BREAK-UPS OF ANY KIND hurt. Think of the last time you broke up with a romantic partner. Break-ups ache all over: your mind, your limbs, your ego. And I swear, if you concentrate on it at the right moment, you can actually feel as though your heart is breaking. The beats seem off-kilter, like the organ has all of a sudden forgotten how to thump-thump against your chest. You feel pain, actual physical pain. You feel anguish, very real anguish. You feel as though you may never recover from it — how could you possibly resume your normal life, what are you going to do, walk around with your chest gaping open? How can you mend a broken heart? Al Green and The Bee Gees didn’t seem to know. But at least when you break off a romantic relationship, there’s a language for it. There’s an agreed upon treatment plan and a mourning period and a set of rituals we all follow, as prescribed by our mates and pop culture. There are songs to cry to alone in a darkened room, there are movies to sob along to as you gorge on your junk food of choice, there are grace periods that allow you to wallow in your misery without the usual obligations to socialise or function. We know how to do romantic break-ups, we know what they look like and feel like and smell like. We’ve memorised the routine: listen to gut-wrenching ballads, watch something miserable on Netflix, binge on Ben & Jerry’s cookie dough ice cream. Tubs of it. Calories don’t count when you’re heartbroken; neither does bad body odour or sudden-onset hermitage. Break-ups are one of the few occasions we give our friends, our acquaintances, our idols and ourselves permission to feel an emotion fully until it releases its grip. It’s one of the few times we get socially sanctioned time to heal.
When I broke up with a boyfriend of seven years in my twenties, I moved back in with my dad and stepmom for a bit, played ‘Magic’ by Coldplay on repeat, ate only from the food group ‘cookie’, napped away the pain, sent woeful messages to my friends, watched endless re-runs of Friends on telly, and had long, animated conversations with my patient, elderly rescue dog, Lady Fluffington. These were my coping mechanisms, and I did them automatically because I knew the social protocol for break-ups. We tend to very quickly empathise with someone who’s going through a break-up; it’s that universal a malady. We all have hearts, they get broken, it’s a bitter fact of life. But there is comfort in the banality of the pain even at the time (though it also helps to imagine that there has never been so tragic a break-up and there never will be a more tragic breakup, not now, not ever, pass the cookies). Romantic love and its demise are things we have utterly digested as a species; we live them in reality and obsessively recreate them in fiction. In fact, really, we love nothing more than the tragic ending of a romantic relationship. It is, perhaps, our most cherished form of schadenfreude. Just think — every time a couple get together on a TV show, the writers are obliged to throw a complication in to break them up because we simply cannot stand to watch romantic happiness or stability for more than an episode or three. We prefer the angst of wondering if they’ll get together more than the satisfaction of watching it work out; such is our fascination with the end of things. We don’t watch rom-coms about people in harmonious, healthy relationships who glide through their lives together uninterrupted. Oh no, we want infidelities and overseas job postings, impossible decisions and terminal illnesses, cooling affections and sexual dysfunctions, emotional cheating and intervening circumstances. When we say we like love songs, really we mean we like the sound of a famous person’s heart breaking, accompanied by a catchy beat. Love songs are the poems of the broken hearted and we’re sick for them because we have a cultural preoccupation with the failure of love.
And yet! And yet. We know so little and speak so little of the friendship break-up. It is a very rare thing indeed to find a candid or insightful depiction of a friendship breaking up. Because they do break up — oh yes, they break up. And it’s painful. People who’ve experienced a true, proper savaging of a friendship say it’s possibly even more painful than the end of a romantic relationship. Several people have told me it’s more similar to a death than a break-up, because when you lose someone from your life that completely, it’s as though they cease to exist. The grief we feel in these situations is exacerbated by the fact that we have no script for this type of break-up and no clearly marked route to recovery.
Elly and Bridie met when they were 10 years old. They were virtually inseparable, in and out of school hours. There were glimmers of disquiet even in the beginning, though: Bridie had a problem with lying. When you’re a kid that doesn’t really matter; if anything, it’s just a sign of creativity. Elly and her other friends let Bridie get away with lies that were audacious only in the ease with which they could have been disproven. As the girls grew up and started high school, Bridie’s lies grew. She started telling tales about boys kissed and virginity lost, things Elly knew weren’t true largely because they spent so much of their lives together, Bridie would simply not have had time for all these alleged dalliances. But again, what real harm are those kinds of lies? So Bridie wanted to beckon the feeling of adulthood a little closer by pretending to make out with some boys, who is that really hurting? Next Bridie started inventing new friends. A whole group of them, all people she apparently had time to see outside of the tight-knit little group of friends in which she and Elly had grown up.
