Reddit’s “you don’t owe anyone anything, ever” attitude is more brazen than what most people will outright say, but it’s essentially what most people have internalized. Estrangement, not just with friends but with family, has to be way up in recent decades. There’s this belief that every relationship has to serve you at all times and if it stops serving you, even temporarily, you have a right to end it.
There’s just so many forces pushing people away from each other, even separate from this pervasive cutting-off culture. I find it really concerning.
"If a relationship doesn't totally serve you or ever makes you feel even slightly uncomfortable, cut that person out of your life" -- person who spends time alone at home on the internet.
...
(Looks in mirror. Looks down at comment text field.)
I think it's more extreme on Reddit but I think it's reflected in people's thinking more broadly, especially young people. "Twitter is not real life" isn't really true anymore. Internet culture is our culture. It's a major theme of CHH's writing.
Years ago, I had to quit reading specific Reddit communities because there were too many posts where people agreed that no one was ever obligated to help with their nieces and nephews, ever, because “their parents were the ones who made the choice to have children, not you.” There was a post about a teenager whose older sister was the mother of three young children and had just had a catastrophic breakup with her husband. The sister and her kids had moved back in with her parents. The teenage uncle was expected to watch the kids, ages two and up, for a single hour a day on Mondays through Fridays. It didn’t conflict with any extracurriculars of his, and he was basically just expected to keep them alive and relatively healthy for an hour. He was allowed to plunk them down in front of the TV if he wanted to. At most, he had to give them snacks and maybe change the two-year-old’s diaper.
But no, that was so unreasonable, and he was being “parentified,” and he was totally entitled to tell his sister that he didn’t owe her anything and she needed to find and pay someone else to babysit.
Edit: Just remembered - the teenage uncle’s parents worked from home, too, so he could have gotten one of them if there was any type of emergency.
Incidentally I also saw a post about a woman charging full price to other family members. No family discounts, and everybody was supporting her. It's like gee, what's family even for anymore, if you can't even get a discount? Sure, no one owes anyone anything. But what about little perks? Perks are nice, aren't they? Personally, perks make my whole day. Even a relatively meaningless one. It makes me feel like my family loves me and have my back if things go south. I got a Christmas present for my kids from a cousin. Not a very expensive one, and felt the warm fuzzies all over. And if you don't give any perks, ever, should you hope to receive any? This kind of legalism is so joyless. No wonder Redditors have no village (sorry, to trip on another CHH theme). They only want villages when the villagers show up, casseroles in hand. (and yes, the parenting subreddits are also full of "you don't owe anyone anything blah blah")
The "no obligations to anyone, ever" is a really bad trend. The natural conclusion is that you can only have "fairweather" friendships, relationships, and family ties. Which isn't how reality works.
It also means that you can be dropped at the first inconvenience.
Yes, absolutely this. I think it is to some degree inevitable - communal relations weakened under urbanization and industrialization; we simply can't have an internet age w/o similar change (and tbh suburbanization already brought changes, just a bit more class specific and hidden by social pretense). But it genuinely seems very important to me when people push back on some deranged take about friendship. Usually I dislike those pile-ons. But there is just no way to survive without other people. It is ok if the amount of work expected of any one person lessens, and even if some roles shift to professionals (childcare and therapy have already done this, I would argue pretty clearly for the good, on net). It's not ok for what's happening to online millennials and zoomers to presage our future. It just won't sustain itself.
“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.”
My friend “Nell” was my best friend since kindergarten. I went to college halfway across the country, but we saw each other when we were home and she went on my family vacation for a week every summer. Then during junior year, she started dating her now-husband and was less communicative with me during the school year. My parents were friends with her parents, and during Christmas break, the families were supposed to meet up and go out to dinner. Nell and her boyfriend showed up late and seemed weirdly distant from everyone else. I tried to get to know him, but he was really standoffish.
For the rest of the school year, Nell barely got in touch. Then my extended family decided to not have the vacation anymore because most of the cousins were teenagers or in college and had summer jobs. I didn’t bother telling Nell because I figured she was busy, wasn’t really connecting with me, and wouldn’t want to go anyway. She did find out afterward that our family had quit doing the vacation and it wasn’t that I’d just stopped inviting her. We graduated from college the year her younger sister graduated from high school, and I saw her at her sister’s graduation party.
After college, I went to law school locally and she was living with her boyfriend about a hundred miles away in a neighboring state. Now that we were geographically closer together, I wanted to see each other more often, and kept trying to schedule when my now-husband and I could come visit. She was the one who suggested we visit in the first place, but wouldn’t commit to a date.
My husband and I started dating in high school, so Nell had known him for a long time, too. We all did the same extracurricular together in high school. She knew we wanted to get married eventually, and one day in an email she asked if we had any wedding plans yet.
I wrote her this long, heartfelt email asking her to be my maid of honor. I said I knew we weren’t as close as we used to be, but I still considered her my best friend and this would be a fun and happy time to see each other more often. I mentioned that my parents were paying for the whole wedding and that because most of the other bridesmaids were going to be teenage relatives, I wouldn’t expect her to throw a bachelorette party. I also mentioned that I knew she’d hate the bridesmaids’ dresses - she hated dresses, period - but if she ever wanted me to be in her wedding someday, I’d wear whatever crazy outfit she wanted me to. (She used to say that when she got married, she wanted the whole wedding party in clothes covered in duct tape.)
She didn’t respond for about two weeks. Then she emailed back and said her answer was “no, at this time” (whatever that meant) because she didn’t want to have to pretend we were as close as we used to be. WHEN I’D SPECIFICALLY ACKNOWLEDGED THAT WE WEREN’T AS CLOSE AS WE USED TO BE. It was so coldly worded and it felt like someone had just stabbed me.
I sobbed to my mom, “This is the meanest thing that anyone has ever done to me.” I was suicidal in fifth grade over harassment from classmates, so that statement meant a lot. The worst part was that Nell acted like I was asking her to pretend something when I explicitly was not, and that our friendship didn’t mean enough to her that she could bother to show up in the metro area where her parents still lived and wear a dress for a few hours just in honor of our long history. At that point in my life, I had one other friend, who lived in a different country, so this basically meant that not only had I lost my oldest, best friend, but I’d lost half of all my friends in the world.
I never even responded to the email. There was nothing I could say. I thought maybe she’d enjoyed hurting me and I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeing it. She’d been my best friend, but her dad always encouraged her to be more like me, which was NOT my fault, and I thought maybe she was trying to get me back for that. I didn’t even want to plan my wedding for months because I was so depressed that I wouldn’t have my best friend there as maid of honor. My mom had to tell me, “You know, we really need to get started planning this wedding.”
I didn’t invite Nell. My parents invited her parents because they were still friends with them, and my parents were inviting several of their other friends. About a year later, Nell invited me and my parents to her wedding; I didn’t respond, but my parents went out of courtesy to her parents. Nell sends a Christmas card to my parents every year and includes me and my husband in who it’s addressed to. My mom used to mention it to me every year when they got the card, but I told her I didn’t want to hear about it anymore. I was actually dreading hearing about it each year because it was just a reminder of all the pain.
