I wrote a book about friendship breakups, so I interviewed a bunch of my friends about their friendship breakups
"You're expected to gain and lose friends quietly. A person in unchecked pain makes other people uneasy"
I have a new novel coming out in three weeks in which the narrator is unexpectedly dumped in her living room by her best friend in the middle of making dinner. She does not handle it well. I do not have much in common with her, but I do share her habit of believing I am acting with great dignity when I am in fact making a real spectacle of myself.
I thought I would commemorate the occasion by asking several of my friends a number of intrusive and frankly presumptuous questions about their own experiences with friendship breakups. Here’s a condensed version of our conversation:
Have you ever had a friendship end definitively, rather than simply drifting apart or losing touch? If so, were you surprised by the nature of that ending, or could you see it coming?
A: My most devastating breakup was with a friend, and I initiated it. We’d lived together and been very close for years. She was my plus one and my emergency contact. Friends always joked that we were basically a married couple and that we would end up together romantically. It could have ended up that way, except I thought that she didn’t treat her romantic partners very well. In retrospect, that was a red flag.
E: I’ve had three friendship breakups that I can think of. I was the dumper in two-and-a-half. My partner once told me that their definition of a friend is “someone you would go out of your way to say hello to at a party” and that blew my mind. I have maybe five categories: enemy, stranger, warm acquaintance, someone I would allow to stay in my home rent-free for an open-ended amount of time while they looked for a place (“friend”), and Best Friend in the Whole World (title currently vacant).
There are probably a few people who would be hurt by knowing I think of them as a warm acquaintance, and probably slightly more would be baffled to hear I’d let them stay in my house indefinitely, but since I’m lousy at staying in touch with people my feelings of friendship do not degrade over time when I haven’t spoken to someone.
K: Yes, I had a former friend break up with me. Her reasons were not that clear to me. We’d had some conflict that I thought we’d resolved, but at a certain point it felt like I was walking on eggshells. At one point I had made a passing joke about her boyfriend, and later apologized to him personally without telling her that I had apologized to him. Then she wanted to have a phone call with me and she dumped me.
Jo: Be patient with me. I am an autist and a child of analysis, and every prompt to examine myself is a new thousand-piece puzzle to a puzzle hound. My first intimate friendship as an adult (ie, the first time I felt I belonged around someone without wondering if it was only the forced proximity of the school day which made it so) imploded. I made the decision to end it after two years.
She was, without exaggeration, a con woman — she exited our tight friend group, of which she was the center, and by that time we realized that even the name we knew her by might have been a fiction. She could have been a cult leader, sometimes I think I was in a cult.
She had suddenly burned bridges with other people in the group and no one was talking. I didn’t know the context and was bewildered by the conflict. She admonished me for asking about it, and my other friends feared that I wouldn’t accept her overwhelming fault in the conflict (she had stolen from them and called the cops on them for weed possession when discovered. Moreover, her entire life story had been fabricated).
What it came down to was, while I idolized this woman and credited her with fostering me as a person (attachment and mommy issues? Yes), I realized she had become severe, that I felt like pure shit when we were together, and immense dread hung over our meetings. The last time I saw her, she knew her plates were losing spin and she concocted a story about how she was moving away — she wasn’t, and didn’t, but she could have sold me anything and had already sold a lot. It was bittersweet because I loved her, and it hurt to be around her, but initially in that moment I resolved to accept her departure and continue my life, somehow, without her. If it had been left at that, I might have grieved more.
But then she made some awful, cutting remark about my other friends, who I loved as much as I loved her. Without even thinking, I told her not to speak of them that way, and instantly it was though she had plunged into icy water. She said that I and the others deserved each other. An hour later we said we’d get together again, but I knew we wouldn’t. I didn’t want to, which was unfathomable but true.
