Over the years, I had a “friend” who told me that we didn’t need to speak every day. And they made me think more about some of the not-so-great friendships I had-the ones where the wounds still felt tender despite the passage of time. Why I'm Saying Goodbye to Toxic FriendshipsĪll of their stories, no matter how old or new, brought them back to the eye of the hurricane, the center of their heart break. Of the friend who told them they were too needy.
About the friends they cut off during the pandemic. There was the one about the trio of friends who tormented them in high school. I knew I would be hitting a nerve writing a novel about bad friendships, but I didn’t know I would hear from women who were still in pain over friendship breakups 20 years ago, or from moms worrying about their daughters experiencing that same pain. How do you talk to a friend you’re not happy with? How do you handle it when a friend ghosts you? Why do we feel so crushed when we have problems with our friends? And from parents, what is it about the intense friendships between teenage girls? There were more dates to come-Instagram Live events, Zoom book club meetings, and podcast interviews all brimming with women, who asked the same kinds of questions over and over. The literary festival was just the beginning of my book tour for The Falling Girls. Losing a close friendship can feel like a death, yet no one thinks to hold a shiva. But we have no such roadmap for the end of platonic relationships.
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We have books and couples counseling and podcasts by Esther Perel on how to resolve those conflicts, or move on when the coupling has run its course. In romantic relationships we’re trained to expect conflict and disappointment.
But rarely, if ever, do we talk about the other side: Friendship breakups, even though the wounds they leave behind can clamor at us for years. We buy mugs that read #friendshipgoals, trade BFF heart necklaces, and fantasize about low-stress girls trips where everyone meditates in a circle, holding hands on a beach in Tulum or something like that. I don’t know a better person.” We’ve been groomed to have high expectations of our friends. She is the friend that everybody deserves. She is the sister that everybody would want. We talk about friendship like how Oprah has described Gayle: “She is the mother I never had. I didn’t want to state the obvious: that one day her daughter could feel utterly intoxicated by a best friend, and the next day, that same “best friend” might start a rumor about her for no reason whatsoever, completely shattering her. “It doesn’t get easier as an adult, does it?” The mother nodded her head because she knew what I knew-that her daughter’s friendship problems wouldn’t end in middle school. I failed tests obsessed over why she’d lie about me.
(I was not.) I was heartbroken, walking the halls in a daze, wondering what I did. The middle school friend was a blonde Guess jeans-wearing mean girl who inexplicably turned on me and started a rumor that I was a thief. When a woman approached me about her daughter’s friendship problems at a local literary festival where I was doing a talk for my book, The Falling Girls, a novel about toxic friendships, I felt a pang of sorrow that I hadn’t felt since my first middle school friendship breakup.
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