essay about losing friends

Friday essay: on the ending of a friendship

Emeritus Professor of Creative writing, The University of Melbourne

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Friendship is an incomparable, immeasurable boon to me, and a source of life — not metaphorically but literally.

• Simone Weil

About eight years ago, I went to dinner with a dear friend I had known for more than 40 years. It would be the last time we would see each other and by the end of that evening I was deeply shaken. But more lasting and more unsettling than this has been the feeling of loss without his friendship. It was a sudden ending but it was also an ending that lasted for me well beyond that evening. I have worried since then at what kind of friend I am to my friends, and why a friendship can suddenly self-destruct while others can so unexpectedly bloom.

My friend and I were used to going to dinner together, though it had become an increasingly tricky matter for us. We had been seeing each other more infrequently, and our conversations had been tending towards repetition. I still enjoyed his passion for talk, his willingness to be puzzled by life’s events, our comically growing list of minor ailments as we entered our sixties, and the old stories he fell back on — usually stories of his minor triumphs, such as the time his car burst into fire, was declared a write-off by insurance, and ended in an auction house where he bought it back with part of the insurance payout and only minor repairs to be made. There were stories of his time as a barman in one of Melbourne’s roughest pubs. I suppose in a lot of long-lasting friendships it is these repeated stories of the past that can fill the present so richly.

Nevertheless, both his opinions and mine seemed to have become too predictable. Even his desire to come up with the most unpredictable viewpoint on any problem was a routine I expected from him. Each of us knew the weaknesses in the other’s thinking, and we had learned not to go too far with some topics, which were of course the most interesting and important ones.

He knew how politically correct I could be, and shrewdly enough he had no time for my self-righteousness, the predictability of my views on gender, race and climate. I understood this. He knew too that his fiercely independent thinking was often just the usual rant against greenies or lefties. Something had begun to fail in our friendship, but I could not properly perceive this or speak of it.

We were a contrasting pair. He was a big man with an aggressive edge to his gregarious nature, while I was lean, short and physically slight next to him, a much more reserved person altogether. I liked his size because big men have been protective figures in my life. At times when I felt threatened I would ask him to come with me to a meeting or a transaction, and just stand next to me in his big way. During one long period of trouble with our neighbours he would visit when the tension was high to show his formidable presence and his solidarity with us.

I was always reading and knew how to talk books, while he was too restless to read much. He knew how to sing, bursting into song occasionally when we were together. He had been unable to work professionally since a breakdown that was both physical and mental. By contrast, I was working steadily, never quite as free with my time as he was.

Nearly two years before our last dinner together his wife had suddenly left him. As it turned out, she had been planning her departure for some time, but when she went he was taken by surprise. I saw a more confused and fragile side of him during those months when we would meet and talk through how he was dealing with their counselling sessions, and then how the negotiations were proceeding over belongings and finally the family house. He was learning to live alone for the first time since he had been a young man, and was exploring what it might be like to seek out new relationships.

Read more: Research Check: is it true only half your friends actually like you?

A safe haven

We had met when I was a first-year university student boarding at my grandmother’s home in an inner Melbourne suburb. I was studying for a Bachelor of Arts, staying up through the nights, discovering literature, music, history, cask wine, dope, girls and ideas.

He lived in a flat a few doors away in a street behind my grandmother’s place, and I remember it was the local parish youth group, or the remnants of one, that used to meet in his flat. In my friend’s flat we would lie around the floor, half a dozen of us, drinking, flirting, arguing about religion or politics until the night was strung out in our heads, tight and thin and vibrating with possibilities. I loved that sudden intimate and intellectually rich contact with people my own age.

My friend and I started up a coffee lounge in an old disused shopfront as a meeting place for youth who would otherwise be on the street. I was the one who became immersed in the chaotic life of the place as students, musicians, misfits, hopeful poets and petty criminals floated through the shop, while my friend kept his eye on the broader picture that involved real estate agents, local councils, supplies of coffee, income and expenditure.

Perhaps the experience helped delay my own adulthood, allowing me time to try out a bohemian, communal alternative lifestyle that was so important to some of us in the early 1970s. My friend, though, was soon married. It was as if he had been living a parallel life outside our friendship, outside the youth group, coffee shop, jug band, drugs and misadventures of our project.

This did not break us up, and in fact after his marriage he became another kind of friend. I was at times struggling to find some steady sense of myself. Sometimes in those years I would not be able to talk or even be near others, and I remember once when I felt like this I went to my newly married friend’s home, and asked if I could lie on the floor in the corner of their lounge room for a few days until I felt better.

They indulged me. I felt it was this haven that saved me then, giving me the time to recoup and giving me a sense that there was somewhere I could go where the world was safe and neutral.

In time, and more bumpily and uncertainly than my friend, I was with a partner raising a family. He was often involved in our children’s birthdays, other celebrations, our house-moving, and just dropping in on family meals. It worked for us. I remember him lifting our cast iron wood-burning stove into its place in our first renovated Brunswick cottage. He lived in a more sprawling home near bushland on the edge of Melbourne, so one of my pleasures became the long cycling trips out to see him.

My partner and I were embraced by a local community thanks to the childcare centre, kinders, schools and sport. Lasting friendships (for us and for our children) grew in the tentative, open-ended, slightly blindly feeling way of friendships. Through this decade and a half though, the particular friendship with my songful friend held, perhaps to the surprise of both of us.

‘Tolerating much, for the sake of best intentions’

In his thoroughly likeable 1993 book on friendship , the political scientist Graham Little wrote under the bright light of writings by Aristotle and Freud, that the purest kind of friendship “welcomes the different ways people are alive to life and tolerates much in a friend for the sake of best intentions”.

Here perhaps is the closest I have seen to a definition of friendship at its best: a stance imbued with sympathy, interest and excitement directed at another despite all that otherwise shows we are flawed and dangerous creatures.