I got in my car after that and cried deeply, called my friends and told them. They made sure I was good for the night and the next day they threw me a party and told me everything. I remember the time and date. I walked around feeling concussed. I still loved her, but I was also proud of myself for having made the decision to end things. These days, her memory evokes a bemused and tender pity.
S: I have actually been the one to definitively, formally end several enormously important, passionate friendships over the course of my life. L, R, N, J (all women). Somehow it was unimaginable in these situations to countenace letting the relationships fade out, so I initiated formal breakup conversations.
It may be relevant here that being ghosted seems like one of the least tolerable ways of being treated, speaking for myself. There may have been a fantasy in play that the breakup conversation would make it all less painful, because less ambiguous. Whether any pain reduction occurred is impossible to say, I suppose, but it was always extremely fucking painful.
Je: By the time these relationships ended, I wasn’t totally surprised. The only really unexpected one was P, a fellow writer, who had a normal supportive conversation with me one day, then crashed out a few days later. We had met when we were both stuck on rewriting our first novels, but she got more and more stuck while I finished and published mine. It caused tension that we couldn’t overcome.
Do you remember the first time a friendship ended in a breakup? The most recent time?
E: I remember the hardest one. I thought of Brad as my platonic life partner. He even made a website that tracked whether we were hanging out, which he updated whenever we visited one another. He’d dated people before and it hadn’t changed our friendship, but in the last year he started seeing his now-wife and he became distant.
I kept trying to get him to talk to me about our changing friendship and he kept denying it was. happening. I lost my job and was trying to decide whether to take a new job in Portland or Dallas (we were both living in Seattle at the time), and he kept being noncommittal. I figure at this point he just doesn’t want to be my friend anymore and disengage, but a few weeks later I got an email from his now-wife about how she was throwing him a going-away party because he was moving to Dallas. He knew the whole time and didn’t say anythign to me. I sent him a really angry email ending our friendship. I felt really righteous and aggrieved at the time, but here I am more than a decade later and I still have dreams where we’re still friends.
I currently don’t have a Best Friend, except for my wife, and saying your wife is your best friend just isn’t the same thing. It’s weird not having one for the first time. I have filled the best friend-shaped hole in my life with hobbies and family and trying out normal pleasant friendships with locals I don’t feel especially strongly about.
S: Yes. L was the first, J the most recent.
Je: My big friend breakup period was 2008-18. Five close friends bit the dust in that period
Have you ever later reconciled with a friend who dumped you (or who you dumped yourself)? How did that work out?
E: Over the 28 years I've known Connor, we've probably spent five of them not speaking; most of those were him doing friendship-breakups with me over text or email, and then one of us sending an email months or years later. The last time we did this was in 2016, and I think lasted about eight months or so. This time feels different.
K: Once, but now we’re back to not really talking. I occasionally text him and he doesn’t respond.
Jo: I did once, a friend who was sort of arrested in some ways — she was an adult woman who nonetheless reminded me a lot of teenage boys I knew. She dealt with a lot of anxiety and depression, and that could manifest in a reactionary frustration, getting prickly and judgmental about people and the world. That built up friction.
I can’t even remember what the dispute was, but we stopped talking for about three months. And then, just like teenaged boys, we started chatting again over music and started seeing each other again as though nothing had happened. We never spoke of the problem, but I think we tacitly agreed it was silly.
S: Never, no, although actually, I suppose, maybe it counts as “reconciliation” that J and I say Happy Christmas to each other via Whatsapp and call each other “my love” when we do so, which feels very strange but also very nice.
Je: No.
What do you think of the expression “friendship breakup?” Do you find it apt? Clunky? Does it elide something important? Have you got a better phrase the rest of us can use?
A: I don’t know what else to call it. Sometimes I jokingly refer to it as my divorce when referring to some of the things we bought together and had to divide up afterwards.
E: I like the term "friendship breakup" because I think I've always been someone who feels things strongly and the end of friendships don't play the same role in society or pop culture as romantic breakups, even though the friendships are often longer and more emotional than whatever situationship you were in for a couple months.
