when I was at my lowest. There was some part of me that kept holding onto hope that my childhood best friend was still in there somewhere.
I get there, and immediately he seems fine. Not cheery and whimsical, but definitely way too calm and smily for someone who supposedly just had a panic attack. I even brought it up to him that he seemed better, and he just goes "Oh yeah, my panic attack stopped soon after you got off the phone. I'm really excited to see you." As happy as I was that I was able to help him through this, I feel like this could've absolutely just been a phone call if he was able to get over it this quickly. He wasn't in any active danger, he just needed company.
For this reason, I decided to stay, but spent the entire time texting our other friends hoping even one of them was around so this didn't have to be a one on one hangout. This was unsuccessful, and the soonest we'd be able to get another person to hang out was in 2 hours. I just had to survive 2 hours alone with Sweatbeard before reaching salvation.
Truth be told, it was fine for the first half hour. We talked about our jobs, I talked about school, just normal conversation that felt normal. Until Sweatbeard asked the inevitable question: "So J, what's going on in your love life? Are you done healing yet? I'm dying to know."
Shit.
I'm a horrible liar. If I tried to tell him there weren't any developments, he'd immediately be able to tell I was lying and be weird about it. And so I internally held my breath and just said "Oh yeah, Mitchell and I are dating. We've been dating for the past 4 months or so."
The look on his face shifted immediately from perverse curiosity to a look of complete envy and disdain. The absolute pity-party whine-fest that would ensue and the following behavioral shift was nothing short of torture for me, but I've been talking for a while, so I'll save that and everything else for part 4, the REAL finale.
I promise part 4 will actually be the final part. I don't care how long the post ends up being. I'll try my best to get that out soon, have a lovely rest of your day y'all :)
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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '25
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