Relationships Sundays

“Sadly enough, the most painful goodbyes are the ones that are left unsaid and never explained.” ― Jonathan Harnisch

Key points

• Friendship loss can hurt as deeply as romantic or bereavement loss, even in the absence of death or drama.
• How a friendship ends is important: Abrupt conflict fuels anger, while ambiguity fuels doubt and grief.
• Cultural myths of “forever friends” and self-blame schemas intensify the pain of friendship loss.
• Grieving friendships is healthy; honoring their meaning may matter more than making them last.

You’re looking at your phone, and you open a photo album from a few years back—only to notice, right away, a familiar face. It stings to recognize this particular old friend: you were once so close to each other, but now you no longer speak. At all. Thinking back on this loss hurts more than you expected, and you have an impulse to mention it to someone, so you tap out your feelings in a text—but before you send it, you hesitate. Why should this bother you so much? It wasn’t an actual romantic “breakup,” and no one died or was lost forever. Is it really as big a deal as your feelings suggest?

Source: Pixabay/Pexels

Be advised: You’re not alone in this experience. The end of a friendship always comes with a psychological or emotional cost. According to the “conceptual model” of friendship loss in adulthood—created in 2022 by Vieth et al.—the end of a friendship can hit just as hard as other types of relational loss (like a divorce or a death in the family). Yet while the importance of romantic breakups or losses via end of life is well recognized, not as much research or discussion has been afforded to breakups of close friendships. As they develop and while they last, these strong connections can affect one’s psychological wellness just as powerfully as grief or love. William K. Rawlins, in his books Friendship Matters (1992) and The Compass of Friendship (2008), argues this, delineating the ways in which friendship helps each of us to develop (and, at times, redevelop) our individual identities.

Friendships decline or die in different ways. Sometimes, if conflicts arise and prove insurmountable, a friendship may come to a sudden, shocking end. Alternatively, some friendships fade away in a more passive manner, as if the people involved have just grown past the point in their lives when they could be close to each other. Vieth et al. note that the way a friendship ends has a strong effect on its emotional consequences. Friendships that end in confrontations can cause persistent, angry rumination; by contrast, uncertain or “ghosted" endings are more likely to result in slow, lingering frustration, ongoing and unresolved doubts, and grief that feels more ambiguous than defined. (Afifi et al., in 2000, suggested that this uncertainty adds to “cognitive load,” meaning it increases the mental effort one must exert to understand it, and thus creates a form of ongoing internal distress.) The more ambiguous the end of a relationship, the more likely a person will blame themselves and will have trouble simply moving on. And no matter how it ends, the loss of a friendship can cause a long-lasting ache that feels more physical than emotional: as Eisenberger (2012) pointed out, social rejection can activate the same nerves and neurological circuits as physical pain.

It’s altogether too easy to blame oneself when a friendship ends ambiguously. Because each of us is limited to one self-focused perspective on the world, we often assume that poorly understood events have been caused by something about us, personally; thus, we may fail to attribute these painful events to situational or contextual factors. And if we already lean toward a sense of ourselves as defective, somehow—or as a person who is frequently abandoned by close others—it feels “right” (although it’s usually wrong) to interpret ambiguous relational short-circuits as personal rejections. Young et al. (2003) describe this as the use of a maladaptive schema—a mental blueprint or shorthand for understanding the world—that pushes us toward familiar misinterpretations. Plus, in broader American culture, as seen in the storytelling in movies and on TV, friendship seems like something that lasts “forever.” These implications about relationships can be integrated into one’s developing identity (Hall, 2012), creating a sense that the end of a friendship might be a personal, moral failure.

Instead of blaming yourself automatically when a friendship ends, take some time to process it. Give yourself the space to grieve your loss—because, even though there’s been no breakup and no one has died, that is what you’ve just undergone. The death of a friendship can harm your psychological well-being. You will likely need to work through this loss by mourning it, as you would for any other type of loss. Be aware, though, that the end of this relationship may hold some unique meaning for you; try to understand it by processing it with someone close to you (or, as the case may be, with a therapist). And when you talk yourself through the loss, remember to be fair to yourself. Don’t catastrophize, and don’t assume it is your fault. Very likely, the friendship served an important function for you: what might that have been?

For most of us, the friendships we forge and maintain throughout our lives will be among the most meaningful relationships we have. However, they need not remain unchanged to sustain this level of importance. As time goes by, friendships may evolve: some become closer while others fade; in other words, the end of a friendship doesn’t mean something has failed. You both may have grown in ways that didn’t allow you to remain close in the same old way. Friendships help us create our identities, enhance our self-worth, provide support for us at difficult times, and foster in us a sense of community, meaning, and purpose. Honoring a friendship may therefore be more about recognizing what it offers you, and finding new ways to grow, than making sure that it lasts forever.

References

Afifi, W. A., & Guerrero, L. K. (2000). Motivations underlying topic avoidance in close relationships. In S. Petronio (Ed.), Balancing the secrets of private disclosures (pp. 165–179). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.

Eisenberger, N.I. (2012). The pain of social disconnection: examining the shared neural underpinnings of physical and social pain. National Review of Neuroscience, 13(6): 421-34.

Hall, J. A. (2012). Friendship standards: The dimensions of ideal expectations. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 29(7), 884-907.

Khullar T.H, Kirmayer M.H, Dirks M.A. (2021). Relationship dissolution in the friendships of emerging adults: How, when, and why? Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 38(11): 3243-3264.

Rawlins, W. K. (1992). Friendship matters: Communication, dialectics, and the life course. Routledge, London, UK.

Rawlins, W.K. (2008). The compass of friendship: Narratives, identities, and dialogues. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.

Rook, K.S, Charles, S.T. (2017). Close social ties and health in later life: Strengths and vulnerabilities. Am Psychol. 72(6): 567-577.

Vieth G, Rothman AJ, Simpson JA. (2022). Friendship loss and dissolution in adulthood: A conceptual model. Current Opinion in Psychology, 43: 171-175.

Young, J. E., Klosko, J. S., & Weishaar, M. E. (2003). Schema therapy: A practitioner's guide. Guilford Press.

Other Relationships

What is a reason that you have had to end a friendship?