Anyone who wants you to drop all your friends for them isn’t asking for loyalty. They’re asking for control.

Isolation is sold as devotion. The request arrives dressed up as wanting more of your time, and the effect is that there is nobody left to compare notes with, nobody to say that something seems off, nobody whose house you could go to at midnight. That is not an accident; it is the mechanism. Love does not require you to have no witnesses.

Keep at least two people outside the relationship who see you regularly. Tell one of them the truth about how things are, even the parts that sound small. And if the asking gets heavier when you push back, that is worth taking seriously rather than explaining away.