Nell and I did EVERYTHING together in kindergarten through high school. My kids want me to tell them stories about when I was a kid, but I usually can’t because Nell’s in 90% of my childhood memories. We had so many inside jokes that when I wrote them all down in sophomore year of high school, they filled half a notebook.
Around two years ago, the mother of one of our mutual high school friends died. I couldn’t go to the funeral because I would have had to take my preschooler with ADHD who couldn’t sit through church. My mom went and saw Nell there, who asked if I was coming. My mom said she thought Nell was really hoping I would be there. I haven’t communicated with Nell since I asked her to be my maid of honor. Sometimes I wonder if I should, but I can’t say anything to her that isn’t angry.
Nell’s whole family is bad at confrontation. Her father has a super-obvious eating disorder and no one mentions it to him, even though they all agree he has one. I used to be like an honorary daughter in her family and she was like an honorary daughter in my family, so I know all the family dynamics, or at least the past history of those dynamics. I miss Nell, but I also don’t know who she is anymore.
For a while, I thought maybe Nell’s now-husband might be abusive and trying to isolate her from friends, but she’s clearly able to communicate with my family if she’s sending a Christmas card. My wedding ended up being great. I told myself that my best friend *was* there - I was marrying him.
My extended family had gone on vacation with Nell every year for about eight years, and they were looking forward to seeing her again at the wedding. They all assumed she’d be there because it was like, “well, duh, they’ve been friends forever,” and I had to tell them that she wouldn’t be and I didn’t even really know why. I ended up not having a maid of honor, and my husband gallantly volunteered to not promote his best friend from groomsman to best man so it wouldn’t be obvious that I didn’t have anyone to be maid of honor. Most of my cousins are these huge social butterflies and had, like, ten bridesmaids. I barely managed to scrape together four. One of my cousins got married three months after I did, and I ended up leaving the reception early because I had to sneak out and cry when her maid of honor made a speech.
Uuuugh. I'm trying so hard to understand the headspace of someone who would reject something so important and then carry on as if nothing had happened. If she just disappeared after that, I would just think "I guess she decided she didn't like you anymore," but this is far weirder. I may be misinterpreting, but it feels like a manifestation of that Internet culture thing where people treat their friendships like business obligations? I don't know... I'm just so sad about it and I'm sorry you had to go through it
Your empathy really means a lot. Thanks for that. 🙂
I think she knows she did something hurtful and she wants to try stay in some kind of limited touch because she’s hoping I’ll forgive her, but she doesn’t have the nerve to actually confront the issue. I think her husband’s influence was involved somehow, but I don’t know how or why because I barely met him!
I asked her to be my maid of honor in early 2011, IIRC, so I don’t know how much that aspect of Internet culture was around then.
Mara, I apologize if this advice is overstepping or inappropriate (as I am a stranger). But I would suggest that you consider making peace with the young friend Nell was to you in the past, seperately versus the older friend who betrayed you.
Obviously, there probably is no way to reconcile with the Nell of today (who betrayed you). But if all your childhood memories are tainted because young Nell was a part of them, then I would suggest that you begin to treat Nell in your mind as two seperate people. The young Nell who was your best friend who meant so much to you, and the weird ass backstabber older Nell, whom she unfortunately grew into.
People change in life, not always for the better. My parents had a bitter divorce when I was older. But my mother confessed to me when she was young she really really loved my Dad. Their early years were some of the best times of her life - he just changed (he would say she changed).
My point is that my mother eventually leaned to bless the good times with the younger version of my Dad she loved. He was just a different person to her than the man she divorced years later.
It might help so you can learn to appreciate the beauty of that childhood friendship, even though it went wrong.
I too saw myself in some of your story. I sort of accidentally ended a friendship when I not only failed to attend a friend's wedding, but I didn't even RSVP to her invitation! I really hated myself, because she was nice and she hadn't done anything. I was just overwhelmed with work and my own new marriage. But 10 years later, a mutual friend died, and I just HAD to talk to my ghosted friend, so I wrote to her. I did apologize for being a bad person.
She extended so much grace and kindness to me about it that it changed me. Now I'm more forgiving and extend a lot more grace to other people.
2. I think what gives you your unique voice, and why I find it so compelling, is your ability to take fairly normal interactions that most of us have and show how the reverberate throughout our lives. These "micro-traumas" would seem silly if we voiced them aloud, but hey clearly have impact, and you are one of the few people with the gumption and talent to speak about them in a funny and compassionate way that allows us to give ourselves grace.
Wow not even a compliment on having a dump truck? Rude as hell.
Also, and relatedly, my friend told me that when I'd sit on his deep couch in a short dress with no undies everyone could see my cooch. He told me this after I'd moved away.
I'm realizing that it is often the friendships with the greatest statements of eternal friendships that don't survive. Those expectations are a burden. I recently lost (ended?) a friendship where I'm 90% sure she had also grown tired of me. Neither of us did anything wrong or bad or toxic, we just drifted apart. The things that made us close in our twenties weren't as important in our thirties. But we couldn't take a break because were "like sisters to each other." And so instead, we kept forcing it, dragging ourselves to dinner dates that we didn't really enjoy, until finally I de facto ended it by (1) not going to her birthday party at the last minute and (2) never following up like I said I would to take her out to a birthday dinner. I didn't intend to do either of those (I think those are both shitty things to do), but the bad feelings had sort of built up, and I just let myself procrastinate until it was too late. I feel bad about how it ended but I also feel like there wasn't any other option! It had to be something dramatic and kind of messy because we'd made all these promises that the friendship was going to be forever! I do think she was secretly relieved. Looking back, I think she'd been growing sick of me for the last three years at least. And I just kept naively pushing the friendship until about a year ago, when I started to grow tired of it too. But I don't know what she really thought, because we never talked about it. If it had been allowed to just sort of fade, I think maybe if I ran into her in a couple years it could be rekindled, but now there's bad feelings so I doubt that will happen.
I don't think you're the asshole. I think the model of intense, best friend energy female friendship rooted in codependency, rescuing, and serving as a stand-in for romantic partnership is the true villain.
What purpose do female friendships serve? What purpose should they serve? Some women crave emotionally intense female friendships while others prefer instrumental female friendships. Instrumental friendships may require intense emotional support sometimes, like when one friend is in crisis, but they don't require being "pair bonded" like "best friend" female friendships.
Understanding the purpose of female friendship because more complex as we mature, partner up, and form families of our own. Do our female friends exist in a network of social relationships that are intertwined with our families and/or careers? Do we share activities or hobbies with our female friends that aren't centered around meeting up to talk about each others' problems in life? I enjoy being in the company of strong, interesting women. I love talking about men, sex, fashion, skincare, cooking, plants, pets, kids, etc. But I can't participate in friendships that are sustained by frequent multi-hour conversations about each other's struggles in life. As a 41-year-old married woman without kids, my local female friendships are all with other married women who have kids of various ages. We hang out in mixed company with our husbands. We shoot the shit. This is enough for me. I don't want to meet up for coffee weekly or monthly to hear about your struggles, or to even banter lightheartedly. I also don't need to "process" my problems out loud with someone who doesn't have a vested interest in my resolving them (i.e., anyone other than my husband).