When Elly went to boarding school, her friendship with Bridie shrank into a series of phone calls. On these calls — those great, long chats you used to have on landlines — Bridie would tell Elly all about her new friends. At this stage, Elly thought that perhaps these friends were false, but she let Bridie have her fantasy — someone who is making up a whole group of friends is clearly clinging to the illusion of popularity because they need it. Then Facebook was invented and things got more elaborate for Bridie. She was a Catfish ahead of her time; someone who had invented people long before she even had the anonymity of the Internet to facilitate it. Facebook was a fantastic tool of deception for her. She was able, suddenly, to give her group of buddies real-looking identities online. Elly was still generous with her gullibility at this stage, perhaps believing Bridie out of a residual childhood kindness. That, and there were Facebook profiles for more than 20 of Bridie’s friends, all of whom interacted with Bridie and each other. Really, it seemed too elaborate to be a lie; who has the time to invent and maintain more than 20 Facebook profiles? For whatever reason, loyalty perhaps, Elly didn’t question her. So Elly and Bridie lived on as friends — for a decade.
Elly went to university, Bridie moved interstate, and then they both went through significant break-ups and decided to move in together. About a month later, Elly became very unwell. Her mental health had taken a battering after the break-up, she had serious PTSD and depression, and she ended up in a psychiatric ward. Her best friends flocked to her side in the emergency department. Bridie was there, but something was up. She kept making deep sighing noises, as though the attention Elly was receiving caused her physical discomfort. At one stage she ‘fainted’ or, perhaps more accurately, sat down dramatically in a nearby chair. She was paid minimal attention, mainly because Elly’s friends were preoccupied caring about Elly. Bridie pulled one of them aside later and confessed that she was pregnant. The details were sketchy: she’d been whisked off by a nurse after she fainted and had a blood test and found out immediately that she was pregnant. ‘Don’t tell Elly,’ she begged the friend, ‘this is her night.’ Her night, like being in hospital for a mental health breakdown was a wedding or a birthday party. Elly would be there for a month, and Bridie would come to visit. On one of her very first visits, Bridie told Elly about the pregnancy. Elly was alarmed, asking Bridie what she was going to do and gently broaching the subject of an abortion. Bridie was defensive, brushing off the kinds of practical suggestions that would have been helpful to a genuinely pregnant woman.
By the time Elly left hospital, Bridie would technically have been about 14 weeks’ pregnant. As Bridie reached 18 and 19 weeks, Elly became really troubled because the time during which Bridie could safely terminate the pregnancy was passing. When Elly pressed Bridie on it, she got jumpy and aloofly said, ‘Oh, I miscarried the other day.’ What should have been devastating news was delivered with a cool kind of nonchalance, almost like she had lost interest in the lie now that Elly was better and there wasn’t so much attention to be reclaimed. In a last ditch attempt to honour her friend’s story, Elly insisted she go and see a doctor. When Bridie refused, Elly realised with absolute certainty that the pregnancy had been a lie. A lie designed specifically to divert sympathy from Elly to Bridie during a really traumatic time for her. It hurt, and it disturbed Elly. This was her oldest, dearest friend and she had been lied to many times before, but this time it really mattered. Bridie was one of the only people who had consistently been in Elly’s life since she was little. Still, she didn’t confront her.
Elly didn’t mention the pregnancy, or for that matter any of the other lies from over the years, but she carried them with her. They were there between Elly and Bridie, these unspoken blotches on their friendship, nasty little silences and untruths that undermined everything they had together. In the end, it was something entirely trivial that finally broke Elly’s trust in Bridie. They had a stupid, loud disagreement about a TV show one night at a birthday sleepover. Elly yelled at Bridie about her opinions on the television show, but it wasn’t really about that. She was reacting to years of lies, big and little, and mainly, she was letting go of the hurt Bridie had caused when she fabricated a pregnancy to detract from Elly’s mental health problems. She was also speaking out of fear and distress. Elly cared about Bridie and she was worried, even disturbed, by her behaviour.
After that night, they never saw each other again.
It was grim for Elly, this friendship break-up, because it disintegrated one of the only things she thought worth keeping from her childhood. It was devastating to find out that she never really knew Bridie. She didn’t really know how to process it, except as another example of someone she loved letting her down. It took a lot to extinguish that friendship, but ultimately Elly knew she really needed to. Sixteen years of lies accumulate, until the feeling of not knowing the person behind them is just too much to bear. So Elly had to walk away from that friendship and find a way to mourn what they once had together.
