Last month my friend broke up with me

Friendship break-ups really hurt.

This email is longer than usual because I’ve got a lot of feelings so get yourself a cup of tea and strap in. Also, before we start, I just want to remind you that today is the last day you can order your Milly Grace whippet earrings. At 7pm tonight they’ll be gone. A big thank you to everyone who’s already bought a pair - we have raised nearly £3000 for Stokenchurch Dog Rescue!

Last month my friend broke up with me

In January, after a long back-and-forth, I received a break-up message from a friend of ten years. It said that, while she’d drafted a few longer messages, she’d decided that all she really needed to say was that I couldn’t offer her the friendship that she needed at the moment. She wished me well and would miss me. And just like that, our friendship ended.

We met when I was 21 and became firm friends. We spent long days working together in coffee shops, flitting between exercise classes and gin bars, smoking on each other’s balconies and texting back and forth about our joys and sadnesses. We even lived together for a few joyful months.

But we both moved out of London to different parts of the country. Having Jess and Otto made it hard for me to travel to see her and her anxiety made it hard to come to events and parties, although I was grateful and delighted to see her at my wedding in 2023.

But 2024 hit me like a tonne of bricks and no area of my life remained unchanged. Seismic things happened - my dogs died, my job changed beyond recognition and I moved to a new city. But these big changes brought smaller ones with them. My relationship with my phone changed. After months of abuse on social media I learned to put it down and step away from it. I began to use social media differently, creating more of a separation between my work and my personal communication.

My friend and I were in contact less. The near-daily messages we used to exchange gave way to longer but more infrequent catch-ups. I thought our friendship was going through a period of change. Most of my oldest friendships are the kind where we can pick things up where we left off months back, and maybe I’d got too used to that way of doing things. If I’d had more brain space to dedicate to it I might have understood that this friendship had different needs.

So, when she told me how she was feeling, I apologised for not having paid more attention to the changing landscape of our friendship, explained the ways things had changed for me and told her realistically that what I had to offer was more in-depth chats rather than the regular pitter-patter we used to share.

But it was the old version of our friendship that she had space for in her life, not the new one. Our priorities were different, there was no longer a version of the friendship that made us both feel good, and so we walked away.

I wasn’t prepared for how destabilised I would feel in the aftermath of our friendship ending, nor the knock-on impact in other areas of my life. As someone with people-pleasing tendencies it’s made me feel like I’m unlikeable. It’s changed the way I interact with new people and the way I carry myself. These feelings are not rational but they are valid and I’m working to acknowledge them and move on. Writing this is helping.

What happens when friendships end?

Friendship break-ups are sometimes inevitable. We change so much in the course of our lives that our friendships will look radically different from one year to the next. People move countries, have babies, change their views, ideas, tastes and behaviour. Some relationships are meant to flex with us. Others simply aren’t.

I’m at an age where some of my friends are having their first or second kids, while I’ve got fewer responsibilities than ever before. Despite this, two of my closest friendships are thriving. My friends have made a huge effort to keep me in their lives in an active way, and I’ve done the same. In a way, it’s changed our friendships for the better. I love being in the mum-talk group chat and I appreciate that, while our day-to-day lives have very little in common, we still look after each other and enjoy each other’s company.

I spoke about this briefly on my Instagram stories and was flooded with messages from people who were going through friendship break-ups of their own, or still healing from ones in their past. Here’s what people had to say:

“The relief when a toxic friendship ends. It doesn’t always have to be bad.”

This is very true. As someone else put it, sometimes we put up with a lot more in our friendships than we would ever dream of in our romantic partnerships simply because we forget that it’s OK to end them.

But not all friendships are created equal - some are toxic, one-sided or simply past their sell-by date. I think lots of us will be familiar with the experience of telling a friend our news only to be left with the feeling that they’re not truly happy for us - maybe even the opposite. I’ve had a few friendships over the years where I’ve listened to my friend talking about other people and it’s dawned on me that that’s probably how they speak about me, too. If a friendship doesn’t make you feel good it might be time to let it go.

In these cases, while ending the friendship can be equally hard, it’s also an act of empowerment and self-care. It’s OK to feel relief alongside the grief.

“It can be trivialised and reduced (particularly when it comes to women’s friendships)”

Contrary to what our culture would have us believe, there is nothing trivial about female friendships and nothing trivial about their endings. I had a bad friendship break-up when I was at university. It was one of the defining moments of my twenties and, to this date, worse than any other break-up I’ve had, romantic or otherwise.

This wasn’t a case of gradually drifting apart, there was clearly a wronged party and an offending friend, and I was the villain. I was living with undiagnosed mental health problems and had a strong self-destructive streak. I was also sitting on things that I didn’t have the courage or the skills to communicate with her about. Instead I did something really hurtful to her and when she found out, rather than being brave enough to stick around and pick up the pieces, I ran away.

I grieved that friendship for years. I got my diagnoses, went through therapy, learned to understand myself better and still it took me a whole decade to forgive myself. When I met my husband five years later there were still times that it brought me to tears. That friendship, and its ending, has shaped me more than any past partner, and the grief at its loss stayed with me for longer.

Many of you also said that your worst break-up has been with a friend, not a romantic partner. In a way, this is a testament to the strength and importance of female friendships. We mustn’t play them down at their best or their worst.

“In a way they’re worse than partner breakups because we don’t get the same social understanding and support. But they’re devastating!”

After that break-up I went to see a counsellor. It didn’t work out and I didn’t know back then what I know now - that if you don’t vibe with your counsellor you can change to a different one. Instead I kept trying to muddle through on my own. I was so ashamed about how the friendship ended that I found it hard to talk to my friends and family. Instead I internalised it and it tore through the rest of my life, dragging my self-esteem to new lows.

Friendship break-ups are serious and the fall-out can be devastating. We should treat them accordingly. Get some counselling, lean on your support network and, whichever side you’re on, make sure the shame and the grief doesn’t have a chance to swallow you whole.

“How honest should I be about the reason behind why I want the breakup?”

It sounds like you’ve already decided what you want the outcome to be so it’s just a case of how you let that person know. Someone else told me “The worst thing is when you don’t understand why it happened”, so there is definitely value in communicating at least a brief assessment of what’s changed for you. I would try to deliver it clearly, concisely and in a way that isn’t intended to cause harm to the other person, even if that is tempting.

I am proud of my most recent break-up in that we both communicated clearly and compassionately. I can tell that my friend felt hurt by the changes in our communication. I wish she had communicated her feelings sooner and I wish that I had paid more attention - I don’t think the blame lies with either of us here and by the end there were things I felt hurt by, too. But I’m glad that we left things warmly and I don’t consider the door closed to rekindling the friendship if our circumstances allow for it in the future.

Think about your motives when you’re communicating your feelings, and whether you’re happy to close a door forever.

“Harder to talk about friendship break-ups than romantic break-ups. People don’t have the language”

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from talking about this it’s that almost all of us have been through some version of it. It’s definitely hard to talk about - in my experience the feelings that come with it are even more complicated than when a romantic relationship ends. But that doesn’t mean you won’t be understood. Reach out to people you trust about it and you never know, it might be a chance for them to share their own story, too.

Thank you all for having this conversation with me. It’s helping me to process the changes I’m going through and I know I will shake this feelings of inadequacy soon and move on with the many other brilliant friendships in my life. If you’re in the same boat I hope this proves that you’re not alone.