I find ways to invest in spending time with our group of friends which includes mostly married straight and gay couples. I organized a co-ed softball team, I invite people to dinner and concerts, and my husband and I host parties. I don't want to hang out with my female friends 1:1 over coffee. I'd rather hang out with my husband, alone, with my pets, or with other couples. I know this makes me unusual, but I don't want to date my female friends.
I like your distinction between intense and instrumental friendships. When I was younger I mostly had intense friendships. These days my female friendships are instrumental aka mom groups. I feel like my female friends are much more like extended family. I also don’t share deep, dark secrets and my innermost longings with cousins and aunts or whatever (and I don’t with my mom friends), but at the end of the day they are a far more reliable presence in my life than all those quasi romantic friends I lost.
I read some social science books that posit girls bond over sharing secrets. It’s like trading social self destruct buttons, mutually assured destruction, etc. That can make things very intense and personal, even if the button was never pressed (and to my knowledge, none of my friendship break ups involved outing my darkest secrets, for which I am grateful). It feels like you handed someone a piece of your soul and for them to reject you after knowing all that, is devastating.
I resonated so hard with this article it’s ridiculous. I had a friend who’s been on both sides with me, let’s call her Anna. She changed to a nearby school in my sophomore year of high school and just ghosted me. I knew there was a girl, let’s call her Beth, she got really close to. She was a lot like me in many ways. But when Anna transferred to Beth’s school, she ghosted me. Never figured out what I did wrong. It’s not like she absolutely refuses to engage me. She just slow faded me. At some point she even alluded to how hurt I must have felt that we don’t talk much anymore (that still infuriated me, really. So she knew how it hurt me and did it anyway). She got extremely close to Beth. I saw them hanging together all the time, the way, frankly, we used to. Oh well, nothing to do but get over it. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever took a break up with a man half as hard as I took losing Anna. Halfway through my senior year, Anna messaged me again and asked to hang out. So we did. And it felt like the good old days. I dared not look the gift horse in the mouth and just accepted it. A few weeks later, I learned through mutual friend that Anna and Beth had a massive blowout break up fight. It was public. Quite a few mutual friends saw it. All of a sudden, everything made sense and all I had left for Anna was rage. Don’t get me wrong, I suspected something went wrong with Beth. But hearing it confirmed was a new level of heartbreak. So I just… ghosted her. Stopped planning anything with her. I was pleasant when I saw her around, of course. Just like she was pleasant with me. But I never hung out with her again.
Similarly, I also had the experience where I didn’t know I was hated until it all boiled over, haha. There was a group of girls who secretly hated me for months because I was a show-off (I made a website aged 12 and was proud of it. I high key bragged about it) and I found out when I found their online screeds against me. I’ve lost some other friends in my youth, and one also stood out. My best friend in elementary school, let’s call her Penelope. She moved away. I visited her lots but eventually I saw that I just wasn’t important anymore. So one summer I said I wasn’t going to visit Penelope anymore. I would rather do something else. My mom obliged, and I never hung out with her again. So I guess instinctively I’m just terrified of female friendships. Something about it feels too high stakes. It just goes so deep, and you never even realize how deep it goes until it all blows up in your face. I have female friends these days. We have same age kids and belong to the same mom groups. I really like these women, but I don’t get in deep with them. I only reveal some things, and only things I’ve long worked through and have no ongoing emotional investment in. Trusting my heart to another woman just somehow doesn’t feel safe. I’d be a supportive villager. I’ve brought meals and groceries when their kids were sick. But I’m just find it hard to open up like that again. I don’t trust myself not to start bawling halfway through a break up talk. Ghosting is just easier…
Wow. This article and all the responses are resonating so much with me!!
"Trusting my heart to another woman just somehow doesn’t feel safe." I have felt this way for 45 years and I have never voiced it.
When I was in college, I was dating a boy that my High School friends did not approve of. Yes, he was an ass. Over the summer they decided that ostracizing me was the best way to handle this. One day I had a group of cherished friends that I trusted, and the next none of them would speak to me because I would not dump my boyfriend.
I am still friends with these women, but a part of me will never fully trust them. My husband and my sisters have my heart, but trusting my heart to another woman just somehow doesn't feel safe.
You're already starting to get comments about how much of distinctly feminine problem this is. How relatable it is to women but not at all to men. How men just don't end friendships. (Which has been previously emphasized this year about subjects like politics).
Well, I'm a man in my forties, and I deeply related to your article because it's happened to me too.
I've had 4 "best friendships" end (2 of those was 1 incident - we were a triad - a guy and a girl). The other 2 were other males.
I am currently in the process of a 5th one possibly ending because we are at an impasse where I said "can we agree to disagree on this and move on?" And she thought about it for a month and said "No." (But isn't saying she wants to end the friendship).
What is different in my case is the root cause - I am extremely confrontational. And each of these friendships ended maybe because I was TOO confrontational about problems. (Or politics. One person I ended a friendship with because he got too mysogenistic.)
But what I deeply resonated with was the fact that the way it actually ended each time eas so anticlimactic. So avoidant. The words "we are no longer friends" were sad only once. The first time, and not by me (it was the triad).
But the drifting apart, the avoiding, the REGRETS. I feel all those so deeply as it spins through my head over and over what I did wrong. I didn't want any of those friendships to end. I want to go back in time and fix them all. Even though I wouldn't have been made most of them if I had fixed any of them. The butterfly effect is a bitch.
By the way I just found out my 5 year old son is Autistic. And it made me realise that I am too. Not sure if that's relevant to your life experience but.....maybe it's not NOT relevant?
If you are autistic and the other person was neurotypical, I can imagine there being really mismatched expectations about how confrontational communication happens.
My son is on the spectrum too and after we found that out I had myself tested - and was at least moderately surprised to find out that I do _not_ have ASD. Whenever I hear descriptions of differences in communication style between people on the spectrum and neurotypicals, my reaction is always "the neurotypical people's way of doing things is so weird, why don't they just say what they think."
One of these were definitely mismatched expectations.
One I was just an asshole.
One the other person was.
One was way more on the spectrum than me and if anything I shamed THEM for being too free with the things they wanted to express. (When "what you think" ends up constantly sounding like "women are less intelligent and less capable than men on average", maybe it's better if you don't always say what you think when you think it)
Am I the problem because I'm the common element? Believe me, I ask it all the time.
Much like CHH herself, what I really wonder is how unique is my experience. Is friendships ending common? Are people just lying about it like they do about their body count? Or do most people simply ignore transgressions and live with discomfort (because that's what it takes to "have a village")
I think friendship-ending must be common - with today's post, it's like CHH dug down and hit a live power line.
I think in our culture, people's curated public lives and actual lives can get really divergent, and people don't share this kind of thing publicly without context.
The neuropsych test ruled out ADHD as well as ASD. ADHD wasn't something I ever suspected for myself, as I was sort of the opposite of an "ADHD kid" growing up. Based on my discussion with the evaluator, I think her view that I don't have ASD is accurate, but I do see myself as ASD adjacent - I definitely "get" that kind of thinking.