Strip away the fabricated Facebook friends, the fake pregnancy, the TV-themed meltdown and the myriad other lies over the years, and this is the story of friendship broken. It happens all the time, everywhere, to all different kinds of people. And it is my great belief that, like Elly, we haven’t yet quite worked out how to deal with losing friendships.
When it comes to friendship breakdowns, we are essentially making it up as we go along. Name me a popular song about a friendship break-up. Or a sensitive scene on a prime-time sitcom about the fragility of friendship. An entire movie-length dissection of what it means to be someone’s friend and then decide to cut them from your life. You’re drawing a blank there because we simply do not dwell on platonic break-ups in the same way as romantic ones. We do not devote countless melodies or lyrics or storylines to them because we have ritually prioritised romantic relationships over friendships. We have been so utterly captivated by the breakdown of romantic love that we’ve practically forgotten to investigate how the heart aches when a friendship is, for whatever reason, over.
This does not please me. We have shorthand for the pain of a relationship break-up; simply say ‘I’m going through a break-up’ or ‘Steve and I just broke up’ and it triggers your friend or your boss or your barista to reminisce about the last time or the worst time their heart was broken. There’s an ease with which we identify heartbreak, and we allow that person the space to recuperate. Try saying, ‘My best friend from high school and I used to be so close, but we’ve sort of drifted lately and the other day we avoided eye contact on the street.’ Or, ‘My mate Sarah and I had an epic fight about who owed who a fiver and now I think maybe the friendship is over forever,’ and you get no such emotional leniency. I hate the idea that people are aching over something that we as a society have not deemed worthy of our cultural interest. This could be changing; there do seem to be more glossy magazine articles and Buzzfeed essays about friendship break-ups. There is some momentum in the conversation there, but it’s fledgling. We are still figuring out how to talk about, and validate, our friendships. It feels like a mildly revolutionary idea that a friendship could be as important to someone emotionally as a romantic relationship and that, consequentially, its ending will be just as painful.
And it is very real pain. When Elly finally fell out with Bridie, she lost years of shared memories and confidences. When a friend of mine from college drifted away, both geographically and sentimentally, we lost all the love and secrets we’d accumulated together. She had become a part of me, and all of that was wrenched away when we stopped being friends. Even though I knew it was the right thing, even though I knew we didn’t make each other’s lives better, it still hurts to watch someone vanish from your life. Lost friendships, whether they fall apart over a single, trivial argument or a more protracted process of drifting apart, really hurt. It’s a breaking of trust and a dissolution of intimacy unlike any other, really. All the time, secrets, love and personal jokes you invest in a relationship just fade into memory, until that’s all you have left of someone who once truly meant something to you. Getting over that kind of loss requires grieving — but we haven’t got an instruction manual for this kind of grief yet. It’s still in the works.
Because we do not have the tools to properly deal with the friendship break-up, we fumble along on our own. We haven’t agreed upon a tactful or proper way to do it, so everybody’s just bloody going for it in whatever way they can. That has resulted, if you ask me, in an epidemic of poorly executed friendship break-ups. People are getting away with all sorts of behaviour that we’ve already vetoed in a romantic break-up scenario, things we’ve already given trendy names to like ‘ghosting’ or ‘breadcrumbing’. They’re no longer acceptable practice in the romantic arena — in fact, if you are the victim of any such behaviour, you’re entitled to at least an extra fortnight of break-up misery indulgence. Not to mention the bonus ire you’re allowed to have towards the entire sex of the person who has wronged you.
For the uninitiated, by the way, ghosting is when you’ve been on a few dates and then your possible lover simply stops communicating with you. It’s like leaving a party without saying goodbye; they simply vanish from your WhatsApp thread, Tinder inbox or text feed. They do not pay you the common courtesy of explaining they are not interested or it’s not working out between you or they’ve met someone else, they simply stop replying to your messages. It’s an especially cruel trick of the heart, because then of course you’re left wondering what you did wrong, or worse, what could be so fundamentally unlovable about you that a person is incapable of explaining why they don’t want to be with you. I have to admit I’ve done it — once. It was when I first moved to London and tried out Tinder. He was a male model and he kept referring to himself as a male model. He spent an inordinate amount of time going through his exercise regime with me and I just didn’t have the heart or the words to tell him I could not be any less interested if I tried. I sent him all sorts of mixed messages and ultimately stopped communicating with him because I was confused and hadn’t dated in seven years. After I’d brutally ghosted this perfectly nice young man, I saw him on the tube twice, panicked, and had to camouflage myself into the crowd, which is my penance.
