Why no one knows how to end a friendship the right way
There are scripts for romantic breakups, for quitting jobs, for canceling gym subscriptions. Somehow this one got left out.
Today’s post is inspired by a woman who reached out to my Friendship Helpline seeking guidance on ending a friendship. Clearly, I have a lot of thoughts on the topic!
Need help with untangling a friendship quandary? Leave me a message at (646) 847-9718.
We live in an era of unprecedented social guidance. There are Reddit threads on how to break up with someone you’ve been dating for three weeks. There are HR templates for firing an employee. There is, genuinely, a script for canceling your gym membership so they can’t talk you out of it. Help is truly a click away.
And yet when it comes to ending a friendship — one of the most common, most awkward experiences in adult life — we have nothing. No language. No agreed-upon protocol. Not even a word for it. We’re out here fumbling around.
This is not an accident. And the coping strategies people have invented to fill that void are very telling.
The most popular, of course, is the slow fade: reply a little later each time, stay perpetually “so busy,” leave the voice memo on read until the other person gets the hint. It can be agonizing for the person on the receiving end. The person doing it spends the whole time feeling vaguely guilty. Nobody wins, but at least nobody had to say anything out loud. I’ve had this done to me and I’ve done it back. All of these times made me feel various shades of rotten about it.
Then there are the more elaborate workarounds. The group chat maneuver, where you don’t end the friendship so much as relocate away from it. Staying in the shared thread while making yourself scarce everywhere else, as if the group chat is a neutral Switzerland you can both continue to inhabit indefinitely.
The “I’ve been going through a lot”, which is often true and sometimes deployed as a holding pattern that can last for years. It’s putting your friendship on deferment like it’s a student loan payment.
There’s The mutual friend operation, in which you brief the entire social circle before the person in question even knows there’s a conflict. That last one isn’t an ending; it’s a campaign.
We’ve never agreed, privately within the friendship and more broadly within our culture, that a breakup conversation is required.
What’s notable about all of these is that they’re designed to avoid a frank conversation. Which makes sense, because we’ve never agreed, both privately within the friendship and more broadly within our culture, that a breakup conversation is required.
Romantic relationships have always been legible to our culture because they have beginnings and endings, milestones and rituals. Friendships exist largely off the books in the private contours of our lives. Which means when they end, they end off the books too. Sorry, you all, but writing that sentence just made me genuinely sad, because friendships are one of the only relationships we have in adulthood that aren’t laden with power dynamics the way relatives, bosses, employees, neighbors and children are. Friendships are an oasis from that fixed sense of pressure, a reprieve from life’s demands. But friendships can also be at a disadvantage for the same reason. They can be so ambiguous that you’re not sure what you owe one another.
It’s that not knowing that makes us pick one of these flawed strategies over another.
The slow fade exists because it’s easy, sure, but we’ve also built no alternative model. We’ve decided, collectively and without much discussion, that the most humane thing you can do for someone you’re leaving is to leave so gradually that they can barely tell when it happened.
It’s not humane. It’s just easier for the person doing the leaving. It can be confusing at best (and crushing at worst) for the person left behind.
We’ve gotten remarkably good at talking about friendship in every other context: how to make them, keep them, repair them. But ending one is still treated as either a personal failure or a private matter too awkward to address directly. So people disappear on each other and call it a season of life. Or they send a long, heartfelt text at 11pm explaining why the friendship no longer serves them, which is brave in the same way that quitting via a sticky note is brave. It’s effective, sure. But not brave.
The actual alternative is almost embarrassingly simple: brief, honest, kind.
The actual alternative is almost embarrassingly simple: brief, honest, kind. Something like “I’ve felt us growing apart and I think it makes sense to step back. I wish you well.” That’s it. You don’t have to mean it forever. You just have to say it once.
I interviewed people in my book MODERN FRIENDSHIP who wished that we could be more open to accepting that friendships end. We shouldn’t be so precious about them. Nor should we catastrophize about it. We should accept that our friends shift and change. That’s normal, and in some cases, inevitable.
The reason most people don’t say something brief, clear and warm isn’t cruelty. It’s that nobody ever told them they were allowed to, or showed them how.
That’s what I’m trying to fix.
* I’ve been pumping out more friendship content over on Instagram so find me there if that’s your thing.
* For a writing project, I’m looking to hear people’s experiences balancing their friendships with their marriage or long-term relationship. Fill out this survey if you have 10 minutes. Thank you, kindly!
Anna, you are so right! I would agree just being honest is better than just disappearing which might leave them wondering what really happened. Thanks for sharing.
Anna, this feels true and I think the problem runs even deeper: we lack the relational skill to be honest in the first place. Most people don't actually know the relationship they were in because they've never been fully honest enough with each other inside it. You cannot cleanly end what was never clearly entered. A lot of friendships live in ambiguity, assumptions and projections so long that by the time they break, there's no shared language sturdy enough to hold the ending.
And I think we mistake emotional capacity for relational skill. They aren't the same thing. Capacity means you can feel the depth of a situation. Skill means you can tell the truth, stay present through discomfort, and act with integrity inside a relationship, including when it ends. Intimacy is a muscle, not just a feeling. It requires consistent truth-telling, self-interrogation and the personal accountability to end things with care and compassion instead of disappearing behind avoidance. For me, that means some breakups may not be brief. It may be an hour face to face conversation to respectfully honor the heartbreak of the dissolution of say, 30 years of interwoven life. An honest, kind ending is a byproduct of an honest, kind friendship. If we haven't built that foundation of truth-telling along the way, we end up disappearing because we don't have the muscles to hold the weight of a real conversation. You're right, it's not cruelty. It's fear.