Friendship breakups can happen for several reasons. They often arise due to differences in personality and ideologies as you grow older, betrayal over siding with someone you are not fond of, or breaking a personal promise. Either way, a rift forms between the two of you, which can sometimes be mended, but in other unfortunate cases, it becomes permanent.
Unlike romantic relationships, friendship breakups are not something you often see coming. Why would someone who you grew up with since your school days suddenly disappear from your life?
Arshi, a university student, tells us about her experience with a painful friendship breakup she experienced during her school years. At 24 years old, she has seen ups and downs in her relationships, but her opinion on friendship breakups is unique.
"If you ask me, I think they are much heavier and more painful than romantic breakups. Because of how personal and deep the bond is, you start to lose bits of yourself after the friendship ends. You have so much in common, you share the same interests, and on top of that, friends are always loyal. When a partner betrays you, it hurts but it is not always surprising, but not a betrayal from a friend."
She tells us the breakup was not the hard part; recovering from it was.
"Broken friendships leave scars just like romantic ones, but you can definitely heal from them, it just takes time. No one really tells you how to recover from them, you just do. With time though, you learn a lot of things and make better friends. I found that I started to notice patterns of what a good and a bad friend is, and what the next step should be."
Older folks have a much deeper view of friendship breakups. We spoke to 45-year-old Nima, who had a lot to share.
"When you're older, you rarely lose good friends, and if you do, it's because of something major. I would even go as far as to say that if you lose a friend at my age, they were never a good friend to begin with! Unlike young people, I find our friendships often end because of things related to our ego. If we find that a friend does not respect us and our family, or has shown time and time again that they do not appreciate our hard work and effort, that is where it breaks apart. I would say that the process is quite slow and serious rather than quick and petty."
Nima finds that recovering from a friendship breakup at her age is far more difficult compared to when she was younger.
"It's not easy at all," she says. "It's hard to accept it. You know someone for so long, and suddenly they are not there. Sometimes, if the both of you are mature enough, you can patch it up, but in other cases, you have no choice but to say goodbye."
The thing about friendships that end is that there is no instant formula or cure to healing from it. The only solution it seems, is the passage of time. Friendship breakups are almost similar to grief, except you are mourning the loss of someone still present.
Time can be a curse but also a blessing. You meet new friends, and you start to realise that perhaps losing that one friend was not so bad after all. A friendship breakup can also teach you lessons on what to look out for and can help you to make friends with kinder, more like-minded people.
Parting ways with a friend can also be quite relieving as well. Like romantic relationships, friendships can sometimes be toxic. You don't realise just how harmful the said friendship was until you're out of it.
Friendship breakups happen, and that is something we cannot change and must accept. But by looking at the end of one relationship as an opportunity to introduce another, we can take a painful moment like the loss of a good friend, and turn it into a moment of healing and change.
Names have been changed to maintain confidentiality.
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