CHH's kind of "hyper-analytical approach" to trying to figure out social skills feels very familiar to me.
I think you may be being too hard on yourself! You’re not totally blameless here (I’m not going to tell you not to cringe at the memory of employing Reddit jargon about valid feelings and boundaries), but from what you’ve given us, I can’t take away the impression that these friendships disintegrating was entirely or even mostly on you.
Katie: I have my own biases, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to demand that a high school senior be totally uninterested in dating and partying. It’s obviously okay to not be interested yourself, but I agree with high school you - she *was* being uptight and judgmental! It wasn’t great of you to react by flaking out on commitments, but it sounds like her refusing to let you be a more complex person than just that one friend group was the start of the trouble.
Jessica: Hoping for friends to lend a hand with your personal endeavors here and there is totally normal, but expecting them to be deeply involved in your business and especially to become customers seems like way too much to me, even more so if those friends are newlyweds without a whole lot of money. Making willingness to help with your business a litmus test of friendship comes across as a little slimy to me, like the person’s social connections are not so much genuine friendships as they are an extension of their professional efforts. There’s a big difference between “hey can you help me move into my new office space this weekend?” and “I want you to de facto work for my business and also be my customer.”
I’ve also disappeared from friendships that were moving in directions I felt like I couldn’t handle, around the same age you’re talking about here. It’s not great, but I feel like to some extent it’s part of growing up…
I used to be afraid of fighting with friends, too! I think it’s only recently that I’ve gotten more comfortable with the fact that it happens and not see it as the end of the world. There was a period in my 20s where I felt like I had the perfectly calibrated friend group that never fought, but life gets more complicated and competing demands arise that cause friction. The long-term friends who are still around at this point have begun to feel more like family, and I think you hit it exactly right with the observation that only certain relationships feel secure enough to withstand that without breaking. If a friendship can get to that place, it’s a very special thing.
This article made me feel a bit guilty, as it reminded me of a time I did something similar.
I was a big nerd in middle school (playing D&D and Warhammer before they were cool, they're cool now, right?). When I entered high school, I wanted to change that and get a girlfriend, which I did largely by essentially ghosting my then-best friend to try to insinuate myself into a "cooler" friend group (results were mixed and it took me another year or so to get a girlfriend). We did wind up rekindling that friendship later in high school, and 30 years later he's one of the few people from high school I still keep in touch with, but I always felt bad about how I handled it. I've thought about discussing it with him and apologizing to him for it, but I'm actually not sure if he experienced it as me ghosting him and don't want to bring it up if he didn't (plus I'm I guy, guys don't talk about this sort of thing, and I'm conflict avoidant).
Yes! There was a girl I thought I was a little mean to in high school- I actually did apologize and she said “oh I don’t remember you being mean to me!” And I was like oh shit, maybe now she feels like she was taunted behind her back!
So with men there's different dynamics but many times the same outcome i.e. disappeared friends. Often moreso due to changes in life circumstances/moves, and most men are incredibly bad at reaching out to each other.
I've had several VERY good/best friends at different stages (elementary school/middle school, high school, college, post-college, grad school) and sadly I only keep in regular contact with less than a handful . . . honestly one of the true big regrets of my life is not ensuring some of those stayed strong/consistent, although sometimes I have reached out over social media/calls and got little to nothing back. But they were usually the result of myself or the other person moving away. Getting married/having kids doesn't help either.
late to chime in but as a man who tended to forge stronger friendships with women, I have had this happen to me too! The first didn't end dramatically, we were inseparable best friends in senior year when she moved to my school, then she had a blow out fight with my other best friend (a woman) and stopped attending classes in person. She just disappeared after graduation and stopped talking to me. I went to college, she stayed in the region with her boyfriend, but the friendship just ceased on graduation day. I never really made the effort to keep the friendship going in a new medium, so I suppose this one was mutual.
The second time was during college, I had an odd job that involved working late at night and became best friends and (briefly) housemates with a female coworker. We never had romantic interests (she was very clear about this and I never entertained the idea) but we were basically attached at the hip at times. I ended up dating a different coworker and when she found out, she was livid at me because she didn't like that coworker very much. Lots of identifying drama but the entire friendship ended with her sending me a message "I hope you have a nice life with her. Goodbye"
I found this extremely relatable and this is the first article I've seen that really explicitly addresses this phenomenon. I think that most women are likely terrified to talk about this. That admitting its difficulty will brand you and make it even harder to make friends. That the only acceptable way to talk about friendship is "I'm done making friends because I have too many." I've always struggled with female friendships - which in the modern climate is extremely frowned upon and creates all kinds of obstacles especially making new female friends; it's extremely difficult if you don't already have them. After a certain age it gets increasingly difficult, especially if you have moved a lot (moi). Additionally if you're an extremely opinionated person (i.e. writer) and are unwilling to subvert your opinion no matter how politely you maintain about it. There are an alarming amount of women out there who really n e e d you to agree -- your willingness to subvert to the group and agree is what qualifies you as a "girls girl" and the ability to talk like a yassified moron. Men rarely need you to agree and its why I find them so easy to communicate with. I recently encountered an adult ass woman with a child who wrote me off for my general dislike for Taylor Swift. But despite feeling that women who behave like that aren't worth the time, I also feel that something must be inherently wrong with me. Other women surely must understand something that I don't.
My post that I'm going to publish tomorrow morning is about my"antifragile" and fragile relationships. I include my relationship with my friends, my now adult children and my wife. And some of my many fragile relationships.
I broke up with my best friend because I dropped him and everyone else when I met my wife. He and I handled it badly in large because we were 23. But now we've been reunited and are close once more.
As for Jessica, that seems to have been a transactional relationship, which is certainly fragile.
I enjoyed reading your essay for itself but with the added pleasure of being related to mine.
i've done this, suddenly ended a close friendship, but i have no excuse at all, i'm just a total bitch, i grew to find her annoying and didn't want to be around her anymore. i guess the only excuse is that i was a teenager. i can't bear to get into too much detail because i think it's probably the worst/cruelest thing i've ever done - basically tried to ghost when i thought we wouldn't have to be in the same places anymore, but then did end up having to interact with her again, so was forced to say something. ugh, awful.
Reddit’s “you don’t owe anyone anything, ever” attitude is more brazen than what most people will outright say, but it’s essentially what most people have internalized. Estrangement, not just with friends but with family, has to be way up in recent decades. There’s this belief that every relationship has to serve you at all times and if it stops serving you, even temporarily, you have a right to end it.
There’s just so many forces pushing people away from each other, even separate from this pervasive cutting-off culture. I find it really concerning.
there is very little place for grace in modern living. It is seen as a weakness or enabling.
Perhaps Reddit is subject to selection bias.
"If a relationship doesn't totally serve you or ever makes you feel even slightly uncomfortable, cut that person out of your life" -- person who spends time alone at home on the internet.
...
(Looks in mirror. Looks down at comment text field.)
Uh, I'll show myself out now.