On that evening, the evening of the last time we went out to dinner together, I did push my friend towards one of the topics we usually avoided. I had been wanting him to acknowledge and even apologise for his behaviour towards some young women he had spoken to, I thought, lewdly and insultingly nearly a year before in my home at a party. The women and those of us who had witnessed his behaviour felt continuing tension over his refusal to discuss the fact that he had wanted to speak so insultingly to them and then had done it in our home in front of us. For me, there was some element of betrayal, not only in the way he had behaved but in his continued refusal to discuss what had happened.

The women were drunk, he said, just as he had said the last time I tried to talk to him about this. They were wearing almost nothing, he said, and what he’d said to them was no more than they were expecting. My friend and I were sitting in a popular Thai restaurant on Sydney Road: metal chairs, plastic tables, concrete floor. It was noisy, packed with students, young couples and groups out for a cheap and tasty meal. A waitress had put menus, water and beer on our table while she waited for us to decide on our meals. Wanting to push finally past this impasse, I pointed out to him that the women had not insulted him, he had insulted them.

If that’s the way you want it, he replied, and placed his hands on each side of the table, hurling it into the air and walking out of the restaurant as table, bottles, glasses, water and beer came clattering and smashing down around me. The whole restaurant fell silent. I could not move for some time. The waitress began mopping up the floor around me. Someone called out, “Hey, are you all right?”

This was the last time I saw or heard from him. For many months, I thought of him every day, then slowly I thought of him less often, until now I can think of him more or less at will, and not find myself ashamed of the way I went for him in a conversation where I should have been perhaps more alive to whatever was troubling him.

Improvised, tentative

For some years after this, I felt I had to learn how to be myself without him. I have read articles and essays since then about how pitiful men can be at friendship. We are apparently too competitive, we base our friendships on common activities, which means we can avoid talking openly about our feelings and thoughts. I don’t know about this “male deficit model”, as some sociologists call it, but I do know that the loss of this friendship took with it a big part of my shared personal history at that time. It dented my confidence in ever having properly known this man or understood our friendship — or in knowing how secure any friendship might be.

I was drawn to read and re-read Michel de Montaigne’s gentle and strangely extreme essay on friendship where he was so certain that he knew with perfection what his friend would think and say and value. He wrote of his friend, Etienne de Boëtie, “Not only did I know his mind as well as I knew my own but I would have entrusted myself to him with greater assurance than to myself.”

Against this perfection of understanding between friends, there is George Eliot’s odd excursion into science fiction in her 1859 novel, The Lifted Veil . Her narrator, Latimer, finds he can perceive perfectly clearly the thoughts of all the people around him. He becomes disgusted and deeply disturbed by the petty self-interest he apparently discovers within everyone.

After 40 years of shared history, there was not the disgust Eliot writes of, nor Montaigne’s perfect union of mind and trust between me and my burly friend, but there was, I had thought, a foundation of knowledge whereby we took each other’s differences into ourselves, as well as our common histories of the cafe we had run, and as it happened our common serving of time in semi-monastic seminaries before we’d met — differences and similarities that had given us, I thought, ways of being in sympathy with each other while allowing for each other.

Read more: Guide to the classics: Michel de Montaigne's Essays

Montaigne’s dearest friend, Etienne, had died, and his essay was as much about the meaning of this loss as about friendship. His big idea was loyalty, and I think I understand that, though not in the absolute way Montaigne wrote of it.

Loyalty is only real if it is constantly renewed. I worry that I have not worked enough at some friendships that have come into my life, but have let them happen more passively than the women I know who spend such time, and such complicated time, exploring and testing friendships. The sudden disappearance of my friend left me with an awareness of how patched-together, how improvised, clumsy and tentative even the most secure-seeming friendship can be.

When the philosopher and brilliant essayist, Simone Weil wrote shortly before she died in 1943,

I may lose, at any moment, through the play of circumstances over which I have no control, anything whatsoever that I possess, including things that are so intimately mine that I consider them as myself. There is nothing that I might not lose. It could happen at any moment ….

she seemed to be touching on the difficult truth that we run on luck and hope and chance much of the time. Why haven’t I worked harder at friendships, when I know that they provide the real meaning in my life?

Some years ago, when I was told by a medical specialist that I had a 30% chance of having cancer, as I waited for the results of a biopsy, I remember that in response to these dismal odds I had no desire to go back to work, no desire to even read — all I wanted to do was spend time with friends.

Inner worlds laid waste

To know what it is we care about, this is a gift. It should be straightforward to know this and keep it present in our lives, but it can prove to be difficult. Being the reader that I am, I have always turned to literature and fiction for answers or insights into those questions that seem to need answering.

I realised some time after the ending of my friendship that I had been reading novels dealing with friendship, and was not even sure how consciously I had chosen them.

For instance, I read The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber, a novel about a Christian preacher, Peter Leigh, sent to convert aliens in a galaxy ludicrously far from earth on a planet with an equally unlikely atmosphere benign to its human colonisers.

It is a novel about whether Leigh can be any kind of adequate friend to his wife left behind on Earth, and whether his new feelings for these aliens amounts to friendship. Though my suspension of disbelief was precarious, I found myself caring about these characters and their relationships, even the grotesquely shapeless aliens. Partly I cared about them because the book read like an essay testing ideas of friendship and loyalty that were important and urgent to the writer.

I also read at that time Haruki Murakami’s novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage , a book that came with a little game of coloured cards and stickers, and I found that I cared about Tsukuru Tazaki too, for I felt all along that Murakami’s character was a thin and endearing disguise for himself (what a beautiful word that is, “en-dearing”).

The novel centred on lost friendships. I heard a tone in its voice that was the oddly flat, persistent, vulnerable and sincere searching of a man for connection with others. If Murakami’s novel has a proposition it wishes to test it would be that we only know ourselves in what images of ourselves we receive back from our friends. Without our friends we become invisible, lost.

