I met this guy about 5 years ago. We worked together in a project of mine for about six months and became friends afterwards. However, I see him rarely since he left the job. I've tried to reach him countless times, but he always seem to be busy about something. I have the impression that it has nothing to do with his activities, rather, that he's has somehow lost interest in seeing me.

He asked me to build a computer for him a few months ago and I ran into all sorts of trouble for keeping my word about it. Two motherboards failed, the PSU exploded and I had to change the video card also, but eventually the computer ended up working properly. However, I lost about $200 in the process due to "miscalculations". He knows it, but he somehow thinks it's ok for me to take responsibility for my mistakes.

Ok, I spent money but I earned his friendship, yes? No. I asked him to help me about a project to compensate but it's been months and he hasn't even touched the parts I left in his house. I suppose that if he really cared about it, he could spare a few hours to sit down and take measures and make drawings.

Thing is, I'm slowly building up a feeling of resentment, in that I believe I value our relationship far more than he does. It is understandable that he has become distant, as he's now engaged with an IEE girl. I suppose he no longer needs any Ne+Fi coming from me, having it so handy already.

In the end, I could summarize my disappointment in one word: "pragmatism". It seems rather obvious to me that SLIs are as cheap about relationships as they are to everything else. If they find that a friendship isn't particularly profitable (and I'm not talking about money here), they simply lose interest on it. I believe that for an IEE like myself, nothing hurts more than feeling increasingly peripheral to the life of a person you consider your friend, specially an SLI, since they don't really put effort in hiding it.

So far, I've experienced mostly rather negative experiences with dual friends. Why are SLIs so difficult to get along with?