I think it's more extreme on Reddit but I think it's reflected in people's thinking more broadly, especially young people. "Twitter is not real life" isn't really true anymore. Internet culture is our culture. It's a major theme of CHH's writing.
Years ago, I had to quit reading specific Reddit communities because there were too many posts where people agreed that no one was ever obligated to help with their nieces and nephews, ever, because “their parents were the ones who made the choice to have children, not you.” There was a post about a teenager whose older sister was the mother of three young children and had just had a catastrophic breakup with her husband. The sister and her kids had moved back in with her parents. The teenage uncle was expected to watch the kids, ages two and up, for a single hour a day on Mondays through Fridays. It didn’t conflict with any extracurriculars of his, and he was basically just expected to keep them alive and relatively healthy for an hour. He was allowed to plunk them down in front of the TV if he wanted to. At most, he had to give them snacks and maybe change the two-year-old’s diaper.
But no, that was so unreasonable, and he was being “parentified,” and he was totally entitled to tell his sister that he didn’t owe her anything and she needed to find and pay someone else to babysit.
Edit: Just remembered - the teenage uncle’s parents worked from home, too, so he could have gotten one of them if there was any type of emergency.
Incidentally I also saw a post about a woman charging full price to other family members. No family discounts, and everybody was supporting her. It's like gee, what's family even for anymore, if you can't even get a discount? Sure, no one owes anyone anything. But what about little perks? Perks are nice, aren't they? Personally, perks make my whole day. Even a relatively meaningless one. It makes me feel like my family loves me and have my back if things go south. I got a Christmas present for my kids from a cousin. Not a very expensive one, and felt the warm fuzzies all over. And if you don't give any perks, ever, should you hope to receive any? This kind of legalism is so joyless. No wonder Redditors have no village (sorry, to trip on another CHH theme). They only want villages when the villagers show up, casseroles in hand. (and yes, the parenting subreddits are also full of "you don't owe anyone anything blah blah")
The "no obligations to anyone, ever" is a really bad trend. The natural conclusion is that you can only have "fairweather" friendships, relationships, and family ties. Which isn't how reality works.
It also means that you can be dropped at the first inconvenience.
Yes, absolutely this. I think it is to some degree inevitable - communal relations weakened under urbanization and industrialization; we simply can't have an internet age w/o similar change (and tbh suburbanization already brought changes, just a bit more class specific and hidden by social pretense). But it genuinely seems very important to me when people push back on some deranged take about friendship. Usually I dislike those pile-ons. But there is just no way to survive without other people. It is ok if the amount of work expected of any one person lessens, and even if some roles shift to professionals (childcare and therapy have already done this, I would argue pretty clearly for the good, on net). It's not ok for what's happening to online millennials and zoomers to presage our future. It just won't sustain itself.
One of the best pieces of advice I have yet to operationalize is literally "try to get in more arguments with strangers": https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/how-to-make-friends
“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.”
My friend “Nell” was my best friend since kindergarten. I went to college halfway across the country, but we saw each other when we were home and she went on my family vacation for a week every summer. Then during junior year, she started dating her now-husband and was less communicative with me during the school year. My parents were friends with her parents, and during Christmas break, the families were supposed to meet up and go out to dinner. Nell and her boyfriend showed up late and seemed weirdly distant from everyone else. I tried to get to know him, but he was really standoffish.
For the rest of the school year, Nell barely got in touch. Then my extended family decided to not have the vacation anymore because most of the cousins were teenagers or in college and had summer jobs. I didn’t bother telling Nell because I figured she was busy, wasn’t really connecting with me, and wouldn’t want to go anyway. She did find out afterward that our family had quit doing the vacation and it wasn’t that I’d just stopped inviting her. We graduated from college the year her younger sister graduated from high school, and I saw her at her sister’s graduation party.
After college, I went to law school locally and she was living with her boyfriend about a hundred miles away in a neighboring state. Now that we were geographically closer together, I wanted to see each other more often, and kept trying to schedule when my now-husband and I could come visit. She was the one who suggested we visit in the first place, but wouldn’t commit to a date.
My husband and I started dating in high school, so Nell had known him for a long time, too. We all did the same extracurricular together in high school. She knew we wanted to get married eventually, and one day in an email she asked if we had any wedding plans yet.
I wrote her this long, heartfelt email asking her to be my maid of honor. I said I knew we weren’t as close as we used to be, but I still considered her my best friend and this would be a fun and happy time to see each other more often. I mentioned that my parents were paying for the whole wedding and that because most of the other bridesmaids were going to be teenage relatives, I wouldn’t expect her to throw a bachelorette party. I also mentioned that I knew she’d hate the bridesmaids’ dresses - she hated dresses, period - but if she ever wanted me to be in her wedding someday, I’d wear whatever crazy outfit she wanted me to. (She used to say that when she got married, she wanted the whole wedding party in clothes covered in duct tape.)
She didn’t respond for about two weeks. Then she emailed back and said her answer was “no, at this time” (whatever that meant) because she didn’t want to have to pretend we were as close as we used to be. WHEN I’D SPECIFICALLY ACKNOWLEDGED THAT WE WEREN’T AS CLOSE AS WE USED TO BE. It was so coldly worded and it felt like someone had just stabbed me.
I sobbed to my mom, “This is the meanest thing that anyone has ever done to me.” I was suicidal in fifth grade over harassment from classmates, so that statement meant a lot. The worst part was that Nell acted like I was asking her to pretend something when I explicitly was not, and that our friendship didn’t mean enough to her that she could bother to show up in the metro area where her parents still lived and wear a dress for a few hours just in honor of our long history. At that point in my life, I had one other friend, who lived in a different country, so this basically meant that not only had I lost my oldest, best friend, but I’d lost half of all my friends in the world.
I never even responded to the email. There was nothing I could say. I thought maybe she’d enjoyed hurting me and I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeing it. She’d been my best friend, but her dad always encouraged her to be more like me, which was NOT my fault, and I thought maybe she was trying to get me back for that. I didn’t even want to plan my wedding for months because I was so depressed that I wouldn’t have my best friend there as maid of honor. My mom had to tell me, “You know, we really need to get started planning this wedding.”
I didn’t invite Nell. My parents invited her parents because they were still friends with them, and my parents were inviting several of their other friends. About a year later, Nell invited me and my parents to her wedding; I didn’t respond, but my parents went out of courtesy to her parents. Nell sends a Christmas card to my parents every year and includes me and my husband in who it’s addressed to. My mom used to mention it to me every year when they got the card, but I told her I didn’t want to hear about it anymore. I was actually dreading hearing about it each year because it was just a reminder of all the pain.
Nell and I did EVERYTHING together in kindergarten through high school. My kids want me to tell them stories about when I was a kid, but I usually can’t because Nell’s in 90% of my childhood memories. We had so many inside jokes that when I wrote them all down in sophomore year of high school, they filled half a notebook.
Around two years ago, the mother of one of our mutual high school friends died. I couldn’t go to the funeral because I would have had to take my preschooler with ADHD who couldn’t sit through church. My mom went and saw Nell there, who asked if I was coming. My mom said she thought Nell was really hoping I would be there. I haven’t communicated with Nell since I asked her to be my maid of honor. Sometimes I wonder if I should, but I can’t say anything to her that isn’t angry.
