when friendships end: the particular grief of friendship breakups
It has been a longtime dream of mine to earn my living as a writer and to offer you reflections from my life that can support your healing. If this writing resonated with you, you can become a paid subscriber. Right now annual paid subs are just $43 and you get access to weekly co-writing hangs, meme mail, and more!
A few weeks ago, I sat on my couch with a human who was one of my closest friends here in Los Angeles. We met years ago, on my first trip to LA. It was one of those Tinder matches that queers know, where you’re not sure if you’re meeting up as friends or if you’re on a date (for those not in the know: it’s now very common for queers to use dating apps to meet friends and build community).
They came and picked me up from my friend’s place and we drove to Griffith Park. As we sat on a picnic blanket, fizzy waters in hand, we looked around us to see more and more corgis. We delighted in the thought that we may have found ourselves in the middle of a corgi meet up. But no…it was better than that.
Across the street, we saw a man walking up to the park with a corgi in a backpack. The corgi, whose name we’d come to learn was Maxine, was wearing sunglasses. This was a celebrity corgi. I was, after all, in LA.
Over the coming year, as I visited LA more and more, this friend and I grew closer. A bond that grew deeper when I moved to LA in May of 2023. Eventually, I’d come to call them one of my best friends in LA. They supported me through my recent breakup, we took a trip out to the desert together, and spoke on the phone almost every day.
But then things got complicated. I didn’t realize that I’d been crossing their boundaries — and by the time they told me, it was hard for us to recover. Still, we chose to step into hard conversations together, named our hurts, and shared our needs with each other. When we met that day, on my couch, we hadn’t spoken in weeks. We’d both needed some time to process.
In that final conversation, we realized that our needs were incompatible. We both needed something that the other couldn’t offer. Knowing that this was the end of our deep intimacy, we discussed boundaries for engaging with each other on IG (still okay) and what we would do if we saw each other out in the world (acknowledge one another with a wave or a hug). We shared our gratitude for our friendship. And then we said goodbye.
This is not the first friendship breakup I’ve had. When I was fourteen, about to begin high school, my two best friends broke up with me. That summer, I’d had sex for the first time — except, I’d only realize years and years later, the sex wasn’t consensual. I’d been raped. The boy who raped me told everyone. And as they do in suburbs, the rumour spread quickly. I now had a scarlet letter attached to my name: S for slut.
I’d been close with L and D since grade 6. We occupied that middle space of not popular but not totally unpopular. Sometimes we’d be invited to the cool kid parties. And when L’s mom went away, everyone would come over to her house and we’d dance in the basement to Britney Spears’ signing “hit me baby one more time” while sipping on screwdrivers. We’d never cared about being cool. We just wanted to have fun.
That all changed though. L and D called me to let me know that they couldn’t be my friend anymore. They wanted to be cool. And there was no being cool with me and my scarlet S. They cried. Told me they were sorry. And our friendship was over. I entered high school without a single friend, all on my own to deal with the relentless bullying and harassment.
In the years between my first and last friendship breakups, I’ve had many others. A once dear friend ghosted me in the wake of my father’s death. Another friendship ended when I could no longer sit by and watch someone I loved stay in an abusive relationship. Other friendships have ended over changing boundaries, as I stepped into the realization that I no longer needed to accept poor treatment in order to be in connection.
Each breakup has hurt — some even more than the endings of romantic relationships. Because for me, friendship holds the possibility of forever. We tend to use the word forever to talk about romantic relationships: to love and to cherish until death do us part, you know. But I’ve long since let go of the myth that the most romantic thing you can do is to stay forever in a partnership that’s no longer working for you. Friendship, however, holds a different temporal possibility.
In my book, Touch Me, I’m Sick, I propose an understanding of time rooted in foreverness. Not in the “till death do us part” kind of way that has been romanticized by the cisheteronormative couple formation. Forever marks an intended duration, one’s intention to be in relation for as long as is possible. I am reminded of Billy-Ray Belcourt’s words in his poetry collection This Wound Is a World: “the body is an assemblage, a mass of everyone who’s ever moved us, for better or for worse.”
Foreverness, here, is less about pledging to be a physical presence in each other’s lives forever. Instead, it is about honoring, in our hearts, the ways in which our love leaves imprints, ephemeral traces that never go away. Forever as in the Donna Lewis lyrics “I love you always forever. Near and far closer together. Everywhere I will be with you” but without the “everything I will do for you” because we’ve all been working hard on letting go of our codependent tendencies. Our forever is built on the soil of earned secure attachment.
Part of the reason why my friendship breakups have been more painful to me is because friendship was the terrain where I first experienced secure attachment. Through my friendships, I got to practice showing up as my authentic self and truly be vulnerable. I got to test out having boundaries for the first time. I cried and let myself be held by my friends as yet another person broke my heart. My friends helped me put myself back together again.
It makes me sad that we have so few cultural representations of friendship breakups. I feel their absence and understand why they’re missing. We live in a world that has taught us that friendships are important up until we find the romantic love of our life. Then, friendships get relegated to the bottom of the relationship hierarchy.
This privileging of romantic relationships over our platonic (and here I’d like to pause to say that the distinction between these two is very, very blurry to me. I romance my friends. I get jealous when my besties have new relationship energy with a new human. I celebrate my friendship anniversaries.) re-enforces the couple as the ultimate form of relationality — and with that, the family unit that is presumed to follow.
This trap does not serve us. We were meant to be in community — something that Black, Indigenous, and people of color have long recognized and upheld, but which colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism have sought to abolish. Why? Because we’re more powerful when we’re together.
If we built robust communities, if we prioritized our friendships as much as our romantic relationships, then we’d actually not need the state (which is already failing people anyway. Like if you want everyone to reproduce, why do people have to pay for daycare???). When we treat our friendships as significant we challenge the relationship hierarchy and systems of power.
I want us to celebrate our friendships. Hold them as sacred. And allow ourselves to grieve them fully when they end.
I want us to share our stories of friendship breakups. To talk about these heartbreaks as much as all the others we will experience in our lives. And so I invite you to share, in the comments here, so that we may all support each other in grieving these losses.
Thank you for making it this far! Liking, sharing, and commenting means the world to me. Whether you forward this essay to a friend or share it on your social media, your referrals help me grow my readership and make it possible for me to live as a writer facing the AI invasion under late capitalism. So endlessly grateful for your support! xoxox
I literally had a break-up with a dear friend yesterday. Maybe I didn’t know that’s what it was when it happened. I definitely did not think having the conversation I fearfully had with her would result in the break-up, and yet the synchronicity of this post and your words help me to know that it’s nothing personal, in that we are unable to meet each other’s needs and boundaries and compassionately communicate. So, it is time. This article helped me to not feel alone, that friendships end and it’s not my childhood trauma wounds unconsciously causing this rupture, and I shouldn’t be ashamed. Thank you.
I really value this insight. I would say that one thing I have learned from treating friendships with the same sincerity and energy as romantic relationships is that sometimes it makes it so my anxious attachment is present there too. I’ve recently been trying to learn the value of friendship as an emotional space in which intensity need not be present. There is something to be said for relationships where we don’t expect the whole world from each other. My friendship breakups have invariably been because of that