K: While I do think the "we don't talk about x enough" is a somewhat irksome line of rhetoric, because undoubtedly a discourse does emerge, but I think it is an adequate way of describing the emotional turmoil involved. Falling out is too glib, too simple. Breakup does a decent job of approximating the way that the intimacy between two people has fractured.
Jo: About the language itself, what comes to mind for comparison, strangely, is people referring to their pets as their children. It gestures toward something that is uneasily defined via something that is easily defined (perhaps in the sense of being socially mandated). In this way, the simile scans as glibly inappropriate on some level. There is a love relationship being alluded to, but it is not, or rather is not supposed to be, the actual sacred bond that infuses a life with meaning, all by itself, by its fact.
I’ve seen parents get het up about this kind of pet language in that defensive way which common to people who need reassurance about things they broadly maintain are unquestionable. So it frequently is with the language of partners and friends, it seems to me.
So, unpacking that more deeply, while there might be a less rigid gradation of investment being acknowledged in one sense, the expected gradation of grief among categories (pet / child, friend / partner) is very sharply defined. We can more readily beat around the bush re: the potential immensity and propriety of love felt for an animal, or a person one is not affirmatively and romantically devoted to. But the potential of immensity for grief at their loss is very strongly enforced: the hierarchy is clear. The socially acceptable quantum of grief, the degree of tolerable dysfunction, is observed and recorded according to that placement.
I guess you could theorize that this is in large part a function of capital: there are points of established detente between wage work and life outside of it, points at which your boss is supposed to excuse you for not showing up to build his wealth for him. But it’s just as crucially a product of the nuclear family and couple form: Your partnerships and blood relations are primary and load-bearing, while other forms of relationship are supplementary.
And here I think we get to something unambiguously and intensely pathological: a barely suppressed panic around and impulse to quarantine grief. A person in unchecked pain is a volatile substance. One is meant to gain and lose pets, gain and lose friends, quietly — one of the expected functions of the family form is to absorb the pain of these things and keep its membership externally ordered for the things expected of them. I mean, it’s commonly understood that you give children pets to foster precisely as training wheels for death, presenting a controllable lesson in carrying, if not resolving, grief; quite often that loss is framed, among adults, as a kind of “hot stove” comeuppance for the disordering quality of love a child allows themselves to give.
The trauma of losing family, or even a lover, produces by contrast something more serious, complicated, and respectable. But to invoke distress of any kind in public will tend to freak out the western subject. People in pain are watched very closely, and judged very harshly…Suffice to say that I don’t actually see any reason why we ought to perceive these categories of experience, love and bereavement, as meaningfully distinct, even if we’re obligated to perform them socially.
S: I’ve never really felt that it elides something important—a “breakup” feels like what it is. Incidentally, I use the same word for the breakup I’ve had with my dad.
Je: Works for me.
Do you think you were at fault in any of your friendship breakups? Do you think the other party was at fault? It doesn’t have to be a 100/0 split, but do pick someone to assign the blame to, please.
A: I have regrets but I think my decision was the right one. Mutual friends expressed concern when she would call and text them to find out where I was if I didn’t respond to her quickly enough (usually because I was at work or in class). She’d get upset if I went out without her. It got to a point where she would invent emergency scenarios to get me to cancel plans and come home.
E: I of course think I was in the right every time, but I also feel I was in the right because even if I was the issue, people knew what they were getting into by being my friend in the first place? Autism and a religious upbringing is a terrible combination, because while I think a lot of girls in the church get golden-ruled into being perfect submissive little darlings or whatever, my ironclad sense of right and wrong took the idea almost as a threat: like if I am a GREAT FRIEND and I adore you enough you are then LEGALLY OBLIGATED to reciprocate, which is an insane way to go through life. I think I'm better now, albeit in the sense that I am improved and not cured.