Nell’s whole family is bad at confrontation. Her father has a super-obvious eating disorder and no one mentions it to him, even though they all agree he has one. I used to be like an honorary daughter in her family and she was like an honorary daughter in my family, so I know all the family dynamics, or at least the past history of those dynamics. I miss Nell, but I also don’t know who she is anymore.
Thanks for writing this piece.
I really need to learn how to engage in conflict. Thank you for sharing this.
This is so heartbreaking... thanks for sharing it.
Thanks.
For a while, I thought maybe Nell’s now-husband might be abusive and trying to isolate her from friends, but she’s clearly able to communicate with my family if she’s sending a Christmas card. My wedding ended up being great. I told myself that my best friend *was* there - I was marrying him.
My extended family had gone on vacation with Nell every year for about eight years, and they were looking forward to seeing her again at the wedding. They all assumed she’d be there because it was like, “well, duh, they’ve been friends forever,” and I had to tell them that she wouldn’t be and I didn’t even really know why. I ended up not having a maid of honor, and my husband gallantly volunteered to not promote his best friend from groomsman to best man so it wouldn’t be obvious that I didn’t have anyone to be maid of honor. Most of my cousins are these huge social butterflies and had, like, ten bridesmaids. I barely managed to scrape together four. One of my cousins got married three months after I did, and I ended up leaving the reception early because I had to sneak out and cry when her maid of honor made a speech.
Uuuugh. I'm trying so hard to understand the headspace of someone who would reject something so important and then carry on as if nothing had happened. If she just disappeared after that, I would just think "I guess she decided she didn't like you anymore," but this is far weirder. I may be misinterpreting, but it feels like a manifestation of that Internet culture thing where people treat their friendships like business obligations? I don't know... I'm just so sad about it and I'm sorry you had to go through it
Your empathy really means a lot. Thanks for that. 🙂
I think she knows she did something hurtful and she wants to try stay in some kind of limited touch because she’s hoping I’ll forgive her, but she doesn’t have the nerve to actually confront the issue. I think her husband’s influence was involved somehow, but I don’t know how or why because I barely met him!
I asked her to be my maid of honor in early 2011, IIRC, so I don’t know how much that aspect of Internet culture was around then.
Mara, I apologize if this advice is overstepping or inappropriate (as I am a stranger). But I would suggest that you consider making peace with the young friend Nell was to you in the past, seperately versus the older friend who betrayed you.
Obviously, there probably is no way to reconcile with the Nell of today (who betrayed you). But if all your childhood memories are tainted because young Nell was a part of them, then I would suggest that you begin to treat Nell in your mind as two seperate people. The young Nell who was your best friend who meant so much to you, and the weird ass backstabber older Nell, whom she unfortunately grew into.
People change in life, not always for the better. My parents had a bitter divorce when I was older. But my mother confessed to me when she was young she really really loved my Dad. Their early years were some of the best times of her life - he just changed (he would say she changed).
My point is that my mother eventually leaned to bless the good times with the younger version of my Dad she loved. He was just a different person to her than the man she divorced years later.
It might help so you can learn to appreciate the beauty of that childhood friendship, even though it went wrong.
Just a suggestion.
Thanks for taking the time to write such a long, empathetic comment. I’ll give it some thought.
I too saw myself in some of your story. I sort of accidentally ended a friendship when I not only failed to attend a friend's wedding, but I didn't even RSVP to her invitation! I really hated myself, because she was nice and she hadn't done anything. I was just overwhelmed with work and my own new marriage. But 10 years later, a mutual friend died, and I just HAD to talk to my ghosted friend, so I wrote to her. I did apologize for being a bad person.
She extended so much grace and kindness to me about it that it changed me. Now I'm more forgiving and extend a lot more grace to other people.
This is a really good and heartwarming story and I’m glad that she forgave you and it sounds like you grew as a person too
2 things
1. I mean we have to know the Code name
2. I think what gives you your unique voice, and why I find it so compelling, is your ability to take fairly normal interactions that most of us have and show how the reverberate throughout our lives. These "micro-traumas" would seem silly if we voiced them aloud, but hey clearly have impact, and you are one of the few people with the gumption and talent to speak about them in a funny and compassionate way that allows us to give ourselves grace.
The code name was “white moon” because I wore a short skirt one day which they felt was inadvertent mooning, and I’m pale lol
Honestly a great mix of "good ring to it" and "tbh quite mean."
I know right??
Wow not even a compliment on having a dump truck? Rude as hell.
Also, and relatedly, my friend told me that when I'd sit on his deep couch in a short dress with no undies everyone could see my cooch. He told me this after I'd moved away.
LOL exactly! Wish they had just called me Big Donk or something
To make up for it I will exclusively call you Big Donk for the next forever
Finally, justice!
Small Donks hate her!
Female commenters:
That happened to me too!
I did that once!
I would have done what you did!
(etc)
Male Commenters:
...friendships begin and end on purpose??
I'm realizing that it is often the friendships with the greatest statements of eternal friendships that don't survive. Those expectations are a burden. I recently lost (ended?) a friendship where I'm 90% sure she had also grown tired of me. Neither of us did anything wrong or bad or toxic, we just drifted apart. The things that made us close in our twenties weren't as important in our thirties. But we couldn't take a break because were "like sisters to each other." And so instead, we kept forcing it, dragging ourselves to dinner dates that we didn't really enjoy, until finally I de facto ended it by (1) not going to her birthday party at the last minute and (2) never following up like I said I would to take her out to a birthday dinner. I didn't intend to do either of those (I think those are both shitty things to do), but the bad feelings had sort of built up, and I just let myself procrastinate until it was too late. I feel bad about how it ended but I also feel like there wasn't any other option! It had to be something dramatic and kind of messy because we'd made all these promises that the friendship was going to be forever! I do think she was secretly relieved. Looking back, I think she'd been growing sick of me for the last three years at least. And I just kept naively pushing the friendship until about a year ago, when I started to grow tired of it too. But I don't know what she really thought, because we never talked about it. If it had been allowed to just sort of fade, I think maybe if I ran into her in a couple years it could be rekindled, but now there's bad feelings so I doubt that will happen.
Society doesn’t normalize friendship breakups - from the time people are little kids, everything is always “friends forever.” 😕
I don't think you're the asshole. I think the model of intense, best friend energy female friendship rooted in codependency, rescuing, and serving as a stand-in for romantic partnership is the true villain.
What purpose do female friendships serve? What purpose should they serve? Some women crave emotionally intense female friendships while others prefer instrumental female friendships. Instrumental friendships may require intense emotional support sometimes, like when one friend is in crisis, but they don't require being "pair bonded" like "best friend" female friendships.
