Anatomy of a Friend Breakup: When is Reconciliation a Good Idea?
Examining both sides of a friend breakup, the road to reconciliation, and advice from a credentialed therapist.
On a sticky June afternoon in Los Feliz, my friend Dani and I met for coffee on Sunset Blvd. The conversation started with empty small talk, all underscored with palpable hostility. I was clinging to the cordial beginning of the conversation, hoping I could stave off what I knew was going to be a messy and brutal confrontation. I didn’t want to be there to begin with, but after having been friends with Dani since kindergarten, I owed her the opportunity to scold me to my face. Call me avoidant (or simply a coward), but in all my few previous friendship breakups, I’d opted for the slow fade to black before rolling the credits, becoming evasive and flakey until the friendship quietly extinguished. I felt it was the humane way to put down a friendship, giving both parties the ability to say they’d merely “grown apart.” But that’s not what was going down at the patio that Saturday; this was going to be, to use the clinical term, a “doozy.”
“I’m really frustrated with you. I feel like I put a lot of effort into this friendship, and I don’t get the same in return,” Dani lays it out. She’s not wrong. I had 100% been a bad friend in the last few months. In all fairness, I had my reasons—I was a few months out from a serious romantic breakup, working crazy hours at my job, and reckoning with the beginnings of a chronic illness. I was a strung-out mess. I’d been avoiding calls, blowing off plans, and growing more and more resentful toward what felt like consistent guilt trips and catty remarks about my unavailability. The tension in our friendship made me avoid her even more, feeling as though I was constantly being punished for not meeting expectations. I responded to her, “I feel like your expectations of our friendship are higher than what I can meet right now. I want to promise I can do better, but I don’t know if I can.”
We went back and forth, voicing our individual frustrations. She, too, was going through a hard time and felt I was never around to support her. I had a hard time approaching her because I felt so much hostility. In the end, we found ourselves at a bitter stalemate, both feeling vindicated in our actions and unwilling to budge. “I think it’s probably best that we just take a break for a while,” I floated. “I guess we should,” she agreed. We were both crying, half out of frustration, half hurt. We stiffly hugged and parted ways. Like all friend breakups, there was some sourness in the wake of the split—talking the ears off our mutual friends who bravely refused to take sides, hundreds of therapy dollars spent reanimating the conflict, and a few terse interactions at pandemic-era park birthdays. After the initial fracture of the friendship, the tension faded, and we both returned to the flow of our respective 20-something lives.
Spongebob Transition Voice: [Three Years Later]
“Remember when we broke up for like a year?” I ask Dani over the phone last Thursday. She laughs, “To be honest, I barely remember that anymore.” Tasked with exploring the topic of friendship breakups, I had an interesting asset at my disposal: a friend breakup with a twist—we’d gotten back together. Seeing as clickbait content and pop-psychology articles often prioritize the emotional fallout of romantic breakups, it seemed like friendship breakups only started appearing in cultural conversation a few years ago.
Romantic breakups, I would argue, are far easier to digest: two people realize they aren’t suited to spend the rest of their lives together, and things end. With the rest of your life at stake, it’s easy to understand that a myriad of non-personal reasons can fuel a romantic split. With friendships, on the other hand, the subtext is always, “I would rather never see you again than spend any more time with you.” That is a gut punch that is impossible not to take personally. While we have so much language to grieve and digest romantic splits, it seemed like platonic friendships operated with not only far less emotional clarity but brutal psychological consequences. To explore the phenomenon in depth, my thoughts first went to Dani; with some hindsight and frontal lobe development, we were now able to dissect what had happened between us three years ago.
On the phone I tell her, “I honestly don’t remember more than the broad strokes of our conversation, and I wanted to take the opportunity to get your side of the story. No holds barred, you can say anything you want about me at the time.” She gives me the cliff notes, “Since I’d moved to LA, I didn’t really feel included in your life. I understood there was a lot going on for you, but I felt like anything I was going through was a burden to you. It seemed like it was burdensome to talk to me or have a close relationship. I felt really angry and abandoned. Also, I don’t know if I can say this, but you weren’t on medication at the time.” I laugh, “Oh, you can absolutely say that. I was certainly not well.”