In both those novels, the friendships are crashing to pieces in slow motion in front of the reader’s helpless eyes. I wanted to shake those characters, tell them to stop and think about what they were doing, but at the same time I saw in them mirrors of myself and my experiences.

I read John Berger too , on the way a human looks across an abyss of incomprehension when looking at another animal. Though language seems to connect us, it might be that language also distracts us from the actual abyss of ignorance and fear between all of us as we look, across, at each other. In his book on the savage mind , Lévi-Strauss quotes a study of Canadian Carrier Indians living on the Bulkley River who were able to cross that abyss between species, believing they knew what animals did and what their needs were because their men had been married to the salmon, the beaver and the bear.

I have read essays by Robin Dunbar on the evolutionary limits to our circles of intimacy , where he suggests that for most of us there needs to be three or maybe five truly close friends. These are the ones we lean towards with tenderness and open ourselves to with endless curiosity — those in whom we seek only the good.

My partner can name quickly four friends who qualify for her as part of this necessary circle. I find I can name two (and she is one of them), then a constellation of individual friends whose closeness to me I can’t easily measure. It is this constellation that sustains me.

Recently I was away from home for three months. After two weeks away I wrote a list in the back of my diary of the friends I was missing. A little more than a dozen of these were the friends, men and women, with whom I need contact, and with whom conversations are always open-ended, surprising, intellectually stimulating, sometimes intimate, and often fun. With each of them I explore a slightly different but always essential version of myself. Graham Little wrote that “ideal soulmates are friends who are fully aware that each has himself as his main life project”.

To live this takes some effort of imagination, and with my friend at dinner that night I might in myself have been refusing to make this effort.

There are also, it occurs to me, the friends who came as couples, with whom my partner and I share time as couples. This is itself another manifestation of friendship, one that crosses over into community, tribe and family — and no less precious than the individual intimacy of a personal friendship. For reasons I can’t properly fathom, the importance of this kind of time with coupled friends has deepened as I have grown through the decades of my fifties and sixties.

Perhaps it is that the dance of conversation and ideas is so much more complex and pleasurable when there are four or more contributing. It could be too that I am absolved from the responsibility of really working at these friendships in the way one must when there are two of us. Or it might be the pang and stimulus of the knowledge that opportunities to be together are brutally diminishing as we grow older.

But to lose an individual friend from one’s closest circle is to have large tracts of one’s inner world laid waste for a time. My feelings over the end of this particular friendship were a kind of grief mixed with bewilderment.

It was not that the friendship was necessary to my existence, but that perhaps through habit and sympathy it had become a fixed part of my identity. Robin Dunbar would say that by stepping away from this friendship I had made room for someone else to slip in to my circle of most intimate friends, but isn’t it the point of such close friends that they are in some important sense irreplaceable? This is the source of much of our distress when such friendships end.

Still learning

When I told people about what had happened in the restaurant that night, they would say, reasonably, “Why don’t you patch things up and resume your friendship?”

As I imagined how a conversation might go if I did meet my friend again, I came to understand that I had been a provocation to him. I had ceased to be the friend he needed, wanted or imagined.

What he did was dramatic. He might have called it merely dramatic. I felt it as threatening. Though I cannot help but think I provoked him. And if we had “patched” a friendship back together, on whose terms would this have been conducted? Would it always be that I would have to agree not to press him on questions that might lead him to throw over some table between us again?

Or worse, would I have to witness his apology, forgive him myself, and put him on his best behaviour for the rest of our friendship?

Neither of those outcomes would have patched much together. I had been hurting too over what I saw as his lack of willingness or interest to understand the situation from my point of view. And so it went inside me as the table and the water and the beer and the glasses came crashing down around me. I had been, in a way, married to my friend, even if he was a salmon or a bear — a creature across an abyss from me. Perhaps this was the only way out of that marriage. Perhaps he had been preparing for (moving towards?) this moment more consciously than I had been.

The ending of this friendship, it is clear, left me looking for its story. It was as if all along there must have been a narrative with a trajectory carrying us in this direction. A story is of course a way of testing whether an experience can take on a shape. Murakami’s and Faber’s novels are not themselves full-blown stories, for there is almost no plot, no shape, to their stumbling episodic structures, and oddly enough in both books the self-doubting lovers might or might not find that close communion with another somewhere well beyond the last page of each novel.

These novels cohere round a series of questions rather than events: what do we know and what can we know about others, what is the nature of the distance that separates one person from another, how provisional is it to know someone anyway, and what does it mean to care about someone, even someone who is a character in a novel?

When an Indian says he is married to a salmon, this can be no stranger than me saying I spent a couple of weeks on a humid planet in another galaxy with an astronaut who is a Christian preacher and an inept husband, or I spent last night in Tokyo with an engineer who builds railway stations and believes himself to be colourless, though at least two women have told him he is full of colour. But do I go to this story-making as a way of keeping my experiences less personal and more cerebral?

When I got home that night eight years ago, I sat at my kitchen table, shaking, hugging myself, talking to my grown-up children about what happened. It was the talking that helped — a narrative taking shape.

Dunbar, like me, like all of us, worries at the question of what makes life so richly present to us, and why friendships seem to be at the core of this meaningfulness. He has been surveying Americans with questions about friendship for several decades, and he concludes that for many of us the small circle of intimate friendships we experience is reducing.

We are apparently lucky now, on average, if there are two people in our lives we can approach with tenderness and curiosity, with that assumption that time will not matter as we talk in a low, murmuring, hive-warm way to a close friend.

My friend cannot be replaced, and it might be that we did not in the end imagine each other fully enough or accurately enough as we approached that last encounter. I don’t know precisely what our failure was. The shock of what happened and the shock of the friendship ending has over the time since that dinner become a part of my history in which I remember feeling grief but am no longer caught in confused anger or guilt over it. The story of it might not have ended but it has subsided.

