Why Friendship Breakups Hurt Just As Much As Romantic Ones
Although talked about less frequently, friendship breakups can happen just as often (if not more often!) than romantic ones. And in a lot of cases, the support we find available in our immediate surroundings is lacking which can make these kinds of breakups that much harder to deal with.
If you’ve recently had to break up with a friend or have had a friend break up with you, you’ll most likely understand the pain that can stem from parting with someone who you used to be really close to. What’s more you might have been surprised by the amount of unexpected confusion, guilt and shame you experienced around that breakup.
If you did, let us tell you that you are definitely not alone! That’s why in this article - we’re going to do our best to answer this one surprisingly common question - why is it that friendship breakups hurt just as much as romantic ones?
1. Although often underestimated, a friendship can be just as important of a social connection as a romantic partner
When it comes to friendship breakups, you’ll often hear people say things like “Oh, it’s JUST a friendship ending, not your relationship/your marriage” or “Well, it’s sad but you have a bunch of other friends so just hang it out with them instead”. As a culture, we tend to focus on romantic relationships as the primary source of our emotional and social connection. Because we tend to have multiple friends at the same time and on average also spend less time with them than we do with our romantic partners, the pain of losing one of these friends is often swept under the rug because it just “isn’t that big of a deal”.
The reality is however, that it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about romantic relationships or friendships, when the people that come into our lives no longer align with our values or our needs, then that loss will hurt. As women, it is in our nature to form extremely close-knit bonds with our fellow women. In our hunter and gatherer days, those friendships were what sustained us while the men were off hunting and trying to provide food. And even in the days since then, we’ve relied on other women for ancestral wisdom, support in childcare, emotional support and so much more.
To simply then reduce the loss of a friendship to “JUST a friendship ending” can feel like a huge disservice to the vital role that the friendship might have played in our lives. So more than anything, we need to start by realizing that friendships and relationships are equally important social bonds and that experiencing hurt, sadness and pain around either is absolutely normal.
2. Our societal expectations around friendships are totally different from those around romantic relationships (especially for women!)
We’ve all heard the saying “boys come and go but true friends are forever”. Often, we are given this sense that because of our history as women, our friendships are supposed to be thriving at all times and inherently just last a lifetime, without ever failing.
These collective narratives around being “best friends forever” can create expectations around what our friendships are “supposed” to look like. So when we do go through a friend breakup, not only are we experiencing the pain and sadness of losing that friend but a lot of times, we’re also experiencing significant guilt, shame and anxiety around this idea that we are “failing” at being a good friend or a good woman because that’s what society has told us is normal.
The reality of course is that just because we may have really close friendships as women doesn’t mean that we can't outgrow them or experience rifts with someone that ultimately make us decide that we’re better off parting ways. In most cases, the idea that every single one of our romantic relationships HAS TO last forever is absurd to us - so why don’t we start having the same expectations for our friendships?
3. The pain of a friendship breakup can often come unexpected which makes the pain appear worse
When it comes to romantic relationships, we learn from a very young age that we should expect pain to come along with a breakup. Nearly everywhere we turn (romcom movies, breakup songs, romance novels, etc.), we’re surrounded by stories that prime us to believe that romantic relationships are the key to happiness and that vividly portray the suffering associated with breakups. So for many of us, we accept that kind of suffering as normal and we learn to expect it as we move through our relationships. But what about friendship breakups?
If you’ve never been warned about friendships ending because ever since kindergarten all you’ve heard about was how your friends should be your BFFs, then the pain of the breakup can really take you by surprise and make it that much more difficult to deal with. We hardly ever hear stories about how friendships end or fall apart. So when we do find ourselves in that situation, we feel less prepared because our negative experience doesn’t strike us as “normal” or “expected”.
4. Nobody shares information on how to deal with a friendship breakup so we’re often left to figure it out on our own
Aside from there being little portrayal of friendships ending in the media and in our entertainment, we also have very little access to information on how to properly deal with these kinds of breakups in a healthy manner.
Let’s be honest.. We’ve all googled “how to get over a breakup” and sifted through endless articles on how we could possibly make this suffering go away asap. Since romantic relationships usually hog most of the limelight, they also get most of the attention when it comes to relationship advice and “how to” information that’s out there. What that means is that most of us just aren’t equipped with the knowledge to help us process and deal with the friendship breakup in a way that we might be able to with a romantic one.
Do we need to have “the talk” or is it okay to just stop communicating? How does this breakup affect our mutual friend group? Do we still talk occasionally or do we need to cut ties completely? All of these questions are ones that most of us might feel uncomfortable around because we’ve never been taught how to handle them properly.
Unfortunately, not knowing how to act and set the right boundaries for yourself can play a huge role in how much pain and discomfort you experience from the entire breakup. So if we’re lacking the overall skills to handle the situation in a healthy way, we’ll experience them as more painful than they would otherwise need to be.
Final thoughts…
Hopefully, this article has helped shed some light on why it is that friendship breakups can hurt as much as they do and why we need to normalize the fact that some friendships do and should end.
At the end of the day, the best way to move through a breakup, or any challenging life circumstance for that matter, is to use it as an opportunity to grow and evolve. When we let our pain transform us rather than consume us, we step into the most authentic version of ourselves.
That is what The Self Care Space is all about. Our membership has resources for navigating breakups of any kind, relationships, self-esteem, body image, trauma, and so much more, as well as a private community of women to connect with and live events with experts to guide you on your personal growth journey!
If you’re looking for more of this kind of support, we offer lots of resources for you to dive into this work in a safe, supportive way in The Self Care Space. We have everything from self-guided prompts and programs to guided meditations and healing visualizations to help you regulate your emotions, work through old trauma and even make some amazing friends in our community. We also have amazing advisory board members who specialize in a wide variety of areas and will be there to answer your questions in the private community or at our members-only live events.
xoxo,
The Self Care Space
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