The Female Friends Who Disappear

I know why girlfriends sometimes end things suddenly: I've done it.

One of the things I always thought I’d never write about was my fairly damning history with ending friendships. This tweet reminded me, and I spent all night, well, writing about that thing.

As someone who has a very hard time with social cues, talks a lot and is prone to uncontrollable bursts of Trump impressions—or as a child, Austin Powers impressions—I’ve never had an easy time making friends. I’ve written about that extensively on this Substack. But after a childhood full of being rejected by potential friends, I never imagined that a friend could break up with me.

At least until one day, in seventh grade. As silly as it is to talk about seventh grade when I’m now in my thirties, this one incident probably shaped my attitude about female friendship for decades, if not forever. See, I was part of a tight-knit group of girls. We regularly had sleepovers at my house, entered a talent show together with an a capella Nickelback-inspired song I had written, and had coordinating Halloween costumes which I crafted (seeing a pattern here?) I was, although I didn’t realize it at the time, the queen bee of the friend group. Everything we did was my creation or my idea. And I think over time my friends got sick of being my backup dancers.

I don’t blame them. I am a narcissistic person who is perpetually doing a bit, and at the time I had zero insight into my flaws. I figured if they wanted to come up with ideas, they’d…well, have ideas, and they never seemed to speak up. I got the sense that I was the leader of the group, but I thought they liked it that way.

What I didn’t expect was that they would never tell me they were mad at me, but one day they would concoct an elaborate scheme in which they suddenly voted me off our lunch table, Survivor style, using a code name for me that I didn’t know existed for extra dramatic flair (the code name was about my ass, by the way.) The ceremony started out as a game, and my heart sunk when I slowly realized the entire thing was premeditated to humiliate me. It was cruel, it was demeaning, and it was so traumatizing for everyone involved that several of these girls—now women—have tracked me down to apologize: one with a hand written letter several years later, another on Facebook during college, and another in an email in our late twenties, sent only because she heard about my book being published and was able to track down my professional email address from my author website.

I forgave them—we were kids, after all. But the incident stayed with me in a way I didn’t expect. I continued to make female friends, and some of these friendships were fairly healthy and happy. But I became allergic to the idea of having conflict with friends. My friendships were all or nothing. Either everything was fine, or I was going to disappear.

And as a result, I’ve disappeared many times. It’s been one of my greatest regrets.

One disappearance took place in high school. You couldn’t really “disappear” in a small boarding school where everyone quite literally knew where you lived, but I came pretty close. I was part of an a capella group (think Perfect Pitch, but a bit more folksy and somehow even dorkier,) which at one point I thought was the coolest thing you could do. By the time I was a senior, I found it a bit far less cool, especially as I aimed to get invited to alcohol-fueled parties off campus that didn’t include any impromptu renditions of For the Longest Time.

But the girls in my a capella group, especially my best friend Katie, were my core friends. I wanted to go to cool parties and date boys, but I didn’t want to lose them. They were funny, they were smart, they made me laugh so hard I couldn’t breathe. We would regularly have sleepovers at Katie’s house (I should clarify that we did go to boarding school, but some students lived close enough to be day students, and Katie was a day student- so nice try, fact checkers!) We would watch movies we hated just to make fun of them, and drive around in Katie’s car blasting classical music as loud as it could go, to the bewilderment of the neighborhood fuddy-duddies. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was experiencing friendship in the way I was supposed to. Most of the time, I felt like I was experiencing the types of things people experience when they’re having a good time, essentially acting in a movie about having friends. With Katie, I felt like I was actually having a good time.

But I found it hard to juggle dating and being in this friend group. I was the only one in the group with seemingly any interest in boys at all. I would have loved nothing more than for all of us to find partners (some of the girls were gay) and go on big group dates, but that wasn’t an option because they had no interest. At the beginning of senior year, I got into a relationship with a boy and almost immediately the two of us got suspended from our school for being caught with alcohol (this feels pedantic to mention, but I actually hadn’t drunk anything; my crime was “not calling the police,” if you can believe it.) My friend group didn’t support me. They said they were shocked I would “do something like that.” Katie told me she was “concerned about my values.” I felt them pulling away.

