I’ve lost friends, some by death … others through sheer inability to cross the street.
—Virginia Woolf
A HEALTHY HUMAN BODY assimilates good nutrition and eliminates toxins at the same time. In the same way we have to shed stale or negative relationships, even as we nurture the high-protein ones. Like much of the “stuff” we discard in this house-cleaning period, many friends have simply been outgrown. But disengaging from friendships that are benign but no longer life-enhancing is a delicate business. Vivian, who moved to the United States from Israel after her divorce, is somber when she describes her decision. “The choices I am making now are much more personal and quiet and involve less people,” she says. “And that makes it hard in terms of friendships that have kind of traveled with you. Perhaps the wave that carries them is nostalgia.”
Then there are those we called friends who are now and always were unhealthy—belittling our achievements, dismissing our concerns, being disloyal—but somehow became embedded in our lives. They drag us down, hold us back, or just don’t understand (or don’t care to understand) what is going on. They must go. “I have one friend who I like very much but she always belittles my success,” says Jane, the artist. “If I ever told her what she was doing, she would be shocked,” she adds, “but I am beginning to think that she is not good for me.”
“I recently ‘broke up’ with one of my best friends,” says Candida in a comment on a blog I wrote about unfriending. “It was quite hurtful for me, but I just realized that—in that ‘he’s not that into you’ kind of way—despite how much we care for each other, how close we were, for a long time …” it wasn’t working any more. In terms of what Candida needs now, “it is not enough to be called friends. There is something missing, some sort of trust.”
“Honesty and trust are important,” observes one woman succinctly. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me and unfriend you.”
The word “unfriending” (some say “defriending”) is one of the newest dictionary-worthy terms that, thanks to Facebook, indicates a brutal and final cutoff. In real life, though, you can’t just click a friend away. You can have a heart-to-heart; you can have a disagreement and not make up; you can try a white lie such as “I’ve got to devote my time to my grandchildren/my school work/my job.” But any way you look at it, paring down your inner circle can be hurtful, guilt-making, and very hard to initiate.
I’ve relied on the “drift” technique—fewer calls, slower responses to emails—hoping that distance and silence will dissolve the tie. This tactic has backfired more than once. The worst experience was when I saw an email from the designated friend, opened it, and decided to “keep as new” rather than responding. I let a few days go by and to my surprise got another email from the same person. “I know you are there. You opened my last email. Why didn’t you reply?!” Until then I had no idea that it was possible to monitor an email’s status. I could have said, “because I would like to downgrade our friendship,” but, of course, I didn’t—and still haven’t.
Whether to “mend it or end it” is a tough call warns psychologist Dr. Irene S. Levine, in Best Friends Forever. With a known toxin, it is a good idea to figure out whether you want to have a showdown or just walk away. That will depend on the possible relief such an exit conversation can bring. It may be the case, though, that clearing the air will get the relationship back on track, but make sure that air-clearing doesn’t become the ongoing (and only) tie between you.
Clearing the air is easier said than done, especially because frequently the issue involves hurt feelings, not an actual conflict. Moreover, being confrontational is hard for many women—we’ve been making peace, not war, for so long. There have been many times when I have felt hurt or angry but instead of speaking up, I either harbored my resentment or pulled back, two responses that aren’t good for the health of my friendships. I can also vividly remember—will I ever forget?! —a blowup that haunts my dreams to this day. But we owe it to ourselves and to those precious few friends we are nurturing to take each other on when something goes wrong.
It took a man to clarify the friend-mending process for me. He was bemoaning the loss of a lifelong friendship in an essay published in the New York Times. “There was no cinematic blowup; it just evaporated. I believe I disappointed or annoyed or let Dan down in some way, and he chose to end the friendship rather than confront me. … I understand. I’ve done the same thing with other guys,” he admits. It’s over. He regrets that they can’t work things out the way his wife and her friends do. They “hurt each other’s feelings. Then they stew and obsess and vent to other friends. Next they engage in a difficult phone call. A few days later they meet and drink wine and work on gently knitting their bond back together. And their friendship not only survives, it is also strengthened.”
Perhaps the relationship has soured because the give-and-take has gotten out of whack, or an accepted pattern of one person making all the plans and imposing her opinions is no longer comfortable for the other. Resistance may outrage one, but it will liberate the other. And it may restore equilibrium.
Carole Hyatt, a career coach, is a giver, describing herself as “Lady Bountiful.” Her friend Jill is a taker. “Over the last twenty years she had called me at least three times a week to request something,” she told me when I interviewed her for Inventing the Rest of Our Lives. Once too often, they were sitting in a hot tub and Jill “spent thirty minutes doing this huge ‘ask’.” Carole finally exploded. “‘I have been hearing this conversation for twenty years, and you have never once offered me anything!” Her friend was stunned. “Carole,” she said, “you never ask! You look like you have everything. I wouldn’t know where to begin giving to you, offering. I’d feel foolish.”
