We need to talk more about about female friendship breakups

Aug 12, 2024

I had gone to the spot where my best friend and I met each morning when we arrived school. We had been elementary school besties who stuck close together once we entered an overwhelming and sprawling junior high school.

But she wasn’t there.

This had never happened before.

I wandered the halls, confused, only to find her standing with a girl she had recently befriended and had made a third wheel to what had once been our cozy duo. I don’t remember the exact words she spoke when I approached her, but I’ll never forget the feeling of being told I was being replaced by the vastly cooler girl at her side.

I can still feel the shame burning on my cheeks, the choked-back tears stinging my eyes, and the desperate urge to throw up. I quickly turned away and put as much distance between us as I could so that she couldn’t see how much she had hurt me.

This time, however, I didn’t even attempt to hold back my tears or pretend that I wasn’t angry and heartbroken. Even a few years ago, I would have done my best to play it cool, but I’m at a stage of my life where I feel no shame for my capacity to care deeply about the people in my life.

So, if you were at Tatte on 14th Street last week and saw a blondish woman crying in her cappuccino, that was me.

I met this person—let’s call her Mary—a few years ago and we slowly became friends and eventually starting spending more and more time together until we began calling each other our besties, texting daily, sharing memes on Instagram and seeing each other weekly and sometimes more to hang out. This friendship brought me a lot of joy. She also acted like it brought her joy, even telling me how much the friendship mattered to her in a way other friendships hadn’t.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but suffice to say that a few months ago her communication and availability tapered off and when I tried to figure out what was up, said she was just busy and seemed annoyed by my question. Something felt very off and I was experiencing a lot of anxiety about the situation and also missing my friend.

When I finally was able to bring up the issue face to face, she flatly informed me that she wasn’t great at friendship and that ours had been a bit of an experiment and that she just realized that it was too intense for her and so she stepped away. So, it had nothing to do with her being too busy.

I felt so stupid and hurt and so many emotions that I can’t even begin to name. I hated that I cared so much, especially because she so clearly didn’t.

I spent three days crying, looking back at what I had thought was a great friendship only to learn she had just been trying on a role, and probably wasn’t having as much fun as it seemed. She wanted to be that person, but she just wasn’t.

At least not with me.

I am writing about this experience with such rawness and honesty because what I discovered as I processed this with various girlfriends is that this is something that happens a lot more than we talk about. While the women doing the dumping can be cast as villains, the fact is people have a right to leave friendships that aren’t working for them, and they have a right to do it less than perfectly.

This essay isn’t about tearing down my former friend. It’s about normalizing the grief that comes with this kind of experience. I want people to know that if this has happened to you and you were and maybe still are devastated, there is nothing wrong with you.

Psychology Today explains how unique female friendships can be:

Research suggests that women have higher expectations of support and intimacy in their close relationships than men do. Women integrate our friends into our lives as deeply as siblings, whereas men treat their friends more like cousins.

Because this kind of intimacy is often a feature of female friendship, we need to learn how to have open conversations to make sure the expectations for the friendship are reciprocal, because they often aren’t and someone gets hurt. We also need to learn how to do more conscious unfriending, to tweak a phrase from Gwyneth, so that when a friendship has run its course it can be ended in a more humane manner than often occurs.

For my part, I’m committed to learning how to communicate better and delve more deeply into this topic. On my reading list are two books: Fighting for Our Friendships: The Science and Art of Conflict and Connection in Women’s Relationships, which looks at the intricacies of female friendships and Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends.

I think in this era of increasing loneliness and sense of isolation, many of us could probably benefit from brushing up on our friendship skills.