How to Leave a Friend
A few years ago, one of my best college friends broke up with me. “I think it would be better if we moved away from constantly talking to each other,” she wrote in an email. “Maybe one day we will agree on views, but now it seems unhealthy.”
The parting was not unexpected. We lived in different cities and mostly communicated via chat, and in the last few months we started to quarrel a lot. There were several reasons for the upsurge of controversy, but the main one, in fact, was that at the time I was depressed, she was coming out of a period of depression, and our various emotional states made me toxic to her. I didn’t realize that the unrelenting negativity displayed by my depression was hurting her, so I sent her a protective email in response. But in hindsight, I understand why she needed to take a seat, and I respect her for asking for it, even if I still miss her sometimes.
It’s hard to leave an old friend. “There is a reluctance to end longer friendships, especially those formed during childhood,” says Jennifer Verdolin, an animal behavior expert and associate professor at Duke University. “The social animals that we are need and depend on social needs that go beyond the immediate family. When you forge them, and they are strong and long, it is difficult to let go. “
This is partly because it takes a long time to build such friendships, and since it becomes more difficult to make friends with age, you may not be able to replace your former friend. And in part because when you say goodbye to someone, you are saying goodbye to a part of yourself, and it’s hard to bury the version of yourself that loved that person, even if you know you need space.
However, friendships change with age, and sometimes you find yourself in a friendship that no longer serves either one or both of you. When this happens, you need to assess whether it is time to cut the cord. Here’s how to do it. But first:
Determine why you want to end the friendship
There are a number of reasons why friendships can deteriorate. The obvious case is when you find that one friend is carrying a lot more weight in the relationship than the other. “Some warning signs can be persistent imbalances in terms of who always has needs and who always meets those needs,” says Peg O’Connor, professor of philosophy at Gustav Adolphus College and blogging for Psychology Today . Although friendship is not always 50/50, especially in short periods when one friend needs more support than the other, “when there is a constant balance, when almost always 70 percent of my friend’s needs, 30 percent of mine,” then this is a problem. ” she said. Basically, if you’re being used in a friendship, it’s time to leave.
Sometimes broken relationships arise from more insidious behaviors, such as lying or betrayal. And sometimes friendship just doesn’t make you the person you want to be – politically, behaviorally, or otherwise. “What happens when you leave your needs or wants aside, or you compromise your values, or you go against your own beliefs?” O’Connor says. “It will fundamentally harm your moral character, and, after all, you have a moral character and you are responsible for it.”
So, if your friend turns you into a mean gossip, or humiliates you, or steals your boyfriends, or just usually takes more from you than you can handle, it might be worth cutting the cord. If so:
Not a ghost
It’s okay to let new or distant friendships disappear naturally, but if you dump a good friend, you must warn him and give him an explanation. “It’s uncomfortable for us to exclude people from our lives, and sometimes this leads to the fact that we do not communicate at all and completely lose touch,” says Verdolin. “Then we have this weird inconsistency that creates a lot of stress and tension on both sides.”
Instead of disappearing, ask them to meet you for a cup of coffee, or call them on the phone, or, if necessary, send them an email. The latter option is the least preferred because it does not give the dump a chance to hear your cadence or respond, but if you find it easier to say what you need, feel free to do your thing. Please note, if you are planning to break up in writing, do not send anything angry or reckless and perhaps give yourself an extra day to read it with a fresh eye.
“See if they are feeling something similar to what you are, and if it seems like it’s completely unexpected for them, well, that’s a good sign that you were not on the same page,” says O ‘ Connor. … “Then you might have to say, ‘You know what? I need some space. “
Be clear about why you need space, provide specific examples if necessary, and try not to blame them even if you firmly believe you are the offended party. Telling someone, “I don’t want to be friends with you because you are bad and needy,” will only make them take a defensive position; instead, make it clear that the relationship is broken, not specifically with them. Something like, “I feel like I’m not heard enough in this friendship, and I find it difficult to feel comfortable when I share with you.”
“You have to be clear,” says O’Connor. “You have to be clean. You have to be honest about this. You can’t be a sausage dog.
Treat it like a breakup
When you end any relationship, you need to set boundaries. This applies to both friendship and romantic relationships. “Sometimes the mistake we make is in this gray space where we’re either not sure what we’re going to do, or we feel guilty or something that is preventing us from taking a full break,” says Verdolin. This does not mean that you have to kill the friendship forever; instead, consider ditching it altogether soon enough to give yourself and your friend time and time to introspect. “Say, ‘Let’s take six months, in those six months we won’t talk, and then we regroup and decide what we want to do,” Verdolin says.
During this time – or, in the long term, if you plan to end your friendship without a month X warning – don’t interact with them. Don’t text them, don’t call them, don’t post things on social media that are meant to provoke a response, smoke them up, and stand by their window and sing a Peter Gabriel song, and if they do any of that to you, remind them gently but firmly that you asked for your space. If you have mutual friends and bump into them at group events, treat them with respect, but make it clear that you are not opening the door of friendship, otherwise you will both start falling into toxic patterns again.
“We create a lot more stress for ourselves because of the lack of clarity,” says Verdolin. “If I’m not going to be your friend, I don’t want to participate in your life at all, even peripherally.”
If you think there’s a chance your now-ex-boyfriend won’t respect your need for space, it might be a good idea to block his number so he can’t text or call you. You can also block them by email or G-chat, or make yourself “invisible” to them in online chat programs.
Disable them on social media
Speaking of peripheral friendships, a great way to lengthen the time it takes to bridge a friend’s breakup is to watch their Instagram Stories regularly. According to Verdolin, “social media really makes it difficult to achieve good endings for all kinds of relationships.” As with a romantic breakup, when you end a friendship, you don’t want to know who your friend is hanging out with, or what they do all the time, or to be fed the terrible political gossip that prompted you to end the relationship. relationship first.
Unfollow them or turn them off on Twitter, turn them off or remove them from Facebook friends, and turn them off or unsubscribe from Instagram. Removing them entirely from your life may seem overwhelming, but it gives you more room to move on.
Allow yourself to grieve
To end a friendship is a real loss. As exhausting as the relationship is, when you let go of a friend, you lose a whole part of yourself. And while tossing something that was starting to feel poisonous is certainly encouraging, it will also make you sad. This is normal and normal, and you should allow yourself to feel the sadness, not write it off. Unfortunately, society places a lot of emphasis on ending romantic relationships and not enough on ending friendships, but the latter can be just as painful.
“It’s very difficult to end a relationship,” says Verdolin. “Depending on how strong this friendship is in the past, we experience grief.”
Some ways to overcome this grief process include keeping a journal, immersing yourself in activities and hobbies that you love or loved before, and finding new social groups that suit you better than the relationship you had with your now ex-friend. … “We all have friends for a reason or a season, and then when the season or reason changes, you can move on and separate, and there really isn’t any harm or foul,” O’Connor says. And if your ended friendship was strong enough to begin with – and the breakup was mutually respectful and clean – you can always reconcile when both sides are ready.