That encounter was an epiphany for Carole. “I realized that I never did ask. That I have never ‘lowered’ myself to ask. That I was Lady Bountiful. And yet mysteriously I felt that she would offer. That everyone would offer. The fact is,” she now understands, “no one ever offers—unless you ask!” The revelation lifted Carole’s resentment toward Jill, and Jill vowed to become more aware of Carole’s needs.
Being “Lady Bountiful” is just what the doctor ordered, writes Sark defiantly. In her popular book Fabulous Friendship Festival: Loving Wildly, Learning Deeply, Living Fully with Our Friends, she relishes the status being a giver. “I actually think I’m more comfortable giving to friends than receiving. Because I feel in control when I’m the one giving. I also get the rewards of being perceived as the ‘good’ and ‘generous’ one. It also means that in any score keeping that may occur, I’ll be the ‘winner.’ It feels embarrassing to admit this and also liberating. I know that other people experience this too.” Knowing that about herself may enable Sark to continue building relationships that are skewed that way. On the other hand, she may have to make some adjustments as her friends get better at holding their own.
When all is said and done, renewing or ending a friendship is about both sides acknowledging their expectations and weighing them against what’s possible. There is another reality to factor in to the equation: human nature. We wish our beloved friends well, but feelings of competitiveness, envy, and pettiness are always lurking. Schadenfreude, that unpleasant better-her-than-me feeling, crops up, right there along with all the compassion and love we feel, at someone’s misfortune.
Kate has found that it is almost as hard to know where to stop looking for failings as it is to identify them at the start. She worries that she will set the bar for reconciliation impossibly high. “We all need to learn how to be a good friend, and in my opinion, number one on that list is not to ask too much of our friends, not to pressure them, guilt them, or hint around to them,” she says. “We need to behave in such a way that our friends feel supported, and safe in our presence. Otherwise they will begin to distance themselves—and rightly so.”
Finding yourself on the other side of an unfriending is understandably painful and traumatic. Novelist Jacquelyn Mitchard lost her most intimate friend over some harsh words to the friend’s son, which weren’t forgiven. “For nearly 18 years we two had been one—what Carson McCullers called ‘the we of me,’” she wrote in More magazine. “Our friendship was as powerful as any love affair. So losing her was, I believe, as crushing as a divorce, and harder to face in midlife than a divorce.” There are no conventions for consoling a grieving friend, she found. “Your marriage ends; someone dies. It’s horrific. It’s unbearable. And yet, quickly a circle of compassion surrounds you. People offer condolences, companionship and casseroles. You lose a friend, and unless you tell, no one even knows. If you do tell, no one much cares.”
For her, recovery was long and painful, but she learned something from the breakup of this friendship that might make her other relationships healthier. “I wasn’t being the friend I wanted to have.” Looking back, she wonders, “was I more often the one who made the call or the one who returned it? As we exchanged news, did I listen first, and listen well, no matter how much my own update quivered on the tip of my tongue? Was I the one to postpone the coffee date because my life was too busy? Not always, but too often, the answers were uncomfortable.”
Divorce and widowhood unsettle a wide circle of relationships, including long-standing friendships. Although many step forward and become a devoted support group, some friends take sides or pull back. Some couples can’t handle socializing with half of a former couple. Others find that their lives are incompatible with that of a newly single friend. I heard from many women who were dumped when their circumstances changed, just when they needed those friends most. When one asked what the problem was, why wasn’t she being invited to their homes anymore, she got a straight answer from her brother-in-law: “You aren’t an ‘and.’” At first she didn’t get it, so he explained. “You aren’t part of a Dick and Jane or John and Mary.”
Imagine being unfriended even before you walk in the door. That’s what happened to Ann when, at fifty-two, she remarried and moved into her new husband’s community. She was looking forward to making new friends there and was instead dismayed to find herself snubbed by his old friends. “With a few dear-to-me exceptions, the women never invited me to get a drink, meet for coffee, take a walk—and they ignored my similar invitations,” she recalls. “I feel terribly alone when they reminisce about their pasts together, often including stories about my husband and his ex-wife.” And they show no interest in her life story. After seven years, she finds herself doubly cut off. “They do not include me in their group email lists, so I only hear second-hand about parties, illnesses, etc.”
Late writer Carolyn Heilbrun, known for her curmudgeonly manner, suggested that you might want to unfriend yourself briefly in order to protect your friendships from your own excesses. Known for her curmudgeonly manner, crotchety and impatient by nature, she delighted in letting off steam online. “If one sometimes feels compelled, as we all do, to complain about any dimension or all dimensions of one’s life but does not do so because all the people one sees are sick of it and will visit even less often if complaints or criticism are forced upon them,” she wrote in The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty,“well, there are people out there who will be happy to exchange complaints and perhaps even help to talk us out of them, or counter them with other, strange grievances.”
Finally, there are sad and frightening circumstances in which emergency treatment is called for in order to protect both you and your friend from herself—even if the friendship does not survive the “intervention.” Dr. Levine has a checklist for those circumstances in which a friend should speak out.
That final item is the saddest realization of all, but the most necessary to act on—for your own survival.