Everywhere I look, I’m flooded with information, articles, and advice about romantic relationship breakups. It feels like every week, there’s a new method for getting over a breakup, winning back a boyfriend, or cutting your ex out of your life in a healthy way.
In the midst of all of this breakup advice, I have noticed a lack of advice about breakups between friends. There is a significant amount of coverage about celebrity feuds, especially between women, that often end up labeling the women as petty or crazy.
The media doesn’t really talk about realistic friendship breakups or give sound advice. From my own experience and the experiences of those around me, breakups between friends, and even best friends, are very common and not as openly discussed like romantic relationships.
Just like romantic relationships, breakups between friends can happen for a number of reasons. There could be a fight. Distance could make it hard to stay in touch. Both people might be too busy to maintain the relationship or the desire to keep in contact just fades. There could be larger issues like personality conflicts. Sometimes feelings just fade and it becomes too hard or too awkward to fix it. It doesn’t seem normal to tell a friend, “I’m breaking up with you,” so it’s easier for the relationship to drift apart.
In some ways, these fallouts should be treated similarly to a romantic relationship. You go through stages of grief, anger, distraction, and reflection. Like romantic relationships, it’s important to know when to reach out to repair the relationship and when to let go. But because there are fewer conversations out there on these types of broken relationships, it is hard to find advice and know what to do in these difficult situations.
It can be harder to hold on to these relationships because you don’t go into a friendship with the commitment that you have when you start a romantic relationship. But I also think, depending on the situation, friendships are easier to repair than romantic ones for two reasons.
First, it is more acceptable for friendships to fade in and out of closeness. Sometimes you are really close to someone for a period of time, and then it fades, and only comes back as time allows.
Second, it’s easier for friendships to come back after time apart because there is no romance, making the time you are apart less questionable (there are no “we were on a break” issues).
We believe our close friendships are there to last and that our friends are supposed to be there through the highs and lows. We tell our closest friends our deepest secrets and are often more vulnerable with them at times than a romantic love, making it challenging when these friendships end because it takes away a sense of security and trust.
Friendship breakups are also hard because they’re difficult to explain to others. It’s a lot easier to talk about a break up in a romantic relationship than it is to talk about a friendship breakup, especially when you share mutual friends. If you both share the same friends, it can create awkwardness in groups or force mutual friends to choose sides.
Communication is key in maintaining any relationship. It is important to communicate with your friends about how you are feeling and put in the effort to fix it when you can. Friendships are not always easy, but like any type of relationship, with effort and the acceptance that it isn’t always going to be perfect, it’s possible to make it through rough patches. Sometimes things come to an end, and you should learn and grow from these experiences.
It’s also important to talk to other friends about your friendship breakups. They may be going through similar things, and opening up a dialogue about what it feels like when friendships end can help people get support and advice on what they should do.
Breakups are hard no matter who they are with, and it should be acceptable to cry in your room and eat a pint of ice cream over any type of fallout, even if it’s not a romantic one.
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