Perhaps in all friendships we are not only, at our best, agreeing to encountering the unique and endlessly absorbing presence of another person, but unknown to us we’re learning something about how to approach the next friendship in our lives. There is something comically inept and endearing about the possibility that one might still be learning how to be a friend right up to the end of life.

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How to Cope With The Loss of a Friendship

Elizabeth is a freelance health and wellness writer. She helps brands craft factual, yet relatable content that resonates with diverse audiences.

Dr. Sabrina Romanoff, PsyD, is a licensed clinical psychologist and a professor at Yeshiva University’s clinical psychology doctoral program.

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Why Friendships End

How to cope with losing a friend.

Friendships are some of the most important connections and relationships a person can experience—oftentimes creating a greater impression than even a romantic relationship.

When you have a good friend you expect to have them by your side to weather the bad times and enjoy the good, and you don't always consider the fact that this relationship could end. Sadly, sometimes people grow apart or realize they're incompatible.

Friendships are undeniably important, but friends may not always be a part of our lives. It doesn’t matter if a friend has been a constant presence for decades, or only a few months—different factors can come into play to bring your connection to an end.

Likewise, different reactions can follow the loss of a cherished companion in your life. We'll dig into the reasons friendships may fail, and the appropriate ways to handle losing a friend.

Friends aren’t just comfortable company during social events or support systems during trying times. A friend can provide the same amount of encouragement, and emotional fulfillment as family members. This is why the dissolution of a friendship can feel just as painful as heartbreak. 

There are different reasons why a friendship might come to an end. These scenarios are discussed below.

You Outgrow Each Other

Under normal circumstances, a friendship usually begins with innocent intentions. These connections are usually forged on common ground: liking the same television shows, enjoying similar kinds of music, or even engaging in common hobbies.

Friendships are unlikely to demand too much and are based on people who purely enjoy the company of others.

However, as the saying goes, 20 friends cannot play for 20 years . There are times when companions grow out of each other.

Sometimes, the interests that started off the relationship are unable to sustain it. In other cases, friendships fizzle because what initially began as common ground, has evolved into different things between friends.

A Fight Breaks Things Up

As humans, our differences are one of the things that make us colorful and interesting. A world where everyone thinks and feels the same thing will appear monotonous and dull. 

With friends, the same principle applies. Friendships teach an accommodation of different belief systems. They are one of the first points where conflict resolution is handled practically.

While differences are encouraged, however, there are some disagreements that may not be resolved so easily. When friends hold different views on matters that are fundamental to their ways of life, these views may prevent the friendship from progressing.

Likewise, where a betrayal takes place, the friendship may be unable to survive the pain.

Distance Complicates Things

Some of the beauty of friendship is found in doing things together. Cooking with a friend, working side-by-side on a term project, going on weekend adventures together—make up the little joys of having a friend.

But with everyday life comes everyday complications. Moving away for work, marriage, travel, and other reasons can put a strain on the friendship.

While there is no shortage of love between friends that find themselves in different parts of the world, this distance can contribute to reduced communication. Ultimately, friendships may end when too much time has passed, and too many events have occurred apart from a once loved peer.

Expectations Might Change

Friendships come in different forms. There may be low-maintenance connections , where friends are happy to communicate and catch up every once in a while. If this kind of friendship ends, it may not hurt so much.

Other times, friendships may be more intense. Here, friends are in constant communication and are usual fixtures in each other’s lives. The latter tend to be involved in day-to-day activities, and may usually expect the same from people they consider friends.

When friends have set expectations from their peers, this can create some tension. The pairing of low and high maintenance friends may be difficult. This is because one half may consider the other as doing too much, while the other remains convinced that more can be done to promote the friendship. Where expectations constantly clash, this can bring an end to the friendship.

The value of a friend can be immeasurable. Having a person to reach out to in your darkest moments, someone to laugh and ponder life’s mysteries with can cause a positive leap in well-being. This social connection is so important, it can assist with life preservation in old age.

When you lose a friend, the pain can cut deep. Now out of your reach, is a person you could confide in, and trust to show up for you. To manage this loss, here are a few steps to take.

Learn to Prioritize Yourself

When you lose a friend, it’s easy to get caught up in the pain of loss. This can mean a significant period of mourning the happy times, which can be unhealthy for well-being.

Letting yourself feel the impact of a lost friend is admirable and even advisable. However, this should not become the status quo. Going on walks, exercising, learning about life with loss , can put you in a better frame of mind to manage a friend’s absence.

Strengthen the Bond With Other Friends

The loss of one friend can help to highlight the importance of others present in your life. Where your social community includes friends that are invested in your growth and happiness, this is a good time to show your appreciation.

Spend time with these friends, and nurture your relationship. Now is a great time to take stock of how to grow your friendship.

Speak to a Therapist

While friendships are never elevated to the position of romantic relationships, this connection can be just as important. Because of this, it can be difficult to deal with the pain and isolation that can follow the loss of a friend in your life. 

Seeking expert guidance can help with navigating the hurt and changes that will follow life without your friend.

Keep in Mind

Losing a good friend is one of the most challenging situations to steer. This is why friendship breakups can feel like an unexpected pain in your gut. 

To navigate the loss of a friend, focusing on yourself, and your existing friendships is a positive step in the right direction.

Likewise, expert advice can help with managing and overcoming the challenges of a lost friend. 

Amati V, Meggiolaro S, Rivellini G, Zaccarin S. Social relations and life satisfaction: the role of friends. Genus . 2018;74(1):7. doi:10.1186/s41118-018-0032-z

Blieszner R, Ogletree AM, Adams RG. Friendship in Later Life: A Research Agenda . Innov Aging . 2019;3(1):igz005. Published 2019 Mar 30. doi:10.1093/geroni/igz005

By Elizabeth Plumptre Elizabeth is a freelance health and wellness writer. She helps brands craft factual, yet relatable content that resonates with diverse audiences.