This was far too much conflict than I could handle. I was terrified that they would all drop me—perhaps with another Survivor ceremony, this one sung to the tune of Destiny’s Child’s Survivor in perfect harmony. So I started distancing myself. I stopped showing up to a capella practice about 30% of the time. My relationship with that boy eventually ended, as most high school relationships do, and I wound up dating someone else several months later—a Marxist-Leninist named Joe, who was the lead singer of a communist garage band (Their one song on Myspace was called “Violation of Human Rights.”)

Joe, who was for some reason the authority on “embarrassing musical endeavors,” thought the a capella group was cringe. He thought Katie was uncool. And at that point, Katie did seem uncool. Not because she didn’t drink or date, but because she seemed so uptight and judgmental. She had judged me for getting suspended, and judged me every time I skipped a capella (somewhat fair! I mean, I did sign up for it!) Now she was going to judge me for going to second base with someone who wore an Urban Outfitters T-shirt with Stalin on it.

One night, I performed some music I had written (I used to write songs and play guitar) at the biweekly school “coffee house” after hours. The plan was that Katie would sleep over at my dorm that night. Joe also came to support me. Joe wanted to hang out after the show. Because I knew Joe and Katie didn’t mix, my fantastic plan was that I’d hang out with Joe for an hour, then go back and have a sleepover with Katie. My logic was that Katie had other friends there, and she could entertain herself for an hour without my supervision. Unfortunately, time got away from me. As Joe and I were making out behind some bushes, Katie materialized suddenly to tell me it had been a few hours and she was going home.

We never spoke again. Every time I saw her in the hallways, I would avoid passing her. I just pretended she didn’t exist. I was terrified that she would speak to me first and we’d have to have a difficult conversation. I figured the less often I ran into her, the less likely that would be.

The time for a conversation with Katie had passed long before. Earlier that year, the seeds of conflict were there. Katie didn’t approve of me wanting to be “cool,” I didn’t think she was cool enough, she didn’t approve of me dating, none of the boys I dated liked her. Maybe if we had been older, we would have had a thoughtful conversation about how our paths were diverging, far before it became a serious problem. Or perhaps, even if we had the conversation, our friendship would have ended, but it wouldn’t have been so sudden.

But actually, I know that maturing wouldn’t have changed anything. Because my conflict-averse ass did the same shit to adult friends.

In fact, one of my biggest regrets—the thing that keeps me up at night when I’m trying to fall back asleep after rocking my baby at 2 AM—is the fact that I ended one of my closest friendships in my twenties by moving to another state.

I had a close female friend named Jessica. I sort of wrote about her before, in my book. She was several years older, far more successful, and already had many close friends when she met me. She was so much “better” than me that I almost didn’t understand why she wanted to be my friend. To be honest, I still don’t. I guess she thought I was funny. And if she happens to stumble upon this, I hope she can preserve my anonymity as I plan to do for her (I’ve changed quite a few identifying details.)

When Jessica and I met, our lifestyles were a perfect match. She was single and I was dating Nick, but we worked in the same industry, did the same stuff on the weekends, and she even became friends with Nick so the three of us could hang out. I genuinely thought we would be friends for life. We quickly became best friends, chatting all day at work over gchat, often meeting up after work for drinks and hanging out every single weekend in a big group with Nick and his friends. When Nick and I got engaged, she helped plan my bachelorette party and did an amazing job.

But soon, things changed. Nick and I got married, and she started a business. I got the sense that she wanted her friends to be deeply involved with her business—including being customers. Nick and I were trying to save money (Jessica was much more financially stable than we were) and it was getting difficult to find non-embarrassing explanations for why I couldn’t pay for her company’s services (I’m keeping the type of business vague for her anonymity, but it involved multiple, repeated things for which I’d have to pay small amounts.) Jessica’s other friends jumped at the opportunity to be top customers and even work for free. I simply didn’t have that time or money—actually, I did have the time, but I wanted to spend it with Nick. In fact, I wanted to spend all of my time with my new husband. I was happy to include Jessica, or our other friends, but having just gotten married I was a bit overly attached to Nick.

