First comes the spark of affinity at the group hang: You loved the Ferrante novels too? Then come the bottomless brunches, if you don’t have kids, or playground dates, if you do. Together, you and your new friend weave text threads scheduling coffee and reassuring each other that you’re being normal and that those other people are being crazy. Periodically, the heart emoji interjects.
Eventually, though, comes a minor affront, a misunderstanding, a misalignment—then another, and another. They’re all small things, of course, but like, she always does this. And then, all too often, comes what is known in therapy circles as the “giant block of text.”
“Some of my female clients are getting these—you’ve probably experienced this—massive paragraphs of text about things that they’re doing wrong or perceived slights,” Shannon Barrett, a licensed clinical social worker in Germantown, Maryland, told me recently.
I have experienced this. One massive paragraph informed me that I’m not texting my friend enough. (My excuse: I hate texting. Texting as an act of friendship, to me, is like invoicing as an act of love.) Another text block said I haven’t initiated enough hangouts. “I’m doing the best that I can,” I wrote back, guilty, flummoxed, a synchronized diver who belly flopped.
Some therapists have the sense these types of friendship performance reviews are becoming more common, but there’s no way to know if that’s true. Friendship, in general, is less common: People are spending much less time with friends than before, and the surgeon general now calls loneliness an “epidemic.” In past eras, friendship seemed much more intense, judging by the florid letters Victorians wrote to their pals: “The divine magnet is in you,” Herman Melville once gushed to Nathaniel Hawthorne, “and my magnet responds.” These days, you’d be lucky to get a “slay, queen.”
Nevertheless, advice is proliferating on how to aggressively confront, or even abandon, friends who disappoint us. Online guides abound for “how to break up with a friend,” as though the struggle is in what to say, rather than whether to do it. One TikTok therapist suggested that you tell your erstwhile friend “you don’t have the capacity to invest” in the friendship any longer, like you’re a frazzled broker and they’re a fading stock. The massive paragraph of text, though not a friend breakup per se, often reads like one—and leads to one.
Psychologists tell me there is a kinder, more realistic way to maneuver through a friendship that’s lacking in some area. You don’t need a guide for breaking up with your friends, because you don’t need to break up with your friends. You just need to make more friends.
Of course, it’s reasonable to hold a friendship to certain expectations. Most people have, if not standards, then at least a wish list for their friends, of qualities that differentiate them from strangers. The University of Kansas communication professor Jeffrey Hall has broken these expectations into six categories: First, there’s “genuine positive regard,” or the idea that the other person likes you for who you are. Second, there’s “self-disclosure,” or a feeling of freedom to discuss personal topics. Third, there’s “instrumental aid,” which is a friend’s willingness to help you move, say, or to provide other kinds of tangible support. Fourth, there’s “similarity,” or seeing the world in a like-minded way. Fifth, there’s “enjoyment,” or having fun in each others’ company—feeling that the conversation is easy and entertaining. Finally, there’s a strange category called “agency,” which presumes that it’s nice when your friends are rich and powerful—people who can help you find a job, or let you stay in their summer house. (Hall has found that women tend to expect more of their friends in the realms of positive regard and self-disclosure, whereas men tend to expect slightly more by way of agency.)
The problem is that few people state their expectations directly. More typically, “you’re building the expectations as you do it,” Hall told me. You write the rules of the friendship as the friendship unfolds: You tell your friend a secret, and they prove trustworthy, so next time, you tell them another. You don’t say outright that your level of self-disclosure is high.
This reminded me of one woman I interviewed whose best friend had forgotten her birthday, a lapse that led to an unmendable fight. Now she still occasionally picks up her phone to text the friend, then thinks better of it. As we spoke, I realized that I haven’t wished some of my friends a happy birthday in years, and I don’t usually hear from them on my birthday either. We never established the birthday expectation.
This nebulousness is precisely what makes friendship so enchanting—and exasperating. We find ourselves depending on people who didn’t know they were being depended upon. And because friendships are voluntary and fluid, “you may ultimately doom the relationship by calling somebody out on their failures,” Hall said.