It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart

The older we get, the more we need our friends—and the harder it is to keep them.

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I t is an insolent cliché , almost, to note that our culture lacks the proper script for ending friendships. We have no rituals to observe, no paperwork to do, no boilerplate dialogue to crib from.

Yet when Elisa Albert and Rebecca Wolff were in the final throes of their friendship, they managed, entirely by accident, to leave behind just such a script. The problem was that it read like an Edward Albee play—tart, unsparing, fluorescent with rage.

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I met Elisa one evening in 2008, after an old friend’s book reading. She was such mesmerizing company that I rushed out to buy her debut novel, The Book of Dahlia , which had been published a few months earlier. I was instantly struck by how unafraid of darkness and emotional chaos she was. The same articulate fury suffused After Birth , her follow-up; her next book, Human Blues (her “monster,” as she likes to say), comes out in July.

Rebecca is someone I knew only by reputation until recently. She’s the founding editor of the literary magazine Fence , a haven for genre-resistant writing and writers that’s now almost 25 years old. She’s also the author of a novel and four poetry collections, including Manderley , selected by the National Poetry Series; she has a fifth coming out in the fall.

The two women became close more than a decade ago, spotting in each other the same traits that dazzled outsiders: talent, charisma, saber-tooth smarts. To Rebecca, Elisa was “impossibly vibrant” in a way that only a 30-year-old can be to someone who is 41. To Elisa, Rebecca was a glamorous and reassuring role model, a woman who through some miracle of alchemy had successfully combined motherhood, marriage, and a creative life.

It would be hard to overstate how much that mattered to Elisa. She was a new mother, all alone in a new city, Albany, where her husband was a tenured professor. (Albany! How does one find friends in Albany?) Yet here was Rebecca—the center of a lush social network, a pollinating bee—showing up on campus at Fence ’s office every day.

Read: Why making friends in midlife is so hard

The two entered an intense loop of contact. They took a class in New York City together. They sometimes joked about running away together. And, eventually, they decided to write a book together, a collection of their email and text correspondence about a topic with undeniably broad appeal: how to live in the world and be okay. They called this project The Wellness Letters .

I read the manuscript in one gulp. Their exchanges have real swing to them, a screwball quality with a punk twist. On page 1:

R: Anything you haven’t done? E: Affair. Acid. Shrooms. Second child. Death. Ayahuasca. R: “Bucket List.” E: “Efforts at Wellness.” R: I just started writing something called Trying to Stay Off My Meds … E: U R A STRONG WOMAN.

But over time, resentments flicker into view. Deep fissures in their belief systems begin to show. They start writing past each other, not hearing each other at all. By the end, the two women have taken every difficult truth they’ve ever learned about the other and fashioned it into a club. The final paragraphs are a mess of blood and bone and gray guts.

In real time, Elisa and Rebecca enact on the page something that almost all of us have gone through: the painful dissolution of a friendship.

The specifics of their disagreements may be unique to them, but the broad outlines have the ring and shape of the familiar; The Wellness Letters are almost impossible to read without seeing the corpse of one of your own doomed friendships floating by.

Elisa complains about failures in reciprocity.

Rebecca implies that Elisa is being insensitive, too quick to judge others.

Elisa implies that Rebecca is being too self-involved, too needy.

Rebecca implies: Now you’re too quick to judge me.

Elisa ultimately suggests that Rebecca’s unhappiness is at least partly of her own unlovely making.

To which Rebecca more or less replies: Who on earth would choose to be this unhappy?

To which Elisa basically says: Well, should that be an excuse for being a myopic and inconsiderate friend?

E: The truth is that I am wary of you … R: When you say that you are wary of me, it reminds me of something … oh yes, it’s when I told you that I was wary of you … wary of your clear pattern of forming mutually idolatrous relationships with women who you cast in a particular role in your life only to later castigate.

Their feelings were too hot to contain. What started as a deliberate, thoughtful meditation about wellness ended as an inadvertent chronicle of a friendship gone terribly awry.

The Wellness Letters , 18 months of electrifying correspondence, now sit mute on their laptops.

I first read The Wellness Letters in December 2019, with a different project in mind for them. The pandemic forced me to set it aside. But two years later, my mind kept returning to those letters, for reasons that at this point have also become a cliché: I was undergoing a Great Pandemic Friendship Reckoning, along with pretty much everyone else. All of those hours in isolation had amounted to one long spin of the centrifuge, separating the thickest friendships from the thinnest; the ambient threat of death and loss made me realize that if I wanted to renew or intensify my bonds with the people I loved most, the time was now, right now.

Want to explore more of the ideas and science behind well-being? Join Atlantic writers and other experts May 1–3 at The Atlantic ’s In Pursuit of Happiness event. Learn more about in-person and virtual registration here .

But truth be told, I’d already been mulling this subject for quite some time. When you’re in middle age, which I am (mid-middle age, to be precise—I’m now 52), you start to realize how very much you need your friends. They’re the flora and fauna in a life that hasn’t had much diversity, because you’ve been so busy— so relentlessly, stupidly busy —with middle-age things: kids, house, spouse, or some modern-day version of Zorba’s full catastrophe. Then one day you look up and discover that the ambition monkey has fallen off your back; the children into whom you’ve pumped thousands of kilowatt-hours are no longer partial to your company; your partner may or may not still be by your side. And what, then, remains?

With any luck, your friends. According to Laura Carstensen, the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, I’ve aged out of the friendship-collecting business, which tends to peak in the tumbleweed stage of life, when you’re still young enough to spend Saturday evenings with random strangers and Sunday mornings nursing hangovers at brunch. Instead, I should be in the friendship-enjoying business, luxuriating in the relationships that survived as I put down roots.