Breadcrumbing, if I understand it correctly, is the act of half-heartedly communicating with someone, only ever really getting in touch in little spurts when it’s convenient for you, leading someone on and then losing interest again quite quickly. Like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs in message form for a hopeful romantic interest to follow, without thinking how it might affect their heart or their ego and without the intention to actually follow through on a relationship.
Now, both of these practices are frowned upon on the dating scene. When it comes to friendships, though, ghosting and breadcrumbing are still kind-of acceptable because we haven’t decided on an alternative course of action. I did a social media appeal for stories about friendship break-ups and boy, oh boy, did people deliver. It almost seems as though everyone has a painful friendship break-up they’re reeling from, even if it’s just one of those things where close friends drift from intimate to acquaintance territory. Evidence suggests people are hurting one another all over the damn place. Both perpetrators and victims of these bad friendship break-up techniques got in touch and it seems to me that we are, collectively, at a loss as to what to do when we want a friendship to end. The other thing I noticed is how often people said to me, ‘It’s so nice to talk about this with someone . . .’ as though they hadn’t found an outlet for their stories of friendship pain until they spoke to me. That makes me immeasurably sad, that we haven’t found a way to comfortably talk about broken friendships yet and so there are people walking around their lives with this lingering heartache.
One woman, Lily, was the victim of an epic friend ghosting. She’s an American who’d moved to a small Australian town with her husband. They were building a house and their builder, Mikey, kept telling Lily she reminded him of his American wife, Kylie. Lily was new to town so she jumped at the suggestion of becoming friends with Mikey’s wife, and quickly set up a double date for the four of them. The women got close fast — they were both American, both newly married, both looking for friendship in a sunburnt corner of rural Australia. They started having dinner and catch-ups over wine several times a week, and that lasted a year. They both got pregnant around the same time — Lily told Kylie her baby news ‘the minute she peed on a stick’, but Kylie kept her pregnancy a secret for 13 weeks. That, to Lily, was the first sign that things were changing. They usually told each other everything, and this was a secret they could have shared. The friendship continued in fits and bursts, both women had their second children and then Kylie announced that she, Mikey and the kids were moving back to the States. It didn’t make sense — Mikey would have to start his business from scratch, they’d made their lives in Australia — but you don’t question a mama of two babes who wants to move home, I suppose. Next thing Lily knows, she can’t find Kylie on social media. Her Instagram account has vanished, she’s not on Facebook. Lily tries to get in touch, but can’t. She finally finds a sneaky private account she thinks might belong to Kylie and asks to follow her, but she’s denied and blocked. Through the grapevine, Lily hears that Kylie served Mikey with divorce papers and tried to keep the kids from him. Mikey returns to Australia, distraught. Lily never hears from Kylie again. Not once. There’s no explanation; just the total and abrupt erasure of a very tight friendship. Lily is mystified, left trying to come up with theories for what happened. Did Kylie have postnatal depression she kept hidden? Was she struggling more than she let on? Why did she need to leave behind her entire Australian life when she decided to leave her husband? Had their friendship been so disposable? Had Lily imagined their closeness?
Another woman, Georgie, made a dear friend when she was 20 and doing an amateur production of the musical Cats. Most of the cast were tone-deaf and hilariously bad, and Georgie bonded with the one other person who seemed to find the whole thing funny, a woman called Esther. Esther was Georgie’s ‘grown-up friend’ because she had all the trappings of adulthood: a husband, a house. They both liked vintage clothes, musicals and politics, and they had one of those friendships that exists on the periphery of your usual circle; it was always just the two of them when they caught up. While Georgie was roaming the continents working as a digital nomad, Esther got divorced and decided to sell her house and travel through Europe. She got lonely on her solo adventure and came to stay with Georgie in England for a bit, where they hung out. The stay came to an end and Esther presented Georgie with a big, beautiful bunch of flowers to thank her for having her to stay. She went back to Australia on what Georgie thought were perfectly good terms. Why would you give flowers to someone you secretly hated, right? Next time Georgie was in Australia, she stayed with Esther and her new boyfriend, they had chats over tea and everything seemed fine. But the time Georgie visited Australia after that, she messaged Esther to see if she wanted to meet up and got no response. Another message, no response. Georgie checked in on Esther’s Facebook to see if she could work out why she hadn’t heard from her, only to discover they weren’t friends any more. She’d been — you guessed it — ghosted. No explanation; simply a mysterious withdrawal of friendship.