Jessica wasn’t being unreasonable when she expected me to help her with her business, she just had different expectations for friendships than I did. She had previously helped me with my writing (although it didn’t involve spending money repeatedly.) Also, all the other friends in her orbit were people who were happy to drop everything and help her. I realized that I wasn’t able to give as much of myself as she probably wanted.

There probably wasn’t anything that could have saved our friendship. And to her credit, Jessica tried. She noticed that we were drifting and began setting up a weekly 1:1 coffee date for us. But these dates began feeling like 1:1s with a manager who has you on a PIP (something with which I’m all too familiar.) Every time I saw her, she would tell me about a new thing I had done to offend her. She suddenly seemed extremely sensitive in a way that I didn’t recognize. For example, when she was struggling with something in her dating life, I saw her at a party and complimented her shirt, which she said was vapid and callously glossed over the difficulty she was experiencing (in my mind, it would have been rude to ask about something difficult or upsetting in front of other people.)

Jessica truly didn’t seem to like me anymore. She wanted me to attend events for her business, but I felt like a seat-filler, not someone she really wanted to see. But for whatever reason, it still felt like she was trying her hardest to make this friendship work. I considered officially breaking up with her to put us both out of our misery, but the idea scared me too much, especially because she had experienced friend breakups before and I had been along for the ride. These breakups seemed drawn out, painful, and not particularly helpful for anyone. They also didn’t seem to provide any needed closure to Jessica, who seemed fairly wounded by them. I was so terrified of having such a conversation that I would have preferred that our multi-year friendship, which I once considered the best friendship of my life, suddenly and silently implode.

Unfortunately, my reliance on Reddit didn’t help. Because I was scared of confrontation, I vented all my Jessica-related frustrations anonymously to Reddit. They were in agreement that I was in an abusive friendship (it was Reddit, after all.) They believed our problematic age gap (six years) created a toxic power dynamic wherein Jessica had manipulated me and destroyed my confidence. They believed she was trying to isolate me and drive a wedge between me and Nick. This sounds absurd (and it was) but at the time it made sense to me. Jessica often “joked” that despite being older, she looked younger than me, even knowing this was my biggest insecurity. She teased me about my lack of social skills and the fact that I thought paying $13 for an entree was a lot of money. At the time, I was able to laugh these things off but they felt less innocuous in the context of an abusive, toxic dynamic. I started to wonder if she wasn’t friends with me because I was funny. What if she was friends with me because she liked being friends with someone who made her feel better about herself? What if the entire friendship had been *scary music* TOXIC?

Suddenly, I didn’t feel guilty about ending things. I felt like I was escaping an abusive relationship. In fact, Reddit assured me I owed her absolutely nothing—I could simply send her an email telling her we wouldn’t be speaking again, or I could block her on all social media. I didn’t want to go that far, but I also didn’t want to have a drawn-out conversation.

In a way, we did have a breakup conversation. I made up a fake excuse not to attend one of the events Jessica was throwing because Nick didn’t want to go and I wanted to be with him. She figured out it was fake and accused me of “always having some excuse.” I gave her a canned response I learned from Reddit about her feelings being valid but my boundaries needing to be respected (Ugh, just shoot me.) She (perhaps correctly!) surmised I was a massive asshole. She ended the conversation with an “Okay.” With a period. Okay! Pack it in, friendship over!

I didn’t speak to her for a few weeks after that. Perhaps our friendship was already completely dead at this point. Maybe it had been for a while. Around this time Nick and I impulsively decided to move out of the state (long story—mostly related to the cost of living in the Bay Area, not at all related to Jessica.) We moved so suddenly that we never threw a going away party or announced anything. I did manage to get dinner with one friend before leaving San Francisco, but it wasn’t Jessica. I received a Facebook message from Jessica a few weeks later, asking if it was true that I had moved.