Understanding the purpose of female friendship because more complex as we mature, partner up, and form families of our own. Do our female friends exist in a network of social relationships that are intertwined with our families and/or careers? Do we share activities or hobbies with our female friends that aren't centered around meeting up to talk about each others' problems in life? I enjoy being in the company of strong, interesting women. I love talking about men, sex, fashion, skincare, cooking, plants, pets, kids, etc. But I can't participate in friendships that are sustained by frequent multi-hour conversations about each other's struggles in life. As a 41-year-old married woman without kids, my local female friendships are all with other married women who have kids of various ages. We hang out in mixed company with our husbands. We shoot the shit. This is enough for me. I don't want to meet up for coffee weekly or monthly to hear about your struggles, or to even banter lightheartedly. I also don't need to "process" my problems out loud with someone who doesn't have a vested interest in my resolving them (i.e., anyone other than my husband).
I find ways to invest in spending time with our group of friends which includes mostly married straight and gay couples. I organized a co-ed softball team, I invite people to dinner and concerts, and my husband and I host parties. I don't want to hang out with my female friends 1:1 over coffee. I'd rather hang out with my husband, alone, with my pets, or with other couples. I know this makes me unusual, but I don't want to date my female friends.
I like your distinction between intense and instrumental friendships. When I was younger I mostly had intense friendships. These days my female friendships are instrumental aka mom groups. I feel like my female friends are much more like extended family. I also don’t share deep, dark secrets and my innermost longings with cousins and aunts or whatever (and I don’t with my mom friends), but at the end of the day they are a far more reliable presence in my life than all those quasi romantic friends I lost.
I read some social science books that posit girls bond over sharing secrets. It’s like trading social self destruct buttons, mutually assured destruction, etc. That can make things very intense and personal, even if the button was never pressed (and to my knowledge, none of my friendship break ups involved outing my darkest secrets, for which I am grateful). It feels like you handed someone a piece of your soul and for them to reject you after knowing all that, is devastating.
Yes, you explain this dynamic so eloquently!
I resonated so hard with this article it’s ridiculous. I had a friend who’s been on both sides with me, let’s call her Anna. She changed to a nearby school in my sophomore year of high school and just ghosted me. I knew there was a girl, let’s call her Beth, she got really close to. She was a lot like me in many ways. But when Anna transferred to Beth’s school, she ghosted me. Never figured out what I did wrong. It’s not like she absolutely refuses to engage me. She just slow faded me. At some point she even alluded to how hurt I must have felt that we don’t talk much anymore (that still infuriated me, really. So she knew how it hurt me and did it anyway). She got extremely close to Beth. I saw them hanging together all the time, the way, frankly, we used to. Oh well, nothing to do but get over it. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever took a break up with a man half as hard as I took losing Anna. Halfway through my senior year, Anna messaged me again and asked to hang out. So we did. And it felt like the good old days. I dared not look the gift horse in the mouth and just accepted it. A few weeks later, I learned through mutual friend that Anna and Beth had a massive blowout break up fight. It was public. Quite a few mutual friends saw it. All of a sudden, everything made sense and all I had left for Anna was rage. Don’t get me wrong, I suspected something went wrong with Beth. But hearing it confirmed was a new level of heartbreak. So I just… ghosted her. Stopped planning anything with her. I was pleasant when I saw her around, of course. Just like she was pleasant with me. But I never hung out with her again.
Similarly, I also had the experience where I didn’t know I was hated until it all boiled over, haha. There was a group of girls who secretly hated me for months because I was a show-off (I made a website aged 12 and was proud of it. I high key bragged about it) and I found out when I found their online screeds against me. I’ve lost some other friends in my youth, and one also stood out. My best friend in elementary school, let’s call her Penelope. She moved away. I visited her lots but eventually I saw that I just wasn’t important anymore. So one summer I said I wasn’t going to visit Penelope anymore. I would rather do something else. My mom obliged, and I never hung out with her again. So I guess instinctively I’m just terrified of female friendships. Something about it feels too high stakes. It just goes so deep, and you never even realize how deep it goes until it all blows up in your face. I have female friends these days. We have same age kids and belong to the same mom groups. I really like these women, but I don’t get in deep with them. I only reveal some things, and only things I’ve long worked through and have no ongoing emotional investment in. Trusting my heart to another woman just somehow doesn’t feel safe. I’d be a supportive villager. I’ve brought meals and groceries when their kids were sick. But I’m just find it hard to open up like that again. I don’t trust myself not to start bawling halfway through a break up talk. Ghosting is just easier…
Wow. This article and all the responses are resonating so much with me!!
"Trusting my heart to another woman just somehow doesn’t feel safe." I have felt this way for 45 years and I have never voiced it.
When I was in college, I was dating a boy that my High School friends did not approve of. Yes, he was an ass. Over the summer they decided that ostracizing me was the best way to handle this. One day I had a group of cherished friends that I trusted, and the next none of them would speak to me because I would not dump my boyfriend.
I am still friends with these women, but a part of me will never fully trust them. My husband and my sisters have my heart, but trusting my heart to another woman just somehow doesn't feel safe.
You're already starting to get comments about how much of distinctly feminine problem this is. How relatable it is to women but not at all to men. How men just don't end friendships. (Which has been previously emphasized this year about subjects like politics).
Well, I'm a man in my forties, and I deeply related to your article because it's happened to me too.
I've had 4 "best friendships" end (2 of those was 1 incident - we were a triad - a guy and a girl). The other 2 were other males.
I am currently in the process of a 5th one possibly ending because we are at an impasse where I said "can we agree to disagree on this and move on?" And she thought about it for a month and said "No." (But isn't saying she wants to end the friendship).
What is different in my case is the root cause - I am extremely confrontational. And each of these friendships ended maybe because I was TOO confrontational about problems. (Or politics. One person I ended a friendship with because he got too mysogenistic.)
But what I deeply resonated with was the fact that the way it actually ended each time eas so anticlimactic. So avoidant. The words "we are no longer friends" were sad only once. The first time, and not by me (it was the triad).
But the drifting apart, the avoiding, the REGRETS. I feel all those so deeply as it spins through my head over and over what I did wrong. I didn't want any of those friendships to end. I want to go back in time and fix them all. Even though I wouldn't have been made most of them if I had fixed any of them. The butterfly effect is a bitch.
By the way I just found out my 5 year old son is Autistic. And it made me realise that I am too. Not sure if that's relevant to your life experience but.....maybe it's not NOT relevant?
If you are autistic and the other person was neurotypical, I can imagine there being really mismatched expectations about how confrontational communication happens.
My son is on the spectrum too and after we found that out I had myself tested - and was at least moderately surprised to find out that I do _not_ have ASD. Whenever I hear descriptions of differences in communication style between people on the spectrum and neurotypicals, my reaction is always "the neurotypical people's way of doing things is so weird, why don't they just say what they think."
Unfortunately I've got every flavour here.
One of these were definitely mismatched expectations.
One I was just an asshole.
One the other person was.
One was way more on the spectrum than me and if anything I shamed THEM for being too free with the things they wanted to express. (When "what you think" ends up constantly sounding like "women are less intelligent and less capable than men on average", maybe it's better if you don't always say what you think when you think it)
Am I the problem because I'm the common element? Believe me, I ask it all the time.