K: I think it takes two to tango. But what pissed me off about my friendship breakup was that she didn’t tell me what was bothering her early enough to allow me to correct my behavior, and she took no responsibility for herself. She was judgmental and impatient and sometimes categorically incorrect about things. I tended to let that slide because I admired her work ethic, her moral compass, and passion.
Jo: Obviously I’ve had my share of fuckups — I’m as liable as anyone to react to my own expectations when I ought to communicate and listen. But as Paul F. Tompkins once sang, “when every other relationship ends, remember! You’re your own best friend.”
S: I think it’s in itself interesting that a breakup is so often framed as something that is bad, and for which someone is to blame! What if people were congratulated for skillful, courageous breakups?
Je: I still regret writing a scene for a playwriting class in high school about a then-best friend. She was justifiably hurt. I couldn’t face the fact that I was jealous of her.
Was there anything you enjoyed about participating in a friendship breakup, even if the enjoyment was perverse? For example: Did it get you attention from other people in ways that made you feel more interesting, or deserving of consolation? Did you take pleasure in the moral high ground, if you had the moral high ground? Did you like enumerating your former friend’s faults to others, after keeping your resentments to yourself for a long time? Did you engage in any gratifyingly petty acts of retaliation?
K: No, it was fairly upsetting. Of course, the alternate version of me had all the right, clever, and wickedly witty things to say about it only after the fact. But it was the kind of situation that started to give me ulcers.
Jo: That first time, having an impromptu party thrown for me (with presents and cake!) was pretty fucking great, it’s true. It is by far the most interesting period of my life to describe to other people, and the heart of it is a mystery I get to mull over even after fifteen years and a lot of forgotten detail.
The pleasure of describing the situation is really in trying to convey that, convey how I don’t hate her, all the pity and gratitude I have, which I can’t necessarily defend, and which I know is only maintained by distance; if she were to reenter my life and we were to reckon with it all, I don’t doubt that the wistful air would curdle.
It’s not about forgiveness or regret. I don’t even think it’s about knowing the true meaning of her actions. We exchanged something. I’ll probably be thinking about that for the rest of my life.
After that, though? The normal breakups? It hurts more, but it’s less interesting. You get to kvetch, just like when you lose a job. Still, as I did with the con artist, I try to give people grace in the long run. At least as much as I give myself.
Je: No, it’s a complete loss. I can’t even write fiction about it without making all my current friends mistrust the confidentiality of our conversations.1
Has anyone ever ended a friendship with you in a way you felt you could respect, even if you did not like it?
Jo: I was wounded by one of the friends I met through the con artist. She ghosted me after ten years. I have often suspected that I am merely tolerated by people I thought of as friends. I recalled the times when she seemed happy and thought, was she performing for my benefit? When she was struggling through life, was I another burden, another task, because she couldn't bear to leave me then the way she ultimately did? Was I an object of pity and misery for her? Did she end up resenting me? I went back and forth and bludgeoned myself with the thought for a few years. There ten years is too many for me to believe it was a falsehood.
S: I invariably have found the whole experience unfathomably miserable, and have wished that there was more of a social norm of rushing to the aid of people who are going through such experiences, in the way that people do for romantic partnership breakups.
Je: Absolutely. About 20 years ago, I was the sidekick/protégé of a woman roughly old enough to be my mother, who led my evangelical Bible study group and a women’s writing group (this was before I transitioned). We bonded over kindness to each other's sensory sensitivities and a shared contempt for Marcus Borg. This ended when the Holy Spirit led me to write explicit gay romance in her class. The friend breakup was mutually agreed upon and sad for both of us. We respected each other's directness. Neither of us believed in shallow friendships where you tiptoe around your essential values mismatch.
How many friendship breakups have you experienced in your life? Fewer than five? More than ten? None?
A: Three, I think; one in high school, one in college, one in my twenties. The first one was pretty uneventful. The second friendship had been pretty short-lived.
