In this excerpt from her book, Friendship First: From New Sparks to Chosen Family, How Our Friends Pave the Way for Lifelong Happiness, Gyan Yankovich examines the unique pain of a friendship breakup.
Friendships, like many of life’s most precious things, are fragile. Sometimes you can see them coming to an explosive end, as stunning as that moment between dropping a glass and hearing it hit the floor. But other times, the ending is quieter, creeping up so softly that you barely notice its arrival until you look around and realize that the friend you just felt by your side has slipped out of sight. It’s hard to say which kind of ending is worse.
To give friendships—and friendship breakups—the weight they deserve, we often compare them to romantic relationships. But when it comes to breakups, the difference between the two doesn’t necessarily lie in what we might assume: that people are sadder to lose a partner because it challenges what they believe about true love or how they imagined their future unfolding. But there’s also a fundamental difference in the way we handle problems in the two kinds of relationships, which can seriously alter how they come to an end.
In 2018, researchers Cheryl Harasymchuk and Beverley Fehr looked to determine the differences between how people approach problems in their romantic relationships compared to their friendships. In their study, they found that while people expected their partner to respond to problems in an active manner—in a positive way, by engaging in a conversation about whatever was going on, or in a negative way, by getting into a huge fight about it—people were much more likely to take a passive approach to their friendships.
According to the research, when we have issues with our friends, we’re likely to take one of two approaches: we either wait it out and hope that things improve without anyone actually bringing the problem up, or we withdraw from the relationship, ignore our friend, and hope they get the hint; essentially, we ghost. The concept of ghosting may have been born out of modern dating experiences but it can also haunt lost friendships.
I know the feeling of texting a friend and getting no reply, when that person used to be someone you spoke to every day, who used to send you compliments and buttery-sweet “I’m thinking of you” messages out of the blue. What I’ve always found most confronting about these situations is the long-lasting emotional impact they can have on you, as the faces of former friends haunt your dreams and your phone’s camera roll.
It’s embarrassing to tell someone you’re upset because a friend won’t reply to your texts, especially when that someone is also friends with the person who seems to have unsaved your number. Hearing that person’s name come up in conversation—which you will—can feel like pressing on a bruise.
When dating, even if you never really know why somebody ghosted or stopped making plans with you, it can be easy to find comfort in imagining explanations. They’ve been so busy at school! They probably got back with their ex! They might have lost their phone! They must have moved to a new country to start a new life! Even if none of those things is remotely true, the likelihood is that you’ll never really know what happened. Eventually, it becomes easier to accept that they mustn’t have been that interested in you.
But when it comes to being ghosted by a friend, these theoretical excuses are harder to find. They’d just tell you if they were too busy at work to catch up; you know they haven’t lost their phone because you can see they’ve been on Instagram; and if they moved to a new country to start a new life, someone sure as hell would have mentioned it to you by now. And matters only get worse when you hear that the person ghosting you has been hanging out with your mutual friends and answering their texts. If you’re ghosted by a date, it’s fair to assume that you’re not dating anymore. But everything’s a little foggier when it’s a friend canceling the plans. I have friends I haven’t hung out with one-on-one in years, but there’s no way I would stop calling them a friend, even if I didn’t see them for another decade. Or even two. Still, if you go from being in near-constant contact with a close friend, making plans, confiding in one another, and something shifts, how long do you have until you can safely say the friendship is over? How do you ever know if they’ve called it on their end if you never speak again?
In an interview with Time, Marni Feuerman, author of Ghosted and Breadcrumbed: Stop Falling for Unavailable Men and Get Smart about Healthy Relationships, explained there’s a key difference between friendship and romantic breakups that make the former worse. “The expectations are different in a romantic relationship,” she told the magazine. “People declare themselves ‘a couple,’ or the relationship is very defined: we’re dating, we’re engaged, we’re married.”
Without official labels or contracts, it’s easy for a friendship to silently drift so far into the distance that it becomes an invisible speck on the horizon, a memory of a friendship that once was. The pain of being ghosted by a friend isn’t just difficult because of the loss it represents but also because it can feel impossible to put words to.
Unless you’re in an open or polyamorous relationship, one of the key differences between friends and romantic partners is that you can theoretically have as many friendships as you want. For this reason, having an imperfect friendship, so long as it is still delivering some joy to your life, can still make sense. Friendship drift doesn’t always have to end with a relationship being completely over. Sometimes, it can simply mean you’re not as close to someone as you once were, without being totally out of touch. Often, only time will tell.
For every person who has been ghosted by a friend, there is someone who has done the ghosting. But if you’ve ever let a friendship fizzle out, it’s likely that there was never a single moment when a decision to ghost was actively made. Instead, it’s more likely you simply allowed a friend to drift away slowly because you felt it was for the best. Or maybe you didn’t even notice it was happening.
Within my own circle, once I start asking people about friendship drift, it seems like everyone has a story. A friend tells me about the choice he made to slowly distance himself from a group of old friends who started dealing drugs. I hear from someone who had a years-long friendship drift apart after discovering their differing political preferences. In the span of a few months, I listen to at least four different stories that all involve a vacation that changed the dynamics of a friendship forever.
C. S. Lewis wrote that friendship must be about something, “even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice.” While the “something” our friendships are centered around might not be as obvious as a shared hobby or interest (does anyone like white mice that much?), there is usually a shared circumstance or value that keeps us bound to people in our life.
As much as I know what Lewis wrote to be true, I also know how it feels when those shared somethings begin to shift: when you realize you don’t like partying as much as you once did and feel conflicted making plans with friends who still expect you to stay out late or when a friend gets a new job and you have a conversation that makes you realize your values around work and money no longer align.
If I take the emotion out of these scenarios, I can consider each experience from two different points of view. For every person I spoke to who had been ghosted by a friend without warning, there was someone on the other end who had, somewhere along the way, withdrawn their attention and affection. Comparing stories of friendship drift to breakups highlights the differences those researchers discovered about our differing approaches to conflicts in these two kinds of relationships.
Excerpt adapted from Friendship First: From New Sparks to Chosen Family, How Our Friends Pave the Way for Lifelong Happiness Copyright © 2024 by Gyan Yankovich. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, The Experiment. Available everywhere books are sold. theexperimentpublishing.com
