I knew my relationship with my now-ex BFF had run its course years before I worked up the nerve to say so. We used to hang out all day and then talk on the phone at night; we finished each other’s sentences and wore each other’s clothes and were tight with each other’s moms. But over time, something shifted and the closeness started to feel forced, then stifling. I felt like accepting the end of a relationship that had once been so important would be a failure—we were supposed to be best friends forever. So even when my friend and I had clearly stopped enjoying each other’s company, inside jokes and encouragement replaced with passive aggression and obligation so that I always felt worse after seeing her, I kept up the pretense.
In addition to the guilt of letting a decade-long friendship dwindle, I also waited so long to end it because I didn’t know how; I literally didn’t have the social script. Romantic breakups are an accepted part of life, a rite of passage with familiar rituals—a dramatic haircut, eating ice cream and crying to rom-coms, rebound sex, nights out with your friends. But there’s no such formula for dealing with the end of a friendship, no roadmap that recognizes the grief of such a rupture and simultaneously assures us we’ll get through it. And having to actually say any version of “I don’t want to be friends with you anymore” felt overly dramatic, even childish. Who says that after middle school? Well, lots of people, it turns out.
Recently, I began to suspect that friendship breakups might be more common than they seemed to me back then. That maybe they make you feel alone not because they’re shameful aberrations, but because we don’t talk about them as much as we should. I wanted to know how other women had handled the end of a close friendship, if they had grieved (even if they were the one to end it), and not known what to do with that grief. I wanted to know if maybe there was a social script for this kind of thing after all; just one that’s not as widely known as its romantic breakup counterpart.
So I threw together a quick survey, thinking I’d find a few women willing to share their stories. Over the first weekend after I shared the survey on X (formerly known as Twitter), 125 women responded with stories of betrayal and heartbreak, dramatic fallouts and ghosting, spite, and regret. I was blown away by not only the volume of responses in such a short time, but also by how much emotion poured out of the responses themselves. It felt like these women had been holding onto these stories, waiting for an outlet:
“There’s just an empty second half of the book where she and I should have been filling in a story together.”
“I went through intense mourning.”
“I still feel betrayed and resentful.”
One detail really stood out in the results of my very informal survey: Almost 90 percent of respondents said that their friendship breakup was as big a deal, or a bigger deal, than some or all of their past romantic breakups. Almost 90 percent! (88.8 to be exact.) Clearly, we’ve been misled by the prevalence of rom-coms to believe that romantic love is the end-all-be-all of heartbreak, when in truth women are out here agonizing over our closest friendships.
“There’s no way to explain or describe the hole she left behind,” wrote one respondent. “Losing a female friend feels like losing a piece of my heart and leads to questions about who am I as person,” said another.
Many pointed out the lack of social recognition of the pain of friendship breakups, saying this made their experience even harder. “It has been one of the loneliest experiences of my life,” one woman wrote. Another said, “I wish more people knew that you can still miss friends years and years after not speaking anymore.” And another really hit the nail on the head: “I really needed the same level of community support that I would if I’d been through the same experience with a significant other, but that framework isn’t really available.”
If so many of us are suffering through these friendship breakups alone, maybe it’s time to start talking about them more openly—to treat them as the significant losses that they are, and to ask for the same level of support we’d expect from our communities around the ending of a romantic relationship. In order for friendship breakups to be treated with the reverence and care we need, we first have to acknowledge the significance of the relationships themselves, before they end—to stop treating our most formative, meaningful friendships as inherently less important than romantic relationships.
Though there has been a lot more discussion recently about how central friendships can be to a happy, well-rounded life, they still tend to be treated as secondary to romantic partnerships and familial bonds. This is partly because of societal focus on the nuclear family—which translates to pressure to find “the one.” But maybe it’s also because there aren’t the same clear markers of a significant friendship: there isn’t the traditional trajectory of dating to moving in together to marriage (let alone a wedding—a big party where you proclaim your love for each other), or even an equivalent conversation that marks the shift from casually dating to an “official” relationship. Similarly, there often isn’t an “official” breakup conversation to mark the end of a friendship, either—and without that definitive ending, it’s harder to build the kind of wallowing and rebuilding rituals we have to ease use through the end of a romance.
Only 36 percent of the women who responded to my survey reported having an actual conversation (sometimes in person, often via text or email) about ending their friendship—the rest reported either a “slow fade,” where contact became less and less frequent until it stopped entirely, or ghosting, where one friend abruptly stopped responding to and/or blocked the other on social media without explanation. And of those that did have a conversation, many only did so after a long period of silence.
I’ll admit that I first tried the slow fade with my ex-BFF, hoping that the friendship would just wither on its own without me having to officially end it. At the time, I felt like maybe that would make it easier to reconnect eventually. Our communication did dwindle, but it never faded out entirely, and I found myself getting irrationally irritated whenever she reached out—even when it was innocuous and friendly. I knew this was unsustainable, and not fair to either of us, so I finally sent a text saying that I felt it would be best if we were not in contact anymore. Even though I was the one to say it, it felt so painfully final. So I understand where all of those ghosters and faders are coming from—even though the ghost- and fade-ees who replied to my survey mostly described the receiving end of that silence as very unpleasant.
“I felt bereaved and angry and confused and hurt,” one woman said about being ghosted. “It haunts me to this day,” said another. And a third: “I think the worst part for me was the not-knowing. I still don’t understand what happened between us, and I will always miss our friendship.” The words “abandoned,” “betrayed,” and “devastated” came up a lot. On the other hand, being on the receiving end of an official friendship breakup isn’t great either. “It was one of the most devastating things that ever happened to me,” one woman said about her ex-BFF’s friendship-ending email. “I still talk about it in therapy,” said another.
One thing is clear: feeling heartbroken over a friendship breakup is more common than it may seem when you’re going through it, reeling and grieving and wondering why it hurts so much—whether there was an official breakup conversation or not. When I put this informal survey together, I had no idea how validating it would be to scroll through response after response affirming how painful it can be to let go of a close friendship.
Of course I hope I never have to part with another of my closest friends—but if I do, I’m definitely going to talk about how hard it is, rather than keeping it to myself out of confusion, surprise, or misplaced shame. I’m gonna eat ice cream and watch sad movies, and maybe even get an impulsive and questionable haircut. Or maybe I’ll invent an entirely new ritual, just for the specific and hugely significant loss that is the friendship breakup.
Lilly Dancyger is the author of First Love: Essays on Friendship (The Dial Press, 2024), and Negative Space (SFWP, 2021). She lives in New York City, and is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has been published by Guernica, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Longreads, Off Assignment, The Washington Post, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more.