As girls, we grow up with the notion that boys come and go but friends are forever. Our moms and aunts and grandmas always have one best friend that has been there for YEARS and has yet to become shady and hit the road on them. This generation is a little different. Real and true best girl friends are hard to come by! It seems like our generation is obsessed with the idea of convenience. No one has time to maintain long distance friendships; people like to jump around between different friends. Nothing is wrong with having a lot of friends, but instead of being able to maintain a lot of different friendships, the friendship break up is happening. After recently suffering one of my own with a best friend of almost four years, here is why they are way worse than real breakups.
1. You don’t see them coming.
When you enter into a romantic relationship, you only have two courses of action. You either marry the person, or you split. So you don’t have super high expectations that the two of you will NEVER break up. However, with friends, you don’t expect that one day, you’ll just stop being friends. You assume, rightly, that the friendship will make it through thick and thin, no matter what. After all, you can never have too many friends, but you can only have one romantic partner. (Unless you approve of cheating or are in an open relationship, but that’s beside the point.)
2. One less person to text your exciting news to.
If this friend is someone you were really close to, you’re used to texting them right after something eventful has happened. You had a fight with your boyfriend? You text them screenshots. Your mom is getting on your last nerve? She’s your girl! You just scored your dream summer job? She’s at your door with celebratory frappucinos. Now it’s like, when something eventful happens to you, you’re reminded that you can no longer text that one ex-friend of yours. Talk about an ouch!
3. The post-breakup clean out is tedious.
When you and a significant other breakup, usually there isn’t like, a lifetime of memories there, so cleaning your room of any evidence that the relationship existed isn’t THAT hard. But with a best friend, there are often years behind that friendship. There’s so many photos, little mementos, gifts, matching clothes and that TV show you used to binge watch together. It’s like trying to delete a huge part of your life. That isn’t easy. Which brings me to…
4. You can’t just keep their stuff.
With boyfriends, at least from my experience, after the breakup, they never ask me for their hoodie or t-shirt back. It just stays in a box in my closet, probably never to be touched again, but eh, I’m not going out of my way to return it. With friends, though, they probably have loads of your clothes or makeup that you guys toss back and forth. Now, I’m sure no girl wants to just give away her clothes, so usually you have to give your things back to each other, which is just opening the wound all over again.
5. One less person to hang out with.
I feel like every friendship has their ‘thing’ that you guys always do together. Whether it’s checking out new restaurants, getting your nails done, shopping, escorting each other to parties, or just having bomb sleepovers, you usually have something you two ALWAYS do together. Now, you need to find someone else to do that thing with, and it probably won’t feel the same. My ex-bestie and I used to escort each other to parties and then have a slumber party afterwards. It was just our thing, the next morning we’d make breakfast and watch Friends.
6. The squad could get messy…
This mostly applies if your friend was part of your girl squad. Sometimes, it’s only you that isn’t her friend anymore, but usually, it’s like she just drops out of the squad. Now, your squad is uneven and incomplete, things just aren’t the same, sometimes it only takes one to start the unraveling of the rest of the squad. I wish we could all be Taylor Swift and have her girl squad.
7. It usually happens painfully slow.
It isn’t like a relationship breakup where a conversation is NEEDED to confirm that the two of you are split. You usually get some closure from that and can ask your questions. In a friendship break up, often (not always though), it just happens slowly. She takes longer to reply to texts, starts to act distant, and stops hanging around. Suddenly she’s always busy until finally, you just aren’t talking at all anymore. It’s a little awkward to message your ex-friend and be like, ‘hey, why did we stop being friends?’ And it likely won’t result in an anything-but-awkward reconciliation.
8. You lose their family/pet/home.
Losing a best friend is like losing another family! At this point, you’ve probably spent as much time at their house as your own! Their family usually takes you in like another child, and if they have a pet, the separation is even harder. Granted, this could happen with a boyfriend too, but you likely weren’t with them for like, five years and constantly sleeping over…
9. There’s just no guidebook on how to get over it.
With romantic relationships, there have been legitimate books written on how to get over it. Every girl goes through it. Like I said at the beginning, it’s ALMOST inevitable. With so many tried and true tricks to getting over heartbreak, it’s not that hard a mountain to overcome. Nobody has written a guide on how to get over a breakup from a bestie, so how do you know what to do?
A best friend breakup is hard, no doubt. But in these cases, turn to your OTHER true blue besties for some quality girl chat and appreciating each other. And maybe a junk food filled sleepover.