And I am luxuriating in them. But those friendships are awfully hard-won. With midlife comes a number of significant upheavals and changes, ones that prove too much for many friendships to withstand. By middle age, some of the dearest people in your life have gently faded away.

You lose friends to marriage, to parenthood, to politics—even when you share the same politics. (Political obsessions are a big, underdiscussed friendship-ender in my view, and they seem to only deepen with age.) You lose friends to success, to failure, to flukish strokes of good or ill luck. (Envy, dear God—it’s the mother of all unspeakables in a friendship, the lulu of all shames.) These life changes and upheavals don’t just consume your friends’ time and attention. They often reveal unseemly characterological truths about the people you love most, behaviors and traits you previously hadn’t imagined possible.

Those are brutal.

And I’ve still left out three of the most common and dramatic friendship disrupters: moving, divorce, and death. Though only the last is irremediable.

The unhappy truth of the matter is that it is normal for friendships to fade, even under the best of circumstances. The real aberration is keeping them. In 2009, the Dutch sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst published an attention-grabber of a study that basically showed we replace half of our social network over the course of seven years, a reality we both do and don’t intuit.

R: I’m worried once we wrap up our dialogue our friendship will be useless, therefore done. E: Nope. We r deeply in dialogue for long run I think. Unless U want  to not b. Does our friendship feel useless?? … R: No I want to be friends forever E: Then we will b

Were friendships always so fragile? I suspect not. But we now live in an era of radical individual freedoms. All of us may begin at the same starting line as young adults, but as soon as the gun goes off, we’re all running in different directions; there’s little synchrony to our lives. We have kids at different rates (or not at all); we pair off at different rates (or not at all); we move for love, for work, for opportunity and adventure and more affordable real estate and healthier lifestyles and better weather.

From the November 2019 issue: Why you never see your friends anymore

Yet it’s precisely because of the atomized, customized nature of our lives that we rely on our friends so very much. We are recruiting them into the roles of people who once simply coexisted with us—parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, fellow parishioners, fellow union members, fellow Rotarians.

It’s not wholly natural, this business of making our own tribes. And it hardly seems conducive to human thriving. The percentage of Americans who say they don’t have a single close friend has quadrupled since 1990, according to the Survey Center on American Life.

One could argue that modern life conspires against friendship, even as it requires the bonds of friendship all the more.

When I was younger, my friends had as much a hand in authoring my personality as any other force in my life. They advised me on what to read, how to dress, where to eat. But these days, many are showing me how to think, how to live .

It gets trickier as you age, living. More bad things happen. Your parents, if you’re lucky enough to still have them, have lives so different from your own that you’re looking horizontally, to your own cohort, for cues. And you’re dreading the days when an older generation will no longer be there for you—when you’ll have to rely on another ecosystem altogether for support.

Yet for the past decade or so, I’ve had a tacit, mutual understanding with many of the people I love most, particularly fellow working parents: Look, life’s crazy, the office has loaded me up like a pack animal, we’ll catch up when we catch up, love you in the meantime . This happens to suit a rotten tendency of mine, which is to work rather than play. I could give you all sorts of therapized reasons for why I do this, but honestly, at my age, it’s embarrassing. There comes a point when you have to wake up in the morning and decide that it doesn’t matter how you got to whatever sorry cul-de-sac you’re circling; you just have to find a way out.

I think of Nora Ephron, whose death caught virtually all of her friends by surprise . Had they known, they all said afterward—had they only known that she was ill—they’d have savored the dinners they were having, and they certainly wouldn’t have taken for granted that more of them would stretch forever into the future. Her sudden disappearance from the world revealed the fragility of our bonds, and how presumptuous we all are, how careless, how naive.

Read: Nora Ephron’s rules for middle-age happiness

But shouldn’t this fragility always be top of mind? Surely the pandemic has taught us that?

I mean, how long can we all keep postponing dinner?

When I began writing this story, my friend Nina warned me: Do not make this an occasion to rake through your own history and beat yourself up over the state of your own friendships . Which is something that only a dear friend, armed with protective instincts and a Spidey sense about her friend’s self-lacerating tendencies, would say.

Fair enough. But it’s hard to write a story about friendship in midlife without thinking about the friends you’ve lost. “When friendship exists in the background, it’s unremarkable but generally uncomplicated,” wrote B. D. McClay , an essayist and critic, in Lapham’s Quarterly last spring. “But when friendship becomes the plot, then the only story to tell is about how the friendship ended.”

Friendship is the plot of this article. So naturally I’m going to write at least a little about those I’ve lost—and my regrets, the choices I’ve made, the time I have and have not invested.

On the positive side of the ledger: I am a loyal friend. I am an empathetic friend. I seldom, if ever, judge. Tell me you murdered your mother and I’ll say, Gee, you must have been really mad at her . I am quick to remind my friends of their virtues, telling them that they are beautiful, they are brilliant, they are superstars. I spend money on them. I often express my love.

On the negative side: I’m oversensitive to slights and minor humiliations, which means I’m wrongly inclined to see them as intentional rather than pedestrian acts of thoughtlessness, and I get easily overwhelmed, engulfed. I can almost never mentally justify answering a spontaneous phone call from a friend, and I have to force myself to phone and email them when I’m hard at work on a project. I’m that prone to monomania, and that consumed by my own tension.

What both of these traits have in common is that I seem to live my life as if I’m under siege. I’m guessing my amygdala is the size of a cantaloupe.

Most of my withered friendships can be chalked up to this terrible tendency of mine not to reach out. I have pals in Washington, D.C., where I started my professional life, whom I haven’t seen in years, and friends from college I haven’t seen since practically graduation—people I once adored, shared my life with, couldn’t have imagined living for two seconds without.

