Female friendship can be a volatile beast.
From primary school to adulthood, we meet hundreds of other women at school, work and social events but only a handful will become friends for life. Even knowing that certain friendships always have an expiry date, it’s still hurtful when someone decides they no longer value your friendship anymore and cuts you out of their life with zero explanation.
In Best Friends Forever: Surviving a Breakup with Your Best Friend by Dr. Irene Levine, she validates the feelings of disappointment, anger and loss that women go through when a friendship ends, especially when there are no obvious reasons. No one slept with anyone’s husband, it’s just simply over.
Is this the end?
To a lot of women, female friendships are incredibly important. Personally, I’ve always been a "girl’s girl" - I have a few good male friends but I get all of my emotional support from my female friends. Which is why the ending of a friendship, for most women, can be just as bad as a the end of a romantic relationship but with less support.
You’d never go on a mini-break just to get over the end of a female friendship. You probably wouldn’t dye your hair red or go travelling around South East Asia just because a good friend suddenly stopped talking to you. But I would be hard pressed to find a single person who wouldn’t feel the sting when they realized a close friend suddenly decided they no longer want you in their life. At least with romantic relationships there is usually a clear end - with female friendships, most of the time things just slowly drift apart so there’s no cut and dry explanation. The lack of closure can make it more difficult to deal with - what did I do wrong? Did I stumble into some bad lighting?
Toxic Friends
Often it’s just as hard being on the other side of the fence. What if you had a toxic friend who constantly made you feel bad about yourself, belittled you or was so negative that you dreaded seeing or speaking to them? There’s no easy way to end a friendship, especially if you have years of history together. So what most people end up doing is to just slowly drift away from them - stop returning phone calls or emails, become less available and just fade out of their life.
This can be confusing - most of the time people don’t realize why they’re being phased out. It would be much easier if it was just like a breakup with a boyfriend when one of you goes “It’s not you, it’s me” and then promptly asks for their Arcade Fire CD and cashmere jumper back. I’m all for being straightforward with someone but the friendship fade out is so awkward that you both end up hoping to never run into that person again.
How to deal
So what’s the best way to deal with ending female friendships? There’s really no cut and dry answer to this. Sometimes the feeling is mutual and you both just realize that the nature of your friendship has changed. I prefer to just downgrade a friendship rather than just cut someone off completely. It’s understandable that people change, our lives evolve and you might be closer to someone at a time when you worked together or lived in the same neighbourhood. I just don’t believe in cutting someone out and pretending your friendship never existed.
There is no reason not to be civil to each other when you see them around town or you run into them at a party unless they did something terrible like poison your cat or tried to seduce your husband. Just because you don’t have anything in common anymore doesn’t mean you should act like a stuck up bitch when you do happen to run into each other. It’s nice to respect the fact that once upon a time, you did share a close bond. It’s normal for friendship to change - it only makes you appreciate the friends you know you have for life even more.
Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures (Mean Girls)