Does falling out with friends make us problematic?
I’ve always had a ride-or-die best friend by my side. A friendship so all-encompassing we’re known to those around us as a package deal. Just as some people attract relationships; I’m a best friend magnet. Yet somewhere along the way, the few friends I had once championed as my future Maid Of Honour turn back into distance acquaintances.
To break it down, I’d say in total I’ve ‘fallen out’ with four close friends - close enough that at one point or another they’d been labelled as my ‘soul sister’. I’d stash away evidence of the once-bulletproof friendship, hoping the absence of adoring platonic-love proclamations and ‘dynamic duo’ captions on Instagram would go unnoticed. Friendships play a formative role in our identity; and each failed friendship made me feel like a failure of a friend. To add insult to injury, my favourite films were all studded with this ‘best friends since birth’ narrative which - like many Hollywood staples (hello, manic pixie dream girl) cultivated unrealistic expectations about relationship performativity. We may be the main character in our lives but life is not a film set.
Through a series of Instagram polls, I found that despite feeling like an outlier, I wasn’t. When asking my followers, “How many close friends have you fallen out with?”, the medium answer was 4.9. Nearly all respondents confirmed they felt shame over ended friendships; a deep-rooted feeling that arises when our character feels out of odds with societal acceptance. For 20-somethings today, committing to longevity across relationships, careers or mortgages is to settle. After all, it’s the decade to experiment and explore. In friendships however, a lack of longevity is perceived as at odds with social merits such as camaraderie, congeniality and loyalty. Which begs the question… does falling out with friends really make us that problematic?
Why do we feel guilt over failed friendships?
According to friendship expert and sociologist, Dr Jan Yager, admitting to a failed friendship can, to some, be just as shameful as admitting to a failed marriage. It’s hardly surprising when you look at how championed friendships are in society. We grew up wearing matching ‘Best Friends Forever’ bracelets, watching Sisterhood Of Travelling Pants and, in latter years, Sex And The City. Sisterhood, ‘women supporting women’ and being a ‘girl’s-girl’ has become simultaneous with modern feminism. We don’t just have friends, we have friends forever.
Whilst conflict in romantic love may never resolve, we expect platonic relationships to be more steadfast. Complexity in female friendships, in particular, agitates society. Arguments are called ‘cat fights’; participants are ‘drama queens’ and prolonged periods of friction are ‘grudges’. Conflict resolution advice in friendships focuses on examining the individual; whereas in relationships we’re told to never change. Let them go. You’re perfect as you are. In friendships, though, a correlation is almost always drawn between the fallout and individual wrongdoing. At what point - if ever - should we accept the Just World fallacy that if you often have problems, maybe the problem is you?
Changing notion of friendship transience:
Irene S. Levine, friendship expert and creator of TheFriendshipBlog.com, believes that not all friendships are supposed to last forever. They’re cyclical by nature and cradle-to-grave platonicism is rare.
Friendship transience - whilst natural - is also amplified by the changing expectations of our times. We’re living in a throwaway culture which - according to a study from the University of Kansas - has facilitated similarities in how we treat both objects and friendships. We treat unwanted people like unwanted things - simply moving on or discarding rather than trying to work things out. Cutting off and clearing out is held up as the gateway to individual betterment. This is omnipresent in all areas of life from household (Marie Kondo), body (juice cleanses, keto, dairy-free), relationships (ghosting, orbiting, blocking); and of course, cancel culture. We appreciate a drop-fast mentality. Labelling conflict or character flaws as ‘toxic’ has permeated popular culture. Sure, certain behaviours are certainly toxic and we need to drop, and roll out of there. But the term’s overuse also lacks nuance. Many of us are guilty of fundamental attribution error, where we’re quick to assume actions are an absolute character trait of the person; rather than acknowledging their personal, unrelated circumstances. The ‘I deserve better’ mentality instills individualism - which is great - but can also make us more frivolous and less accepting of flaws in relationships. After all, mistakes don’t always have to make someone toxic - it just makes them human.
Do we need to take responsibility for our friendship fallouts?
In the Bobo & Flex podcast, Flex Mami encourages her listeners to be an active participant in their lives by taking responsibility for 50% of conflict. It takes two to tango, sure, but can it ever be better to just trust ‘it’s not you, it’s them?’
Holding myself accountable whilst resisting defectiveness is a challenge I’ve wrestled with for many years. An eight year long friendship came to a screeching halt when - under the influence of a new love interest - a former best friend decided to reject the hedonistic antics we had both been equal generators of. Another lengthy friendship - one that was rooted in mental illness - came to a halt, by phone call, with zero explanation. Both fallouts could be justified without playing the self blame-game: social withdrawal is symbiotic of depression and it’s natural for a reformed party girl to outgrow her club-rat friend. Yet, to avoid yet another heartbreak, I spiralled into a self-reflective (and often self-critical) analysis. The more I sought a direct link between my personal flaws and the friendship breakdown, the faultier I felt as a human. My therapist labelled me as defective, with the reassurance that I wasn’t blameworthy; creating a confusing push-pull internal conflict. I felt wounded internalising the fallout, but I knew rejecting all potential wrongdoing was ignorant too. Where’s the balance?
Dr Kyler Shumway, psychologist and author of ‘The Friendship Formula’, believes all relational problems are co-created to an extent. Individual actions or issues rarely cause problems alone. Instead, conflict arises when three factors interact to make contact: my stuff, your stuff and our stuff. By differentiating between the three, you can isolate your personality quirks, habits, neediness and knee-jerk reactions as disrupting ‘their stuff’ without having to go back to the drawing board and rewrite who you are as a person.
Rewriting the friendship fable
In a pro-friendship society, friendship fickleness is hush hush. We’re scared of losing friends and being outed as problematic. As Dr Irene Levine notes most friendships - even very good ones - are time limited. Yet whenever we make a new friendship, we never suspect that it will end.
In an article for Repeller, Philip Ellis writes “A two-month dalliance can have its own emotional value. It shouldn’t be deemed a failure because it doesn’t lead to something more long-term — just like a short story shouldn’t be judged as a novel”. Whilst he’s discussing romantic relationships, the same can be applied to friendships. Each friend serves a purpose to the natural ebbs and flows of life. There’s work friends, party friends, friends-of-a-now-ex, friends who knew you before your post-high school rebrand. Falling in and out of love with friends doesn’t necessarily have to make us drama-fuelled or faithless. We need to reshape the ‘friendship forever’ expectation to align with the unscripted, ad-libbed trajectory of real life.
Words – Laura Woods