And yet I do. I have.

This is, mind you, how most friendships die, according to the social psychologist Beverley Fehr: not in pyrotechnics, but a quiet, gray dissolve. It’s not that anything happens to either of you; it’s just that things stop happening between you. And so you drift.

It’s the friendships with more deliberate endings that torment. At best, those dead friendships merely hurt; at worst, they feel like personal failures, each one amounting to a little divorce. It doesn’t matter that most were undone by the hidden trip wires of midlife I talked about earlier: marriage, parenthood, life’s random slings and arrows. By midlife, you’ve invested enough in your relationships that every loss stings.

Read: The Friendship Files

You feel bereft, for one thing. As if someone has wandered off with a piece of your history.

And you fear for your reputation. Friends are the custodians of your secrets, the eyewitnesses to your weaknesses. Every confession you’ve made—all those naked moments—can be weaponized.

There was the friend I lost to parenthood, utterly, though I was also a parent. Her child shortly consumed her world, and she had many child-rearing opinions. These changes alone I could have handled; what I couldn’t handle was her obvious disapproval of my own parenting style (hands-off) and my lack of sentimentality about motherhood itself (if you don’t have something nice to say about raising kids, pull up a chair and sit next to me).

There was no operatic breakup. She moved away; I made zero effort to stay in touch. But whenever I think of her, my stomach chirps with a kind of longing. She showed me how cognitive behavioral therapy worked before I even knew it was a thing, rightsizing my perspective each time I turned a wispy cirrus into a thunderhead. And her conversation was tops, weird and unpredictable.

I miss her. Or who she was. Who we were.

I lost a male friend once to parenthood too, though that situation was different. In this instance, I was not yet a mother. But he was a dad, and on account of this, he testily informed me one day, he now had higher moral obligations in this world than to our friendship or to my feelings, which he’d just seriously hurt (over something that in hindsight I’ll confess was pretty trivial). While I knew on some level that what he said was true, I couldn’t quite believe he was saying it out loud, this person with whom I’d spent so many idle, gleeful hours. I miss him a lot, and wonder to this day whether I should have just let the comment go.

Yet whenever I think of him, a fiery asterisk still appears next to his name.

Mahzad Hojjat, a social-psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, once told me that people may say that friendship betrayals aren’t as bad as romantic betrayals if they’re presented with hypothetical scenarios on a questionnaire. But that’s not how they experience friendship betrayals in real life . This doesn’t surprise me. I still have sense-memories of how sickened I was when this friend told me I’d been relegated to a lower league—my heart quickening, the blood thumping in my ears.

Then there was the friend who didn’t say anything hurtful to me per se; the problem was how little she said about herself at all. According to Hojjat, failures of reciprocity are a huge theme in broken friendships. That stands to reason—asymmetries of time and effort can continue for only so long before you feel like you’ve lost your dignity. (I myself have been criticized for neglect and laziness, and rightly. It’s shitty.) But there’s a subtler kind of asymmetry that I think is far more devastating, and that is a certain lopsidedness in self-disclosure. This friend and I would have long lunches, dinners, coffees, and I’d be frank, always, about my disappointments and travails. I consider this a form of currency between women: You trade confidences, small glass fragments of yourself.

But not with her. Her life was always fine, swell, just couldn’t be better, thanks. Talking with her was like playing strip poker with someone in a down parka.

Read: How friends become closer

I mentioned this problem to Hojjat. She ventured that perhaps women expect more of their female friends than men do of their male companions, given how intimate our friendships tend to be. In my small, unscientific personal sample of friends, that’s certainly true.

Which brings me to the subject of our Problem Friends. Most of us have them, though we may wish we could tweeze them from our lives. (I’ve had one for decades, and though on some level I’ll always love her, I resolved to be done with her during this pandemic—I’d grown weary of her volatility, her storms of anger.) Unfortunately, what the research says about these friends is depressing: It turns out that time in their company can be worse than time spent with people we actively dislike. That, at any rate, is what the psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad discovered in 2003, when she had the inspired idea to monitor her subjects’ blood pressure while in the presence of friends who generated conflicted feelings. It went up—even more than it did when her subjects were in the presence of people with whom they had “aversive” relationships. Didn’t matter if the conversation was pleasant or not.

You have to wonder whether our bodies have always known this on some level—and whether the pandemic, which for a long while turned every social interaction into a possible health risk, made all of our problem friends easier to give the slip. It’s not just that they’re potentially bad for you. They are bad for you. And—alas—always were.

A brief word here about the scholarship devoted to friendship: I know I’ve been citing it quite a bit, but the truth is, there’s surprisingly little of it, and even less that’s particularly good. A great deal is dime-store wisdom crowned in the laurels of peer review, dispatches from the Empire of the Obvious. (When I first wrote to Elisa about this topic, she replied with an implicit eye roll. “Lemme guess: Long term intimate relationships are good for u!”)

You have perhaps heard, for instance, of Holt-Lunstad’s 2010 meta-analysis showing that a robust social network is as beneficial to an individual’s health as giving up cigarettes. So yes: Relationships really are good for u.

Read: How friendships change in adulthood

But friendship, generally speaking, is the redheaded stepchild of the social sciences. Romantic relationships, marriage, family—that’s where the real grant money is. They’re a wormy mess of ties that bind, whether by blood, sex, or law, which makes them hotter topics in every sense—more seductive, more fraught.

But this lacuna in the literature is also a little odd, given that most Americans have more friends than they do spouses. And one wonders if, in the near future, this gap in quality scholarship may start to fill.

In a book published in the summer of 2020, Big Friendship , Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, the hosts of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend , argued that some friendships are so important that we should consider assigning them the same priority we do our romantic partnerships. They certainly view their own friendship this way; when the two of them went through a rough patch, they went so far as to see a therapist together.