Georgie was mystified. And then she was angry. Why dissolve a perfectly lovely friendship without so much as a goodbye? I very much like what Georgie did next. She sent Esther a message, courteously asking for an explanation. I thought we were friends, she said, but I’ve discovered we’re not and I’d like to know why. Esther wrote back. It was a detailed, heated description of how Esther thought Georgie had failed her as a friend, abandoned her during her visit in England and exacerbated her loneliness as a new divorcée. According to Georgie, each alleged infraction was a miscommunication or a misunderstanding, and Esther knew that. And yet, here she was, definitively cutting off the friendship. The thing that gets me is this: Why didn’t Esther send that message in the first place? Was she too frightened, or tongue-tied, or sad to compose a simple message alerting Georgie to the end of their years-long friendship? How could she live with that wanton absence of resolution? Did she not have the courtesy or the guts to have that conversation? Could she not have even lied about the reason, but still extricated herself from the friendship with some sort of notice to the other party?
Having spoken to a bunch of people, I now suspect this is happening again and again all over the world: people breaking off a friendship without notifying the other person. It’s a matter of basic manners, to start. Confrontation is hard, I get that. Emotional transparency is difficult and sometimes friendships do just fade until your mate becomes someone you used to know. But this isn’t that, this is the deliberate erasure of a connection that meant something to another person and I’m inclined to argue they deserve an explanation. It’s further evidence to me that we are sentimentally ill-equipped to deal with the friendship break-up scenario. We’d sooner ghost our way out of a meaningful platonic relationship than brave the awkwardness of being honest about the situation. That ends up hurting people — people who once meant something to us.
So how do we do it properly? How do we break up with a friend like a grown-up? And then, bloody hell, how do we recover from it afterwards, breaker and breakee? I spoke to psychologist Perpetua Neo (her clients call her ‘Dr P’) for advice on this one. She says, first things first, look back over the friendship and try to work out whether it’s been a toxic one or not. A toxic friendship is one where you feel drained, it’s one-sided and the focus is always magically on the other person, and there’s a lot of unnecessary drama and passive-aggressiveness. And not because they’re going through something awful; just because it’s their personality to be that way. It’s important to decide if the friendship was toxic because it’ll affect how you break it off. Toxic people thrive on drama — they’re sick for a fight because it gives them adrenalin and makes them feel important — so you don’t want to indulge them in that. Ain’t nobody got time for some soap-opera level arguments that drag on and take over your life. If you’re dealing with a toxic person, you may want to try and break it off — a simple ‘this isn’t working for me any more’ will do — but then you may need to freeze them out. It could be the only way to avoid drama. They’ll try and woo you back and they could turn aggressive when it doesn’t work, but you have to stay resolved and resist ‘getting back together’. If the friend isn’t toxic, but your lives have diverged to a point where not even nostalgia or respect can salvage it, then you’ve got to pluck up the courage to say, ‘We’ve become very different people and I’ve decided we shouldn’t continue this friendship.’ Dr P says to do it with love and try to respect what you’ve had between you. That’s why good people deserve some sort of notice that you’re ending it — because of what you’ve been through together. That way you’re in control and you’ve set the tone for mutual respect — hopefully they’ll respond in the same way. It’s a whole other story when you’re the person being broken up with.
Lizzie got in touch to tell me about a friend who’d broken up with her. She met this friend, Kimmy, in their first year at university. They became entwined in that lovely way young women can: they stayed at each other’s houses after nights out, travelled together, studied together, went on double dates and really grew into early adulthood side by side. It was a formative friendship for both of them because they were busily working out what it was to be an adult person in the world, with a close ally. They’d always been supportive of one another, but then suddenly they found themselves competing for things: jobs, grades, boyfriends. It blew up, in the end, over a man, but that man became symbolic of everything that didn’t work between them any more. Kimmy told Lizzie she didn’t want to be her friend any more. Lizzie was devastated; she says it was worse than any romantic break-up she’s ever had because it felt more personal. As she says, there are any number of reasons a romantic partner might break up with you: perhaps they’re allergic to commitment or scared of relationships, maybe their family doesn’t like you or he’s decided he loves you but not enough. There are familiar events that break up a romantic relationship: the cooling of passion, the pressures of long distance, the boredom of the heart. But with a friend? With a friend, it feels as though a person has got to know you intimately, spent all this time with you and made an analysis of who you are as a human being — and somehow you’ve fallen short. Most of us only have room for one romantic partner, so it makes sense that multiple people won’t make the cut. We have room in our lives for plenty of friends, so when someone decides they would like you to cease and desist with your companionship, it’s a huge and very hurtful move.