I felt awful, but what was I going to say? Was there any conversation that would have made any of this easier? Surely, I could have handled it better. Like I said, this is a regret of mine—it’s something I’ve been afraid of writing because of what a massive asshole I was. And instead of apologizing for my cowardice, which I absolutely should have done, I just told her that “it all happened so suddenly,” and I simply forgot to tell her. Whoops! Don’t you hate it when you just trip on the state lines and accidentally move thousands of miles away?

That was many years ago, and I’ve since come to terms with the fact that I—not Jessica, not Katie, not even the girls who bullied me in seventh grade—am the problem. I am the asshole. I am the villain. There is a decent chance—probably close to 100%—that a woman has mentioned me in therapy.

But I’m not an asshole because I want to hurt people. Quite the contrary. I’ve been an asshole because I’m terrified of hurting people—terrified of any conflict at all—and a sick part of me believes that by disappearing, I can prevent hurt feelings and unpleasantness. Because while I can end friendships, I simply can’t fight with friends. Fighting with friends feels about as perverse as incest—I simply don’t do that. I can fight with family members. I can fight with my husband. My brother is one of my all-time best friends, and once, in our twenties, we got into such a huge fight at a Whole Foods that Nick still mentions it to tease me (the best part is I actually don’t remember what the fight was about, but I do remember being violently furious at my brother as we passed by the organic rotisserie chickens.)

I’ve wondered why I can fight with my brother and husband but not other friends—why we can have conflict, even fairly tense conflict, and it might be unpleasant but doesn’t feel wrong. I suppose it’s because these relationships feel secure in a way that my friendships don’t. In fact, Nick is the only man I’ve dated with whom I really argued. All my past romantic relationships basically ended at the first argument, if you could call them arguments at all. Meanwhile, Nick and I got into an argument about three weeks into our relationship (in case you’re wondering what it was about, he played a prank on me by pretending to have thrown out my off-brand Ugg boots) and we stayed together, so perhaps there was something about him that felt more secure. Nick can attest we have had many arguments since then!

I don’t know if my friendships will ever feel secure enough for non-friendship-ending arguments to happen. Despite my trouble making friends, I do have a few very close female friends (mostly long distance) and I simply cannot imagine fighting with them. I mentioned this to one of them (who says she has the same conflict-averse nature) and we made a half-joking pact to “just bury our feelings if we’re ever mad and get over it without saying anything.” It helps that these friendships were built with an understanding of relatively low expectations. We’re long distance, there’s no expectation for us to travel to see each other regularly, and we’re all in a similar stage in life (with young children) where none of us expect to be the others’ first priority. Maybe that’s all I need.

But as happy as I am with my current friendships, I can’t help but feel like there’s something deeply wrong with me. I know my reactions to previous conflicts have hurt people, even if it wasn’t my intention. And tracking those people down to apologize feels more self-serving than leaving them alone (or am I resisting this because I’m still terrified of conflict? I was afraid to even write this, in case one of them somehow recognized themselves!)

But maybe my story could at least somewhat explain the phenomenon of women’s friendships ending suddenly and shockingly. It seems like lots of women have stories similar to the things Jessica or Katie might say about me. Of course, you only hear their sides, so perhaps the “ghosting” friend actually made their feelings fairly obvious prior to ghosting. But I have a feeling I’m not the only one who feels that fighting with friends is inherently wrong—who feels nauseous at the idea. I wouldn’t be surprised if this feeling was behind a great deal of the shocking and traumatizing friend breakups or ghostings that you hear about. Not to give those people an excuse—I’m certainly not excusing my own cuntiness here (bad cuntiness, not serving cunt, although I like to think I do that too.)

I don’t know why I’ve said all this. Maybe a woman who has been in Katie’s or Jessica’s shoes will read this and feel better about her obnoxious friend who disappeared, realizing that the problem wasn’t her, it was the friend’s anxiety and conflict-averse nature. Or maybe I just needed to tell someone—why not thousands of strangers? I mean, that’s far less scary than having an awkward conversation with one friend.

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