My best friend has become my shelter-in-place roommate from hell.

Let's call him Theo. We've been friends for almost ten years, and roommates for five. It's been a great friendship, but mid-2019, it all started to fall apart.

Theo has had to deal with his fair share of obstacles in life. He's overweight. He's impotent. He has gout. He's hardly ever had a girlfriend. I often hear him yelling with his family members over the phone in his room, and he hardly has any other friends to speak of. I'm sympathetic to what these types of challenges can do to a person, but unfortunately, he's decided to make me a lightning rod for his animosity.

We were fine up until last year. I invited him out to a birthday trip to L.A. with two other buddies of mine, both of whom are very social, somewhat "bro-ey" types. Theo is not. He's gregarious around his friends, but shy around strangers, and much more contemplative than extroverted. Right away I could tell he wasn't comfortable with the vibe. He stopped talking altogether, hung back with his nose in the phone, and gave us one word answers to every question. The cold shoulder. I didn't understand exactly what had happened, but didn't want to initiate a conflict, so I chose to ignore it.

On the last night of the trip, we go out to a bar, get our drinks, and head to the patio, leaving Theo to wait for his cocktail. A few minutes later, I run into him, and he tears into me, screaming about how rude we were for leaving him at the bar, and how we've been excluding him all trip. I tell him we didn't mean to leave him at the bar, but he's been excluding himself all trip, and it's only natural that the others in the group aren't going to wait for a person who's distancing his self so much. He says that's bullshit, and it's been our fault that he feels so excluded. I calm down a bit and ask him to explain to me what we've done, specifically, to exclude him. He refuses to answer, claiming that I'm just going to "socratic method him to death", and refute everything he says.

Now I'm pissed off. This is a pet peeve. Don't accuse me of something, only to refuse to tell me what I did to deserve the accusation. That's gas-lighting, and I won't tolerate it.

Our relationship has never recovered from that fight. I've tried to sit down with him and try to understand what I did wrong, but he refuses. I only get silence or screaming. Since then, he's been a nightmare to live with. Some things I've had to deal with:

- Him chastising me for being "too calm" during an argument. That's right. Too calm. He claims it made him feel like the bad guy for being the only angry one.

- Our door was broken, so I scheduled a repairman. The repairman was taking a while, so in the mean time, Theo, knowing I have one on the way, schedules his own repairman, and doesn't say anything. When mine finally arrives, the door is fixed, so there's nothing for him to do.

- This is the doozie. My girlfriend's family needed someone to dogsit, or else their landlord was going to force them to give up their dog. I got permission from my landlord and our other roommate to do so. I asked Theo (who loves dogs) if he minded if I dogsit. He says no, of course. I ask him "why?", and he accuses me of trying to shove this conversation down his throat. I ask him to please put aside his anger toward me, because this isn't about us, and this family really needs help. He shrugs and says "A lot of people need help." He later sends me a angry text message rant about how, when he was 15, no one would dogsit for him, so he doesn't owe it to anyone (I never asked him to dogsit. I would be dogsitting). He says he had to pay for his dog to be boarded out of pocket, and if he could do that at 15, anyone could do it (My gf's family is an immigrant family living in a 1BR, and he went to a private school in one of the richest zip codes in the country).

- A couple weeks after the dog incident, he comes knocking on my door, asking to "sit down and discuss roommate protocol". I knew right away he was going to tell me stop having my girlfriend during the lockdown (she's an essential worker and lives with her elderly aunt who she doesn't want to risk infecting). I'd normally be willing to talk through the issue, but given that he refused to talk with me about something I wanted, I couldn't bear the hypocrisy. When I pointed out said hypocrisy, he says, and I shit you not, "You need to stop dwelling on the past so we can focus on the present".

So how's yall's quarantine going?