A friend of mine, Melanie, lost her childhood best friend to Jesus. They’d been, as she puts it, ‘wild, crazy savages that always came in a two-for-one deal for all things in life’. You know those childhood friendships; you become inseparable in a very intense, almost obsessive way that defines the way you see the world and yourself. You grow up side by side, companions in everything, allies through the process of becoming teenagers and then adults. Friendships like this are so important; who could possibly know and adore your spirit more than someone who learnt to love you as a child? Imagine, then, growing up and growing apart. Imagine the pain in hearing they no longer want to be in your life — they know you so well, better than anyone, they know you to the core of your being, and they make the decision to eject you from their life. When Melanie’s friend found Jesus — unexpectedly, as an adult — she changed. She morphed into someone Melanie didn’t recognise, and suddenly there was this great disconnect between them. It all came undone officially when Melanie hooked up with someone at her friend’s wedding, and her friend used that as an excuse to end the whole friendship — supposedly because an act of lust like that was so far removed from her new religious life, it had ‘embarrassed’ her on her wedding day. Melanie was dumbfounded and devastated. She felt she hadn’t done anything wrong, certainly nothing worthy of a break-up. She was distraught in a way that truly has no equivalent. It felt more like a death than anything else — the friendship ceased to exist with the brutal suddenness of death — but we have no way to really mourn someone who is still alive, so she’s just left with this aching feeling of inexplicable loss.
Dr Perpetua Neo has some tips on how to recover from such a thing. She says it’s really important to mourn properly, and that starts with giving yourself permission to feel broken. We mourn all sorts of things in life that are not technically deaths — the parent we wish we’d had but never got, the future we thought we’d have with a partner, a missed opportunity. When a friendship breaks, we will grieve. It’s normal and natural. Dr P suggests maybe trying to set a time limit for your mourning, like some cultures do with their grieving rituals. Allow yourself to cry and scream and binge on ice cream. Allow yourself to fully experience the pain of the break-up because there is no way of avoiding it, or distracting yourself away from it. You can try and postpone it, but when you try to play tricks with it, pain has a way of smacking you in the face when you least expect. It’s important to know this sort of pain is natural and universal, so normalise it and get on with it. Don’t judge yourself or blame yourself, it’s a waste of time and energy. Then, says Dr P, do a friendship post-mortem. Try to work out what went wrong and draw it all into a narrative so you can understand it and package it away. Our minds love closure. Talk to the good friends you have in your life to remind you how fabulous friendship can be and make a note not to settle for anything less than what they give you.
Now, as I said, there are friendships that naturally come to an end — and then there are toxic friendships. Not all broken friendships were toxic friendships, but in my opinion, all toxic friendships should end up broken. We are coming to terms with the idea that domestic abuse is not always physical, and that sometimes emotional abuse can be just as excruciating. We are getting more comfortable talking about that concept in the context of a marriage or romantic relationship, but we don’t often expect or even realise when it’s happening between friends. It is entirely possible for someone to emotionally abuse, belittle and demean their platonic friend — it happens all the damn time and it’s dangerous. It’s insidious and sinister, the way some people coerce and control their friends, some of whom may not even be aware of just what’s happening. When I put out a call, people came forward on Twitter, Facebook and email who had been in toxic friendships for some time before they understood something was very wrong. People who’ve had to take out court orders against former friends, move states or countries to escape them, and alter their lives dramatically to move on. People who’ve had their lives utterly torn apart by other human beings they once called friends. More often than not, it’s a gradual process — an erosion of the soul, one nasty gesture or remark at a time. But sometimes it’s just all-out harassment.
A woman called Alice had a friend once, a guy we’ll call Ben. She and Ben struck up a friendship over work and started writing comedy together. They’d write for hours a day, for a period of about six months, before things started falling apart. Ben spiralled into a depressive episode right at the time Alice’s mother was dying. At first, Ben depended on Alice for support, depended on her to do things like hold him at 3 a.m. and stop him from killing himself. It was too much for one person to bear, let alone someone who was having to care for her ailing mother, who had begun to lose herself in psychosis. Alice felt like she was desperately holding up two people who were sinking and she didn’t have the buoyancy for both, so she tactfully told Ben she simply couldn’t be there for him, not as his primary carer and not in the way he needed. She suggested he move home to get support, but he never forgave Alice for prioritising her mother over him. It was an act of desperate necessity for Alice; one person cannot tend to two people in such severe states without crumbling herself. But to Ben, she had abandoned him when he needed her most.