K: Fewer than five. Only one in adulthood that I can remember.
Jo: Ones that stick in the memory, with defined endings? Maybe five.
Je: Five that I would consider true breakups.
Who was the first person you told after being dumped by your former friend (or vice versa)?
A: I told those mutual friends who had previously expressed concern to me about my ex-friend’s behavior. What’s weird is that after I moved out, they both complained that it was “awkward” to try to maintain friendships with both of us. I think eventually they both stopped talking to her.
K: My now-ex, because they were coming over when my friend and I were having our breakup phone call.
Jo: For the ghosting friend, I’m pretty sure it was you and my therapist.
Je: My husband is usually the first to know about anything big in my life.
Do you remember what you were wearing when the friendship ended? Did you still have any of your former friend’s stuff at your house, or vice versa, and did you ever participate in a post-breakup “give me back my stuff” swap?
K: I was wearing these grey college sweats. Thankfully there was nothing to return.
Jo: Negative on clothes, but I'm hardly a model of sartorial care. Of the ghosting friend, I still have gifts she gave me — paintings, sketches of me from when we hung out together. My left arm is inked exclusively with her work.
Je: B— left all her stuff in our spare room and we had to ship it to her for hundreds of dollars.
Do you think you are, on balance, a better or a worse person than your former friend?
K: I think we are both decent people in general. She works in public health so she might have a slight edge on me karmically. But I would like to think that my...what I feel to be a general noncombatitiveness, and I hope sense of care and willingness to work things out, is a point in my favor.
Jo: The ghosting friend and I are the same, although I think she’s braver. I knew her as well as I’ve ever loved or known anyone. I felt I understood her, and she understood me. I knew all about her weaknesses and mistakes. I loved them too, because they were hers, and I forgave them. I forgive them now. I forgive and admire her. She has not diminished in my mind at all.
As for the con artist, I am better than her, but I saw and felt frailties in her. She must have been terribly lonely.
Je: I can't judge the whole of a person based on their relationship with me. I believe I'm a more reliable friend than most people, in that I know what I can offer, and I follow through. However, some friends and ex-friends would say that my limits on what I offer are too tight and rigid.
Do you think there is anything you could have done to avoid the breakup, in retrospect?
K: I regret not telling her that I had apologized to her boyfriend. But part of my frustration was I never knew what else I had done wrong.
Jo: I can't think about that question for any length of time. I want too much to be loved.
Je: Honestly, I should have pulled the plug sooner in most instances.
Were any of your friendship breakups with a “best” friend? Or just friend-friends?
A: She was my person. I’d always thought of romantic relationships as temporary, and that she would be in my life forever. I was a mess. I started seeing a second therapist.
Jo: I write this warmly — I distinctly remember you pointing out that characterizing the ghosting friend as my "best" friend was a strange thing. That was kid talk!2 But yes, both women were what I'd call my "best" friend, from their respective periods. They were people I thought welcomed everything about me, and we lived, corporeally, in the same place.
S: Always with a best friend.
Je: One former friend always called us “best friends” in a way that made me uncomfortable because it felt possessive and akin to a loyalty test. The one person I really consider my best friend is a guy from college. We never discuss our friendship.
Have any of your current friends been dumped by another friend? Did you secretly suspect that your friend was at fault, or did you believe that they had been mistreated?
K: A while back, there was a falling-out between two of my friends who belonged to another small group. I can see how both of them contributed to the demise of the relationship. It was very much a matter of communication.
Jo: The con artist absolutely mistreated our friends -- much more severely than she did me. But overall, the people I hang out with tend to be conflict-avoidant, so the heat death of friendships is slow and unremarkable. There were no spectacular endings... except when friends developed into romantic pairings which subsequently ended.
Je: I tend to be the last friend standing.
Do you often suspect that your friends withhold their resentments from you until such time that these resentments reach a critical mass and they feel justified in turning on you?
