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Breaking Up With Friends

by 9 Comments

FrenemiesYears ago I sat in a dark theater watching Mean Girls with my best friends. I watched Cady battle with frenemy Regina and wondered if all friendships involved ups and downs, hate and admiration. It seemed as if friendships never ended.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned some friendships can and do end.

Why do we hang onto old friends? In my case, I ended a friendship with someone I was friends with since elementary school. Though she stuck with me through high school, in college we grew apart and later down the line she failed my friend litmus test: Stick with me no matter what, in good times and bad.

Letting go of a childhood friend was not easy. And as long as we’re talking about elementary school, I will bring up “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)“:

Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and
lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you
knew when you were young.

I’ve known some of my best friends so long that they might as well be sisters, which is why it was so hard to walk away from a friendship that spanned space and time. The day I realized our friendship was over was when my husband and I sat down to make our guest list for our small backyard wedding. I couldn’t put her on the list because I knew she hadn’t always supported me.

Maybe that’s a high and even unrealistic friendship standard, but links to the past should be strong ones built on trust and fondness, not on appearances. True friendships at their core are relationships between two people who should be able to share anything without judgment.

What I learned from this experience is that I have to know where to draw my lines and set standards. Is it unrealistic to expect loyalty in good times and bad? Maybe, but that’s why I have only a small group of friends who have known me, in some cases, since I was five years old.

Breaking up with anyone, whether it be a friend or partner, is rarely easy. But at the end of the day, the most important people in my life should be there for me in thick and thin.

Either that or I’m just too Italian. That can be another explanation to explore on another day.

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  • MJ

    I totally understand what you mean when it comes to breaking up with friends. Over the years, I’ve had to do that, not so much because they weren’t supportive of me but rather we were going in separate lanes in life and we just grew apart. I learned that as we climb through life, you can’t take everyone with you but while they are there, they serve a purpose so that keeps me from being sad about lost friendships. With that said, the closest people to me still live in my home state of NYC which is miles from where I lived now. These two friends of mine I’ve known since elementary school and no matter how far we are we are so into each other’s lives you would think we lived next door. I would rather have a few friends like that than host of unsupportive, fake ones any day!

    • I totally agree! One wildly supportive friend is better than a faux-friend. I worry that sometimes I am being unreasonable. I don’t think loyalty or trust should be something that’s demanded blindly, but it should be mutual.

      I find that space, time and change does test friendships. If someone does not make it through any one or all of those changes, then they probably weren’t meant to be friends with you in the first place.

  • I’ve had to break up with friends who were unsupportive too. With women it’s often a result of jealousy or their own baggage that makes them act and react in unsupportive ways. For instance, if a woman is not used to being treated well by men she will find it difficult to be happy for you when you find a great guy. If she feels you’re prettier than her she might choke on compliments and not be able to tell you you look great. I started to go by how I felt after I spent time with certain friends. If I left feeling confused, filled with self-doubt and basically not good, I knew that friendship needed examining. If you leave feeling like you’ve been lifted up, that’s a good friend and a keeper.

    • So true! I’ve had this situation with this particular friend where we were basically going through similar issues and she was just not supportive of me at all, even years afterwards.

      I think if people were more picky about their friends, they’d probably have less problems. I’ve always been a very guarded person with very few close friends, so when one isn’t supportive, it’s hard but at the same time easy to say goodbye.

      • A similar thing happened to me recently. I’d been really close friends with a girl for 4½ years, while we both went through shitty relationships. She was always there for me. Then I met a guy who were really good to me, but she thought it was a stupid idea, and told me not to pursue the relationship. When I chose to do so anyway (i.e., not doing as I was told), she got angry with me, and told me how all I did was make mistakes, and in the end I had to drop the friendship.

  • Terri

    This post got me thinking if I’ve ever done the same. I know that I’m much older than you, but in recent years good friends have begun to pass away…and it has given me pause. I tend to simply let friendships fade away rather than “break up.” Was this friend aware of “breaking up.”? The flip side of this is the great excitement I see on Facebook about an upcoming high school reunion. I’m simply NOT excited about it at all. At my age, I’m more concerned with being forward looking than in looking back.

    • I think it’s a strange situation that doesn’t happen often. It’s so hard to break ties with the social media world that exists right now. I think most friendships fade away rather than end dramatically.

      I think it’s all how you choose to look at it!