The Swift Goodbye

With some friends, you can pick up after months of not catching up - be it due to distance, career or family commitments that keep you apart - and it's like no time has passed. Alternatively, you might meet someone new, and there is an instant bond, and you find yourself in the blissful throes of being in the company of someone who understands you and enjoys hanging out with you in an entirely non-sexual way. In general parlance, it's called friendship.

                                 

With other friends, you may suddenly realise you have nothing in common any more, or worse, you despise the person you're sharing a glass of champagne with - and there's not much you can do until you've both drained your glass and escaped the tedium of your rigidly scheduled "catch up". Strangely, you often invest more time in this limbo-land of dutiful friendship and growing resentment than you do on the real, uplifting relationships in your life. 

I'm not sure if it's something as sinister as Mercury Retrograde or if it's simply another stage in evolution. Whatever the reason, a number of my girlfriends and I are finding ourselves in friendships that drain us of energy (Qi Vampires), and leave us feeling a range of emotions: angry that we wasted our time putting up with their crap, confused that we feel flat after spending time with them, or the more direct feeling of hurt, that we are somehow not interesting/fun/worthy enough to warrant a polite response to a simple text or email. 

All of a sudden we find ourselves in the awkward position of breaking up with or being dumped by friends we've outgrown or who have outgrown us. Unlike a romantic entanglement though, there don't seem to be rules of engagement (or disengagement) that we know to follow to preserve our mental health and feelings of self-worth as we extract ourselves from the friendship. We're rudderless when we suddenly  find ourselves being broken up with, or attempting to break up with, a friend who is moving swiftly into frenemy territory.

True friends share their umbrellas

The greatest divides I've noticed can (sadly and strangely) be fairly simply categorised: the Singles vs the Couples and (much rarer) People with Babies vs People Without. I've been kind of swimming in both currents with a few people of late, and definitely witnessing the trend amongst other friends of mine. And we are all equally confused and saddened by the sudden death of lengthy friendships.

A romantic relationship tends to have a slower process of separation - and generally some form of closure is available, whether via a painful communique that you are just not very lovable, or a "I'm not ready for this level of commitment" type departure that can often involve a few more encounters (often drunk, often involving sex) until it all slowly peters out. A friendship ends with an immediate closing of a door: quietly, not slammed. Sometimes you don't realise it's happened until weeks down the track, when it seems almost embarrassing to ask why. There are no furious recriminations, there is no other woman whom you can FB stalk until you don't care any longer, and certainly no option to tearfully meet up to understand the reasons why once and for all. You are simply locked out and on the outer, wondering if it's ok to drop by with an apple crumble once in a while. 

I am in the process of watching a very painful break-up of Singles vs Couples, although I have sincere hopes they'll end up reunited. I have also recently ended a friendship (I assume she realises) with someone. The reason I ended it, was as simple as becoming jack of her constant rejection of my overtures. Is it because she has a baby and I don't? That simply doesn't make sense, because so many others I'm firm friends with have kids. Does she resent that I have a career instead of a baby? I have no idea. Does she resent my happiness with my husband, after years of me being the friend who just dates arseholes? I have no idea! And I can't ask, because breaking up with your friend is an entirely different landscape to breaking up with a lover.

I can't tearfully call and ask what I did wrong, and suggest maybe we could patch things up, or that we might still be friends. I can't shout at her for finding someone better than me. I can't lament the mistakes in our friendship, because we simply didn't spend enough time together to make such fatal errors. 

        

In a break-up, most people recommend a wholesale social media deletion of the ex - delete text messages, ceremonial Facebook de-friending, and blockage of Instagram or Snapchat accounts. In the case of a friendship, though, it's complicated by the degree in which your lives are linked by mutual friends, families or workplaces - particularly if you are the dumper. 

In some circumstances (the acrimonious ones) no one is surprised when one defriends the other - if anything, you're a bit pissed that you didn't get to do it first. If you are the dumper, and it is simply because this person is doing your head in, it's a little more complex. On the one hand, they may not notice you've defriended them (ouch!), on the other it may just not be worth the barrage of queries from gossip-hungry friends or colleagues. In my case, I have simply blocked her posts from my Facebook feed, and I feel much better already: (a) because I've done something proactive (even if she doesn't realise it); and (b) because she is none the wiser, so no one's feelings are technically hurt (literally).

OMG she defriended you!

My friends and I have ruminated over the growing-apart thing over these last few months, but we still aren't close to a solid reason for it happening. I can only assume that our paths have diverged - wildly - and that it's just not meant to be anymore. But that's hollow reasoning when you bid adieu to someone who has been a part of your life for far longer than any lover. It's not a death, but sometimes it feels like it.

Heading in different directions

Reasons to suspect your friendship may be over:

• You send multiple messages and call what feels like a thousand times, only to be met by the Great Wall of Silence (this is an obvious sign, please stop calling immediately)
• You arrange to catch up and she constantly cancels at the last minute - only to check in at a fun festival or bar with someone else a few hours later
• You are always the one reaching out to catch up, for no good reason (i.e. she does not have octuplets or a crazy-arse career that causes her to disappear into a hole of paperwork or nappies for weeks or months at a time)
• She is really mean to you - in front of others / you are excluded from "in jokes" with other friends that kind of feel like you're at the butt of that joke
• Her new friends are mean to you (aint nobody got time for that)  
• Your conversations have gone from hilarious gossip sessions to painfully stilted conversations about the weather and how your parents are going
• You feel down on yourself after hanging out with her, and not uplifted the way your other friends make you feel
• You have nothing to say to each other, because you have nothing in common anymore - not even how hot Ryan Gosling is and what a shame Eva Mendes locked him in with a baby.

Goddamn it.