The other problem is that few people meet all these expectations organically, no matter how badly we might want them to. We can’t always wring all six friendship duties out of one person. In dialing up the pressure on a best friend, you risk ignoring the casual connections that can provide camaraderie or sympathy just as well. Rather than resting on one pillar, healthy friendship is better imagined as crowd-surfing—many hands holding you up.
I lose sight of this myself sometimes. I have one older, mentor-type friend whom I talk with most days, and he recently questioned one of my life choices. I was startled by how much it hurt; it felt like being rejected by a parent. If his wasn’t the only opinion I ever solicited, I might have seen it as a stray thought rather than the last word. Roaming my neighborhood in tears, I called a different friend, the friend I call when I get upset—who I now realize is the only friend I call when I get upset. I’m not sure what I’ll do if she’s ever unavailable.
What many experts recommend instead is to ease up on your one or two closest friends and befriend people who can do whatever it is your besties are failing at. The resounding chorus from everyone I interviewed was that no one person can fulfill all of your needs. Some friends are good listeners, some invite you on fun trips. The person you call in a crisis might not be the one who tells the best jokes at happy hour.
Of course, if a friend disappoints you, you should first try communicating, ideally in the counseling-approved “I felt Y when you X” cadence. Relationships, including friendships, tend to be healthier when people address issues, rather than skirt them or store them up, writes the psychologist Marisa Franco in her book, Platonic.
But even if you communicate with the dexterity of a hostage negotiator, some people are not going to do what you want. A chronically late person might never be on time, no matter how many feelings conversations they’re subjected to. If we “recognize this person might not be in a position to meet that need, we can then take steps to go out and build new connections with people who can,” says Miriam Kirmayer, a clinical psychologist who specializes in friendship.
That doesn’t mean letting go of the friend who let you down, though. You can find the person who will remember your birthday, and still enjoy everything else about the birthday forgetter. “Not only does that allow us to then meet this need that we have; potentially, it also will allow us to be less bothered by the moments where a friend disappoints us or doesn’t act in the way that we really want them to,” Kirmayer told me. It’s worth also considering, she added, what the disappointing friend has done for you lately—maybe they didn’t call when you had surgery, but they sent a meal.
Friendship requires stamina, writes Sheila Liming in her recent book Hanging Out, but the pace of modern life is better suited to bailing. “Enthusiasm and ardor get kindled quickly, but so do dislike and dismissal,” she writes. “As a result, we make a habit of turning away from all the things and people and encounters that bother, confuse, or tax us. We abandon them, comforting ourselves with excuses about how they’re not worth our time anyway.”
You might feel relieved, in the moment, to cut out a person who’s upset you, in the same way that any final decision provides a sweet release from dissonance. “We tend to think about our relationships as all or nothing,” Kirmayer said. “Either they’re my best friend or we’re not close at all.” But people are messier than that, and relationships blurrier.
It’s, in fact, normal to downgrade and upgrade friends over time—and without spelling out that you’re doing so. (In You Will Find Your People, the writer Lane Moore calls this “leveling up” and “leveling down” your friends.) This kind of reshuffling isn’t always prompted by a friend’s faux pas—it can happen because your friend had a baby, or moved, or got busy. Some friends dwell for a while in a gray area, sort of mad at each other but also meeting up regularly. “Sometimes, we have to let things be long and loose in order for them to pass through a crucial point of conflict and then get good again,” Liming writes.
Even the most passionate friendships can ebb with age and distance. In his “divine magnet” letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville brims with ardor for his friend and, at the time, neighbor. “Whence come you, Hawthorne?” he writes. “By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips—lo, they are yours and not mine.” (His word choice has prompted historians to wonder whether the two men were perhaps more than friends.) Melville’s bond with Hawthorne influenced his writing of Moby-Dick, and Melville dedicated the book to him, “In Token of My Admiration for his Genius.” He told his friend that “knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.”
A few days after receiving that letter, however, Hawthorne moved away, and the two corresponded less frequently. They still visited each other, taking long walks and talking of “Providence and futurity,” but they grew apart. By the time Hawthorne died in 1864, they hadn’t seen each other in seven years. Their friendship—“this infinite fraternity of feeling”—had naturally dimmed. But its glory lives on.
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How to Not Break Up With Your Friends - The Atlantic
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