Going through the ups and downs of youth can be pretty rough sometimes; while we get frightened over the prospect of change, the thrilling sensation of being able to accumulate new experiences makes our hearts beat faster. At the end of the day, we’re creatures who are constantly shifting – whether we like it or not –, which means we’re always learning new things about ourselves once we finish a chapter of our lives.
Therefore, it’s not uncommon for us to let go of some people and welcome some others once a cycle ends, whether that be regarding a significant other, or a friendship in which the people just fell out of sync. The grief we experience will not necessarily be the same for both situations, and that’s totally fine; it makes a lot of sense, actually, because it’s normal for relations to have different degrees of closeness. And such closeness is often at the core of our opinions when we talk about the ways we handle relationships, playing a massive role on how we cope with breakups.
Nonetheless, our society has normalized the idea that romantic breakups tend to hurt more than friendship ones, and that’s not a universal truth. This brings us to the main point of this article: friendship breakups can be as heartbreaking as romantic ones – sometimes even more! –, and here’s why.
Is there an actual difference between a friendship and a romantic relationship?
Actually, they’re very similar; when you think about it, those are the people we trust for all the things in life, the ones that are always there for us. The people we love and care about. So why do we tend to differentiate them?
Truth is, we grew up understanding that romantic relationships are supposed to feel different from the rest of the relationships we experience. We should feel butterflies in our stomach, get all warm and fuzzy next to the person we like romantically. And this understatement is perpetuated when we claim that breakups between partners hurt a lot more because your love for them has to be bigger than the love you have for your friends – just because… they are your significant other.
Again, this cannot be taken as a universal truth – it ends up invalidating the different roles that love plays in our lives, making us believe that we need to hierarchize and prioritize the love we feel and give to others. Besides being absolutely unnecessary, this process of hierarchizing relations becomes part of a bigger problem: when a friendship breakup happens, we end up thinking we’re overreacting, as if it’s not supposed to hurt that much. Which brings us to…
We’re not taught how to process and cope with the grief from friendship breakups
Instead, what we’re often taught is that friendships do not last, that it is “natural” to lose a friend rather than lose a significant other. It makes us believe that friendships are extremely volatile and can be left aside whenever you want; as if affective responsibility is only necessary in romantic relationships, because the bond you create with your partner needs to be thoroughly maintained in order for the relation to last.
But the process of grieving the end of a friendship can be harder if you go through it by yourself. That’s because, when you break up with a significant other, you usually rely on your friends to help you cope and recover from the possible trauma and sadness – but if you break up with a friend and do not have this support network, it might be way harder to process the pain and learn from the problems that the friendship could have faced.
On that note, it’s important to highlight that we created a whole kind of ritual in order to grief over the end of a romantic relationship – the internet is full of tips on how to go through a breakup (in which it’s implicit they’re referring to a romantic breakup), and there are some rules over what you should and shouldn’t say. I’ve never seen such guidance toward friendship breakups, mostly because it, yet again, falls under the idea that “you will eventually make other friends”, entering a never-ending invalidation loop.
If everything in life is so ephemeral, then what’s the point of differentiating things that are, in fact, so similar?
People come and go throughout the times, and that’s an understatement. And, though some may stay longer (or even forever), the ones who go always end up marking our lives – be it in a positive or negative way, having a peaceful or troubled exit. It’s up to us to understand the impact they had on ourselves, and what we’ll learn with their departure. Sometimes, it’s a short goodbye; other times, it’s a hurricane that we never want to experience again.
As life progresses, we understand that what really matters is to be next to those we hold dear to our hearts – friends, partners, whoever makes the difference in your life. And we shouldn’t neither feel the need to label our love for them, nor hierarchize how important they are to us. Once we realize how similar friendship and romantic relationship breakups are, we draw the attention to something else: how we perceive and want to handle our relations, in our own way.
As a generation that needs to deal with so many past generational traumas and has been put under the pressure of starting to actively change the world, it is important to rethink how we view the relations we nurture. We should open the doors for new ways of thinking about how we bond with one another. Because if everything in life is so ephemeral, then what’s the point of differentiating things that are, in fact, so similar?
At the end of the day, pressuring ourselves into believing we have certain relations that need to be different, and labeling them once they change, works as a straitjacket: it will only hold us back. And, in order to move forward, it might be necessary to rethink society’s belief system.
The article above was edited by Lethicia Lioi. Liked this type of content? Check Her Campus Casper Libero home page for more!