Ben’s way of dealing with this alleged betrayal was to attack Alice with as much vitriol as he could muster. He began sending long, abusive emails, accusing her of all sorts of things that never happened, things like physical violence against him. Alice took Ben out for a cuppa a few times to try and work things out, and he’d always claim not to have meant any of it. But then he’d do it again, berating Alice and inventing crimes she’d committed against him. After four or five rounds of this sort of abuse, Alice felt she had no choice but to cut him out of her life. She blocked his email, his Facebook and his phone number. He started texting her from payphones so he could get through to her phone, alternating between declarations of love, threats of suicide and accusations. He started showing up at her house. He sent emails using Alice’s website contact form. He found whatever way he could to stalk and harass a woman who was being unambiguous about her desire not to be friends. He started spreading rumours about Alice — serious things, things about sex and violence. Alice began to wonder how much of this Ben was making up to damage her reputation, and how much he truly believed had happened. An opportunity to move interstate came up and Alice gratefully took it, relieved finally to escape the threatening presence of a man she once called a friend.
There are so many incarnations of danger in friendships. Lara, who got in touch via Twitter, made a close friend when she was about 16 years old. She has asked to call this friend ‘A’, and given it’s an allusion to the villain in the TV show Pretty Little Liars, I am more than happy to oblige. That show is a master class in toxic friendship — four high-school girls are threatened and blackmailed by a mysterious person who signs their dangerous text messages with a single ‘A’ and over seven glorious seasons, they steal, lie and kill in the name of friendship — so it seems especially relevant. Anyway, Lara and A picked up a new friend about a year into their friendship — let’s call her Belinda. A started fairly quickly to play Lara and Belinda off one another, testing their loyalties and pitting them against one another in a complex web of lies. She’d tell Lara awful things about Belinda, and Belinda awful things about Lara. She led them to believe that the other was a terrible friend, which only secured her position as the alpha friend in the group. Lara lent A a substantial amount of money, an insultingly small percentage of which was ever paid back. Basically, under the guise of friendship, A terrorised Lara and Belinda from point-blank range, keeping them in a constant state of confusion, hurt and worry. Ultimately, Lara and Belinda had enough of A’s surreptitious bullying, worked out they’d been lied to and forged a friendship of their own, without A. They never hear from or speak to A now, and deliberately surround themselves with genuine friends. It’s an example of two people cleanly, strategically removing a toxic friend from their lives.
Aristotle believed friendship wasn’t for everyone. He said it was a fine skill, to be mastered over a lifetime of devotion, generosity, and attention. For him, it should be time-consuming and challenging, requiring a person to draw on their greatest stores of humanity. The implicit idea, really, is that some people don’t deserve friendship; that some people are simply not cut out for the task; that some people cannot muster the requisite humility and care to be a proper, true friend. Look, I’d like to believe everyone deserves friendship; truly, I’d like to be so generous. But the more stories I hear of betrayal, deception, theft, racism, bigotry, cruelty, coercion and abuse, the more I find myself agreeing with old mate Aristotle. In some circumstances, perhaps friendship could be healing or even redemptive for someone who is deviant and unkind. If a person has the superhuman patience to care for someone cruel without being damaged themselves, fantastic. There but for the grace of Beyoncé go I. But if I’m being ruthlessly truthful, I think perhaps there are people who are simply incapable of genuine friendship. People who do nasty, calculated things. People who siphon kindness from others, steal their confidence and mangle their self-esteem. People who wilfully endanger, threaten, harass or frighten others. People who are so self-centred and self-absorbed they cannot perform the act of genuinely caring for another human being.
Stories about people like this came pouring in on Twitter: Peter had to cut his good mate Stuart from his life when he got married because Stuart didn’t ‘approve’ of Peter’s wife’s ethnicity. Leanne had to distance herself from Kaley when Kaley got physically violent with Leanne’s child. Nicola had to move on from Fran when she refused to get help for her excessive drinking and started seriously verbally abusing Nicola every time she got drunk. There were tales of a more insidious sort of toxicity too, the sort of thing that develops over time rather than being defined by a single act of awfulness. Those friendships are the real fuckers — the ones that carry on for years, slowly destroying one person’s sense of self until they feel drained of identity. Like any kind of abuse, the toxic friendship experience can be extremely difficult to identify when you’re going through it. Some people, thankfully, recognise what’s going on and can extricate themselves effectively. Other people get trapped in these friendships for a lifetime, unable or unsure how to get out, perhaps even unaware they need to.