Much like CHH herself, what I really wonder is how unique is my experience. Is friendships ending common? Are people just lying about it like they do about their body count? Or do most people simply ignore transgressions and live with discomfort (because that's what it takes to "have a village")
I think friendship-ending must be common - with today's post, it's like CHH dug down and hit a live power line.
I think in our culture, people's curated public lives and actual lives can get really divergent, and people don't share this kind of thing publicly without context.
Did you get tested for ADHD at all? They have some overlapping characteristics, including some of the social stuff.
The neuropsych test ruled out ADHD as well as ASD. ADHD wasn't something I ever suspected for myself, as I was sort of the opposite of an "ADHD kid" growing up. Based on my discussion with the evaluator, I think her view that I don't have ASD is accurate, but I do see myself as ASD adjacent - I definitely "get" that kind of thinking.
CHH's kind of "hyper-analytical approach" to trying to figure out social skills feels very familiar to me.
I think you may be being too hard on yourself! You’re not totally blameless here (I’m not going to tell you not to cringe at the memory of employing Reddit jargon about valid feelings and boundaries), but from what you’ve given us, I can’t take away the impression that these friendships disintegrating was entirely or even mostly on you.
Katie: I have my own biases, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to demand that a high school senior be totally uninterested in dating and partying. It’s obviously okay to not be interested yourself, but I agree with high school you - she *was* being uptight and judgmental! It wasn’t great of you to react by flaking out on commitments, but it sounds like her refusing to let you be a more complex person than just that one friend group was the start of the trouble.
Jessica: Hoping for friends to lend a hand with your personal endeavors here and there is totally normal, but expecting them to be deeply involved in your business and especially to become customers seems like way too much to me, even more so if those friends are newlyweds without a whole lot of money. Making willingness to help with your business a litmus test of friendship comes across as a little slimy to me, like the person’s social connections are not so much genuine friendships as they are an extension of their professional efforts. There’s a big difference between “hey can you help me move into my new office space this weekend?” and “I want you to de facto work for my business and also be my customer.”
I’ve also disappeared from friendships that were moving in directions I felt like I couldn’t handle, around the same age you’re talking about here. It’s not great, but I feel like to some extent it’s part of growing up…
I used to be afraid of fighting with friends, too! I think it’s only recently that I’ve gotten more comfortable with the fact that it happens and not see it as the end of the world. There was a period in my 20s where I felt like I had the perfectly calibrated friend group that never fought, but life gets more complicated and competing demands arise that cause friction. The long-term friends who are still around at this point have begun to feel more like family, and I think you hit it exactly right with the observation that only certain relationships feel secure enough to withstand that without breaking. If a friendship can get to that place, it’s a very special thing.
This article made me feel a bit guilty, as it reminded me of a time I did something similar.
I was a big nerd in middle school (playing D&D and Warhammer before they were cool, they're cool now, right?). When I entered high school, I wanted to change that and get a girlfriend, which I did largely by essentially ghosting my then-best friend to try to insinuate myself into a "cooler" friend group (results were mixed and it took me another year or so to get a girlfriend). We did wind up rekindling that friendship later in high school, and 30 years later he's one of the few people from high school I still keep in touch with, but I always felt bad about how I handled it. I've thought about discussing it with him and apologizing to him for it, but I'm actually not sure if he experienced it as me ghosting him and don't want to bring it up if he didn't (plus I'm I guy, guys don't talk about this sort of thing, and I'm conflict avoidant).
Yes! There was a girl I thought I was a little mean to in high school- I actually did apologize and she said “oh I don’t remember you being mean to me!” And I was like oh shit, maybe now she feels like she was taunted behind her back!
So with men there's different dynamics but many times the same outcome i.e. disappeared friends. Often moreso due to changes in life circumstances/moves, and most men are incredibly bad at reaching out to each other.
I've had several VERY good/best friends at different stages (elementary school/middle school, high school, college, post-college, grad school) and sadly I only keep in regular contact with less than a handful . . . honestly one of the true big regrets of my life is not ensuring some of those stayed strong/consistent, although sometimes I have reached out over social media/calls and got little to nothing back. But they were usually the result of myself or the other person moving away. Getting married/having kids doesn't help either.
late to chime in but as a man who tended to forge stronger friendships with women, I have had this happen to me too! The first didn't end dramatically, we were inseparable best friends in senior year when she moved to my school, then she had a blow out fight with my other best friend (a woman) and stopped attending classes in person. She just disappeared after graduation and stopped talking to me. I went to college, she stayed in the region with her boyfriend, but the friendship just ceased on graduation day. I never really made the effort to keep the friendship going in a new medium, so I suppose this one was mutual.
The second time was during college, I had an odd job that involved working late at night and became best friends and (briefly) housemates with a female coworker. We never had romantic interests (she was very clear about this and I never entertained the idea) but we were basically attached at the hip at times. I ended up dating a different coworker and when she found out, she was livid at me because she didn't like that coworker very much. Lots of identifying drama but the entire friendship ended with her sending me a message "I hope you have a nice life with her. Goodbye"
I found this extremely relatable and this is the first article I've seen that really explicitly addresses this phenomenon. I think that most women are likely terrified to talk about this. That admitting its difficulty will brand you and make it even harder to make friends. That the only acceptable way to talk about friendship is "I'm done making friends because I have too many." I've always struggled with female friendships - which in the modern climate is extremely frowned upon and creates all kinds of obstacles especially making new female friends; it's extremely difficult if you don't already have them. After a certain age it gets increasingly difficult, especially if you have moved a lot (moi). Additionally if you're an extremely opinionated person (i.e. writer) and are unwilling to subvert your opinion no matter how politely you maintain about it. There are an alarming amount of women out there who really n e e d you to agree -- your willingness to subvert to the group and agree is what qualifies you as a "girls girl" and the ability to talk like a yassified moron. Men rarely need you to agree and its why I find them so easy to communicate with. I recently encountered an adult ass woman with a child who wrote me off for my general dislike for Taylor Swift. But despite feeling that women who behave like that aren't worth the time, I also feel that something must be inherently wrong with me. Other women surely must understand something that I don't.
My post that I'm going to publish tomorrow morning is about my"antifragile" and fragile relationships. I include my relationship with my friends, my now adult children and my wife. And some of my many fragile relationships.
I broke up with my best friend because I dropped him and everyone else when I met my wife. He and I handled it badly in large because we were 23. But now we've been reunited and are close once more.
As for Jessica, that seems to have been a transactional relationship, which is certainly fragile.
I enjoyed reading your essay for itself but with the added pleasure of being related to mine.
Thank you! I'm excited to read it, that's a great point that I've never really examined!
i've done this, suddenly ended a close friendship, but i have no excuse at all, i'm just a total bitch, i grew to find her annoying and didn't want to be around her anymore. i guess the only excuse is that i was a teenager. i can't bear to get into too much detail because i think it's probably the worst/cruelest thing i've ever done - basically tried to ghost when i thought we wouldn't have to be in the same places anymore, but then did end up having to interact with her again, so was forced to say something. ugh, awful.
If it makes you feel better the comments on this article prove you are definitely not alone!