Notes On: Friendship Breakups

(Bc all adventurous women do)

‘Nearly everything I know about love, I’ve learnt from my long‑term friendships with women’ – Dolly Alderton

‘It is better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all’ – Alfred Lord Tennyson

‘I’d like to remind the three of you not to sleep on this friendship, because I know it feels like it’s just gonna be, like, love and lust pushing you forward, but lust fades and friendship never does, if you nurture it’ – Hannah, in GIRLS, right before they all break up

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Notes from the Mailbox:

Letting go of friendship heartbreak and starting to trust people again! (i.e. it's been five years since my ex bff and i broke up and I'm still having A Time about it)

I would love to read something about friendship heartbreak or about growing apart from those who you thought would be your best friends forever. Still remaining friends but not having the same connection as you did once

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According to folklore, girls grow up dreaming about their weddings. For me, this was only partly true. I grew up dreaming not of the person I’d marry at my wedding, no, I liked to imagine who would be my maid of honour. As a teenager, the biggest testament of platonic love, for me, was saying to a friend: “I can just tell, we’re going to be in each other’s weddings.” It was conspiratorial, hopeful, exciting, this idea that one day – a day so far into the future it’s hard even to contemplate – our wedding days would be marked not by marrying someone we loved (after all, we couldn’t quite picture that yet), but by how long we’d been friends with the people who were celebrating with us.

Now, on the brink of thirty, a lot of my friends are getting married. And a lot of their friends are getting married. And one topic that seems to come up a lot, is the concept of a friendship break up. Because whilst getting married is about celebrating a romantic relationship, it’s a touchpoint, a moment to step back and reflect: who do I value in my life? Who am I very close to? Choosing bridesmaids and maid(s) of honour reminds me, perhaps unflatteringly, of MSN close friends list. And – shockingly – it has the capacity to ruin friendships.

Over the past few months, I’ve heard of several separate stories of brides who no longer speak to people they chose to be their bridesmaids because of things that happened at or around their weddings. At first, I was shocked, but the more I thought about it – and spoke to friends about it – the more I understood. These are momentous moments in people’s lives, and they also bring up so much for those around them. They’re this cornucopia of joy and excitement and hope for a joint future for the couple involved. But they’re also a touchpoint for those around them: am I happy, romantically? Do I have this many people who’d want to celebrate me? Could I afford all of this, if I wanted to?

According to research by Aviva, the average cost of a hen do in the UK is £779 per person. This rises to 1,208 if it’s abroad. And then there’s the bridesmaid dress, and the time off work, and the wedding present. You’re frequently looking at an average of £1,000 or more for the whole thing. All of this, of course, can cause tension. Friendship break ups are apparently so common whilst planning a wedding that Google is littered with advice and think pieces like ‘How to Keep Your Friendships Intact While Wedding Planning’ and ‘Does wedding season mark the end of friendships?’ and ‘Is a Friendship Breakup Inevitable While Wedding Planning?’ and ‘When Weddings End Friendships’ (the latest one in Vogue).

So, when I asked what you’d like me to write about, this week, and the answer was ‘friendship breakups’, I couldn’t wait to research it. And when I asked for specific stories, on Instagram, my replies were flooded. There were so many, it was actually hard to read them all. Everyone, it seems, has experienced a friendship break up that felt, and I’m quoting here, ‘like heartbreak.’ Why is this? And why don’t we all talk about it more? Here’s my take. I hope it brings you comfort.

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On Romanticising Female Friendship

We’re currently living through an era that I like to call ‘The Romanticisation of Female Friendship’. This, of course, is the millennial prioritisation of female friendship that sits squarely on the shoulders of sitcoms like Friends and Sex and the City, now repurposed it to include pubic hair and unabashed nakedness and problematic, always-late, type-B friends who’re always getting off with older men but you love them anyway.

Culturally, it was needed, I think – this romanticisation of female friendship. We needed a chapter – in literature, in the world – in which we de-centred men and idolised our female friends. Wrote love letters to them. Dated them. Prioritised them. (Examples include: Fleabag, Broad City, How I Met Your Mother, The Bold Type, Gilmore Girls, Grace and Frankie, Animals by Emma Jane Unsworth, The Girls by Emma Cline, Ghosts by Dolly Alderton, the list goes on). So all-pervasive is this (iconic) trend, that it’s one of the few truly millennial things that Gen Z has adopted for themselves. Personally, I love it. But it does contribute to this narrative that (Female) Friends Are For Life, and to lose one is therefore to fail.

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On The Cold Hard Facts

There was this guy called Robin Dunbar who did some research on primates – and then on humans – and came to the conclusion that a person can only have 150 social relationships at any one point, and only five of them are close friends (or ‘intimates’). But – and this is a huge but – 60% of our time is actually spent with those five close ones.

Other research has shown that 52% of these social networks – and up to 70% of close friends – melt away every seven years, to be replaced by new ones. So, according to the Cold Hard Facts, everyone probably has experienced a friendship break up. Including me. And it is searing. It makes you question everything, comb back through every interaction looking for clues. But the worst part? The worst part is that it feels shameful. Because in a 2025 – smack bang in the middle of The Romanticisation Of The Female Friendship era – it feels like you’ve done something wrong, to lose one.

So, I’ve done some research. Here’s why it feels so uniquely terrible, to lose a close friend:

Girl, so uncommunicative

According to various articles, a huge reason friendships end is the perceived imbalance of emotional labour, or even closeness, which is never disclosed. And most friendships apparently end with the slow fade. There’s no clear ‘break up’ moment, no big fight, just slower replies, those ‘omg I’m so sorry I’ve been sooooo busy with work’ texts every few months until they stop coming all together. It feels like being ghosted because it sort of is being ghosted. Per The Atlantic: “Most friendships die not in pyrotechnics, but a quiet, gray dissolve”.

What now?!

Unlike with romantic relationships, there’s no guidebook for navigating a friendship break up. There are no cultural milestones, no ‘eat ice cream for two weeks, delete all the photos, go out with your friends, get under someone to get over someone’ articles. You’re just drifting, unsure of what happened, unsure what to do with the grief, because it isn’t really grief, is it? (Hint: yes, it is). (Also: I have actually created a ‘Heartbreak Handbook’ for friendship break-ups. You can find it here).

Okay, but, she’s still there

The thing about close friends is that they’re often entwined in your social circles. To lose one, and keep seeing them? That’s a new kind of pain. A lot of those reaching out to me said they were still friends after the fall out, but nowhere near as close as before. Which, I think, might be even worse. (One even described it as ‘keeping the wound open’. This makes me want to weep).

Losing The Old You

According to Forbes, ‘certain friendships become synonymous with our identities... when we lose them, we lose part of ourselves.’ I’m not sure I need to add anything, here. Heartbreak hits different when you’re losing a part of yourself, too.

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On Love and Loss

According to the facts, then, most people have experienced a friendship break up, and yet there’s such a taboo around it. In the era of romanticising female friendships, to admit to losing one feels akin to saying: it’s me, hi, I’m the walking red flag.