“We were what? Twenty-five? Twenty-six?” Dani adds, “We were both untethered and immature.” She was making a good point—not to plagiarize Miley Cyrus, but we used to be young. It’s not as if three years is a lot of time, but the difference between your mid and late twenties can be a lifetime in emotional maturity years. Nothing like a global pandemic and some overdue psychological diagnoses to make you look back three years and think, “Wow, I was just a kid back then.”
To get a more clinical perspective on the phenomenon of friendship breakups, I consulted LMFT (Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist) Jeff Yoo. When asked about the primary causes of a friendship breakup, Yoo answers that it can occur “when the emotional balance is interrupted.” He cites the most common causes of this imbalance are a misunderstanding that can lead to feelings of jealousy, insecurity, or if one party starts a new friendship or relationship that changes the time spent together. He continues, “Conflicts can explode that make one of them the wrong-doer, but we know it takes more than one person to start a war.” When asked how the emotional fallout compares to romantic breakups, Yoo answers, “Friendships become loving and closer relationships at times than marital relationships, and the heartache at ending that relationship can and does feel as heartbreaking as a death or divorce. Both parties may experience bitterness, sadness, depression, and quite possibly the lower[ing of] their self-image, creating mental status concerns and physiological pain.”
So, if Dani and I both walked away feeling justified in our sides of the argument, how did we become friends again? There is a literal answer: we were still orbiting in the same friend groups, and eventually, the tension started to dissolve. Terse conversations became cordial, cordial became sincere, and eventually, we were on speaking terms. Speaking terms lasted for a while until—maybe a year, year and a half later—we were texting. It wasn’t until we were both taking the same 10 a.m. Saturday class we started spending quality time together again. That’s what happened, but mostly, changes happened under the surface. On my end, I started seeing the necessary doctors. I got medications for my physical and mental health that made my life feel manageable. I was no longer working at a job that drained all my energy. I changed. When our friendship restarted, I was a different version of myself. She was, as well. Ultimately, we had to let the versions of ourselves and our past relationship remain in the past. We met each other in a new phase of our lives, and luckily, we were compatible.
When asking Yoo for a professional take on reconciliation, he said it “may never take place or may take time to confront or overcome.” As a family therapist, he is well versed in how reconciliation is in the best interest of a split couple with family ties or children, but whether you’re dealing with a divorce, a friendship split, or any other sort of relationship-ending conflict, he says, “the element in any relationship is a commitment to communicate with respect and trust.” At times, he explains, one or more parties are powerless to understand what the other is going through. In the case of Dani and I, we were both at arm's length due to our individual personal issues. In the year that we were on what Ross in Friends would describe as “a break,” we were able to do enough personal work with therapists to enable a reconciliation in a new era of our adulthood.
Perhaps it is the zeitgeist or the fact that my 30s are right around the corner, but I’ve observed friendship breakups with a frequency I haven’t seen since middle school. There are some obvious perpetrators at play—geographical distance, marriages, babies, and varying levels of ambition and career success—that come with the territory of any long-term friendship. I’ve also observed that, as the algorithm has armed everyone with a bastardized version of “therapy speak,” there has been a profound crisis of empathy in modern friendships. This topic could be its own essay, and I’ve already written it here. Somehow, we convinced ourselves that friendships are emotional labor, disagreements are gaslighting, and Jonah Hill knows how to use “boundaries,” and began casting our friends as the antagonists of our own self-improvement journey. Friendships, like any long-term relationship, require effort and compassion. Friendships challenge us, but are not meant to affirm you without merit. When we aren’t abusing “therapy speak” to circumvent real conversations, we have the opportunity to grow. As poet Brian A. Chalker wrote, “People are in your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” You can’t live a lifetime without change, so expect a friendship to evolve in tandem with you. Some friendships you may outgrow, some may outgrow you, but change is a constant. Without giving a friendship breakup due process, you may find yourself in a prolonged state of arrested development—and what kind of company would I keep if I was still acting like an unmedicated 25-year-old?
Find Jeff Yoo, LMFT at Moment of Clarity Mental Health Center