WHEN I was in my early twenties I had my heart broken. I’d had my heart broken before, but this time it was different. This time it wasn’t a boyfriend. It was a friend.
When it goes wrong, female friendship can be horribly painful, and we simply don’t have the skills to deal with it.
There are no social milestones like engagement, marriage or anniversaries to mark long-term friendship.
In the same way, there is no protocol for when friendships disintegrate. There are no pop songs about friendship break-ups.
No friendship-couples counselling. No discussion of “custody” of various bars (or social media sites) where you used to hang out together.
I didn’t know what to do when my friendship broke down all those years ago.
We’d been mates for almost five years and had seen each other nearly every day. We had a lot of mutual friends. Our social lives, like a lot of romantic couples, were intricately intertwined.
We went on holiday together. We were the first person the other contacted with good — or bad — news.
But then our love started to fizzle out. Things started to go wrong when I got a particular boyfriend she didn’t like — but really, I think there was more to it than that.
We started to drift apart. And we didn’t know how to articulate that to each other. We couldn’t sit down over coffee and say, “This isn’t working any more. Shall we call it a day, in a civil and decent way?’”
She stopped inviting me out and started hanging around with new friends, one of whom slagged off my style of clothing, and, when I took it up with her, she took his side.
It seems trivial now, but that really stung. I stopped inviting her to things, too — mainly because being around her felt effortful and emotionally expensive. I would leave her company drained.
I remember the last few times we were together as utterly excruciating. One trip to the cinema ended in her telling me I was an idiot.
I was being an idiot — rambling nonsense in that way you do when you’re nervous and trying to regain ground with someone.
I stopped inviting her to things, too — mainly because being around her felt effortful and emotionally expensive. I would leave her company drained.
I knew the friendship was dying and I was floundering, and that kind of behaviour is never attractive.
She was someone who retreated in crisis; I was someone who struck forth, like a babbling loser.
I was trying to make her laugh, trying to impress her, trying to do something that might remind her of our old love. It didn’t work.
Another time she came for dinner and things went similarly awry. She slagged off my music taste and the book I was reading. The atmosphere was so frosty it was sliceable. She left before dessert.
That was the last time we spoke. I knew then it was over. I didn’t text her the next day — although I did text that “Any Questions Answered” service a few weeks later, alone one night, asking: “What do you do when you lose a best friend?”
The answer was compassionate but brief, like something my Nan might say: “Sometimes people outgrow each other. It will be OK. New friends are waiting.” The friendship equivalent of “Plenty more fish in the sea.”
We bumped into each other a few times. Once, at a party, I stood next to her at the bar. Neither of us spoke.
I don’t know what I was expecting. But I was adrift, lost, cut-off. I felt as though I had invested so much in the friendship that I was empty without it.
Other times, I looked at her social media — torturing myself, like one might with an ex — seeing who she was hanging out with instead of me.
I look on that break-up now as a formative heartbreak. It taught me a lot about myself.
I knew the friendship had run its course but I think it took me so long to get over it because I had no coping mechanisms, and that’s because we are told that friends will always ultimately come second to lovers — so it can’t hurt as much when they leave. But it can.
Time was the only thing that got me over it — but it still pangs now in a deep part of my heart.
Now I’m older, a little wiser, and I have strong friendships with several women.
These friendships go through undulations and phases, but we aren’t afraid to address the fact we might have different needs and opinions.
My view on friendship has definitely evolved. It’s partly about growing up, but it’s also about our accepting and celebrating friendship as equal to other kinds of love. And hooray for that.
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