London psychotherapist Samantha De Bono sees a lot of clients trapped in toxic friendships, some of whom don’t even realise until they come in to talk it through. Just like domestic abuse, toxicity in a friendship can be difficult to detect, mostly because we deflect, make excuses for the perpetrator and blame ourselves. Just like the victims of an abusive relationship, people who find themselves enmeshed in an abusive friendship are very quick to think ‘it must just be me’ or ‘it’s not that bad, remember that time she made me breakfast?’ Dr De Bono says the first thing you should do is trust your gut: if something doesn’t feel right in a friendship, it probably isn’t. She says toxic friendships are almost identical to an abusive relationship, primarily in that they feature manipulation and emotional control. If a friend is doing things entirely on their terms, isolating you from your other friends and loved ones, turning you against other people in your life, stealing your friends or demeaning you, then that’s abuse. We’re just hesitant to call it abuse in a friendship situation because it’s embarrassing, because we don’t take friendships as seriously as romantic relationships and because we haven’t got a properly developed understanding of it. There are so many incarnations of toxicity, and it ranges from mild to extreme: being negative all the time, body shaming you, insulting you under the guise of a joke and criticising your life choices all the way up to openly disparaging you, spreading rumours about you, ignoring your requests for space, controlling who you can and can’t see, and making your life a living hell. If all bad behaviour is on a spectrum, it’s about working out where your deal-breaker line sits. How many surreptitious, nasty comments can you take before you need that person out of your life? How many times does your sister, father, boyfriend or mate have to tell you that someone is bad news before you believe them? How many insults, taunts, or let-downs does it take to break a friendship? All of that is completely subjective. You’ve got to decide for yourself what you’re willing to tolerate and when it’s healthier to get someone out of your life for good.
Dr De Bono had a toxic friend of her own. She essentially forced herself into Dr De Bono’s life, befriending her other friends and inviting herself to things she hadn’t been invited to until she infiltrated her social circle. As Dr De Bono says, narcissists move very quickly, and this one weaseled her way into her life at breakneck pace, with emphatic declarations of friend-love and expensive gestures very early on. She’d organise things for the two of them to do and then get very angry when Dr De Bono couldn’t make a particular date or activity. She’d demean and insult Dr De Bono, taking a place in her life as an emotional sort of parasite. They’d been friends a while and the doctor is a fallible human like the rest of us, so she kept thinking it was her problem and it became very difficult to cleanly end the friendship — especially because every time she tried, this person would turn up at her house with flowers or wait outside her office. This toxic friendship had the markings of an obsessive relationship: the attempts to bully, belittle and control, the sending of flowers to try and woo Dr De Bono back, the turning up without an invitation. Finally, Dr De Bono broached the subject and told this person her behaviour really bothered her. ‘I’m going to be the way I am and you’ll have to deal with it,’ the friend said, in a text. That gave Dr De Bono her way out because, actually, no she didn’t. She composed a very calm message that simply said, ‘You are wrong, and this is where our friendship ends.’
Getting out of a toxic friendship can be very difficult, especially if you’re dealing with a narcissist, whose whole modus operandi is to coerce and charm you in turns. The truth is that you have to be very clear about your boundaries (but first you have to know what they are, which can require some serious self-awareness — might I recommend a therapist?). If someone contravenes what you think is right or decent or good, then you must calmly escape the friendship. To get to a place where you’re able to do that, you have to start by setting yourself free a little. For example, it ain’t your responsibility to care for this person during the fallout of your friendship. In fact, you’ve probably been taking responsibility for the friendship too long and it’s time they were accountable for their own behaviour. Give yourself permission to say no: no to invitations, no to apologies, no to the whole friendship if that’s what you want. Dr De Bono’s advice is not to lie, but to very simply and unambiguously declare that the friendship is over. Yep, it’ll probably wound the other person, but ultimately that’s not your responsibility. Oh and — praise be! — Dr De Bono also says you can totally break up with a toxic friend over text. It doesn’t have to be a big, dramatic sit-down affair (the sort of person who abuses a friend might quite like the drama of that scenario). It just has to be a clean, assertive notification: ‘I don’t think we should hang out any more’, ‘This friendship is over’, ‘You make me feel small and sad, please don’t contact me again’.
And then . . . Duck down the road to the shops, pick up a tub of Ben & Jerry’s, get in your pyjamas, whack on the telly and mourn that friendship like you would a romantic relationship. You deserve it.