A: I fear this sometimes. At this point in my life, though, I have trouble imagining a big, dramatic falling out with anyone. I could be wrong. But I think it’s likelier we’d just drift apart due to different priorities.
K: I do think that. I also think it’s natural to some degree. I do it myself sometimes. But I also don’t wait until things become unsustainable to bring something up, and when I do I try to be diplomatic. If you rip the bandaid off and get things over with, usually things turn out fine.
Jo: Autistic as I am, I like to think I can read a room, and that I can detect resentment when it builds. When conflict arises from someone else, it’s almost never about the thing being discussed/yelled about. It’s either a proxy, or more often a reaching for the nearest outlet re: unrelated stressors. All those need is time.
But do I bottle up resentment and let it out in one big litany? That’s a question There have been times. When it does happen, and I’m not heard, those are the instances I feel most justified in detonating a friendship. I can be unforgiving, I just prefer not to be.
Je: That was a huge issue in one of my former friendships. I have gotten better at choosing my friends.
What would it take for you to turn on your current best friend? Be as vague or as specific as you like.
K: If she did another thing that was blatantly racist.
Jo: 1. If they affirmed the things I suspect are my greatest faults, and defined me by them.
2. If they seriously harmed someone without apology or recompense.
3. If they somehow became a fascist.
Beyond that, I’d like to think I’m imminently appeasable.
Je: I’ll always consider my college best friend my brother, but that doesn’t mean I will “help” him in a way that I don’t think really helps him. That’s what we are fighting about at the moment, actually.
How long has it been since you last spoke to the big one? And are you still angry? If you saw them on the street right now, what do you think you would you do?
K: We saw each other at a mutual friend’s wedding a few years ago. We were cordial. I actually got along with her boyfriend quite well. He and I never actually had beef, which is part of what made the whole breakup so confusing. I don’t know what she’s up to now.
M: I am haunted by my friendship breakups. I actually dream about my friend-exes all the time.
Jo: Last contact with the con artist would have been about sixteen years ago. Ten years ago, I ran into her by chance in a different city — she was sitting outside the deli where I got lunch while in town — but she didn’t see me, and I turned around and walked away.
The ghosting friend, that’s a different story. It’s been about five years now. I would embrace her and ask to know everything about her life. I would want to hold her face in my hands, see the way it’s changed and stayed the same. I would tell her I love her, but she knows that, and what has she demonstrated through this long absence if not the fact that there’s no place for me in her life? If she sought me out, that would be something else. But a chance encounter, I would greet her warmly and briefly, and give her the opening for graceful exit. Then I’d call my therapist and cry and nurse my heart until I remembered other things and people. What could I say? She was the great love of my life. Really, that fact might explain everything.
S: I’m not still angry… it would feel crazy to see any of them on the street right now. I think I would want to say hello. What a thought experiment! I’m reeling a bit just from picturing it. I think I would feel (or perform feeling) rueful, maybe even sheepish or ever so slightly contrite and ashamed. Worried about how they perceive me to have changed in appearance over the years. I think I would to have, and want them to want to have, a sort of soulful, melancholic but ultimately heartwarming cup of coffee together or something—and then just go on our way again.
Je: It’s been about eight years. Whenever I display something she used to bully me about, I have a moment of anger, but I realize the “heat” mostly comes from my own shame at the behavior and my own vulnerability.
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I tend to assume most people don’t read their friends’ writing! Not that that’s an excuse to start airing out all your friends’ private conversation.
Ed. note: I believe that I said this but I no longer remember the precise context! I certainly hope I didn’t just interrupt him in the middle of discussing something painful to say, “You sound like a child.”
Jo's thoughts on pets and friends and grief and the family are so lovely and so profound.
I found answering these questions for myself an absorbing exercise. I have not shared it with anyone, and I probably won't, because I think it makes me (somewhat unduly) sound like a real dick.