I mentioned this to Laura Carstensen. Her first reaction was one of utter bewilderment: “But … it’s the whole idea that friendships are voluntary that makes them positive.”

Practically everyone who studies friendship says this in some form or another: What makes friendship so fragile is also exactly what makes it so special. You have to continually opt in. That you choose it is what gives it its value.

But as American life reconfigures itself, we may find ourselves rethinking whether our spouses and children are the only ones who deserve our binding commitments. When Sow and Friedman went into counseling together in their 30s, Sow was unmarried, which hardly made her unusual. According to a 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center, nearly a quarter of American adults ages 30 to 49 are single —and single here doesn’t just mean unmarried; it means not dating anyone seriously. Neither woman had (or has) children, either, a fact that could of course change, but if it doesn’t, Sow and Friedman would scarcely be alone. Nearly 20 percent of American adults ages 55 to 64 have no children , and 44 percent of current nonparents ages 18 to 49 say they think it’s unlikely they ever will .

“I have been with family sociologists who think it’s crazy to think that friends could replace family when you realize you’re in real trouble,” Carstensen told me. “  Yeah , they say, they’ll bring you soup when you have the flu, but they’re unlikely to care for you when you have dementia . But we could reach a point where close friends do quit their jobs to care for you when you have dementia.”

Friendship is the rare kind of relationship that remains forever available to us as we age . It’s a bulwark against stasis, a potential source of creativity and renewal in lives that otherwise narrow with time.

“I’ve recently built a whole community of people half my age,” says Esther Perel, 63, the psychotherapist and host of the immensely popular podcast Where Should We Begin? , in which she conducts a one-off couples-therapy session with anonymous clients each episode. “It’s the most important shift in my life, friendship-wise. They’re at my dinner table. I have three friends having babies.” These intergenerational friendships, she told me, are one of the unexpected joys of middle age, giving her access to a new vocabulary, a new culture, a new set of mores—at just the moment when the culture seems to have passed her generation by.

When we spoke, Perel was also preparing for her very first couples-therapy session with two friends, suggesting that Sow and Friedman were onto something. “The pandemic has taught us the importance of mass mutual reliance,” Perel said. “Interdependence has to conquer the lonely, individualistic nature of Americans.” As a native of Belgium, Perel has always found this aspect of American life a little baffling, particularly when she was a new mother. “In my culture, you ask a friend to babysit,” she told me. “Here, first you try to hire someone; then you go and ‘impose.’ And I thought: This is warped. This has got to shift. ”

Might it now? Finally?

Elisa and Rebecca nurtured each other as if they were family—and often in ways their own families did not. When they met, Elisa was a new mother, and her parents were 3,000 miles away. Rebecca became her proxy parent, coaching her through breastfeeding and keeping her company; she even smelled like Elisa’s mom. “I can’t describe the smell, but it’s YOU, and it’s HER; it’s no cosmetic,” Elisa later wrote in The Wellness Letters , adding,

and your birthdays are adjacent and you are very much like her in some deep, meaningful ways, it seems to me. There is no one I can talk to the way I can talk to her, and to you. Her intelligence is vast and curious and childlike and insatiable and transcendent, like yours.

When they met, Rebecca was still married. While Rebecca’s marriage was falling apart, it was Elisa who threw open her doors and gave Rebecca the run of her downstairs floor, providing a refuge where she could think, agonize, crash. “We were sort of in that thing where you’re like, ‘You’re my savior,’ ” Rebecca told me. “Like, you cling to each other, because you’ve found each other.”

So what, ultimately, undid these two spit sisters?

On one level, it appeared to be a significant difference in philosophy. Namely: how they each thought about depression.

Rebecca struggles with major depression. Elisa has had experiences with the black dog too, going through long spells of trying to bring it to heel. But she hates this word, depression , thinks it decanted of all meaning, and in her view, we have a choice about how to respond to it.

R: When I’m really depressed I feel, and therefore am, at a painful remove from “life” … Even as I was aware that I was doing it all the time, this thing called “being a human being” … it was not what I imagined living to feel like. And I have spent years essentially faking it, just reassuring myself that at least from the outside I look like I’m alive … E: Jesus Christ, dude, first thought: you must chill. You must CHILL. This is not particularly empathetic, I’m sorry. I just want to get you down on the floor for a while. I want to get you breathing. I want to get you out of your head and into your hips, into your feet. I want to loosen you up. That is all.

To Elisa, women have been sold a false story about the origins of their misery. Everyone talks about brain chemistry. What about trauma? Screwy families? The birth-control pills she took from the time she was 15, the junk food she gorged on as a kid?

E: THE BODY, dude. All I care about is THE BODY. The mind is a fucking joke … Remind me to tell you about the time they prescribed me Zoloft in college after my brother died. Pills for grief! I am endlessly amused by this now.

But pills for grief—that is, in fact, exactly what Rebecca would argue she needed.

Around and around the two went. The way Elisa saw it, Rebecca was using her depression as an excuse for bad choices, bad behavior. What Rebecca read in Elisa’s emails was a reproach, a failure to grasp her pain. “If there’s no such thing as depression,” she wrote in The Wellness Letters , “what is this duck sitting on my head?”

It’s a painfully familiar dynamic in a friendship: One friend says, Get a grip already . And the other one says, I’m trying. Can’t you see I’m trying? Neither party relishes her role.

Eventually, Rebecca started taking medication. And once she did, she pulled away, vanishing for weeks. Elisa had no idea where she’d gone.

E: Well, our dialogue has turned into a monologue, but I am undaunted. Are you unmoved to write to me because your meds have worked so well that you’re now perfectly functional, to the extent that you need not go searching for ways to narrate/make sense of your internal landscape?

Weirdly, this explanation was not far off. When Rebecca eventually did reply, the exchange did not end well. Elisa accused her of never apologizing, including for this moment. She accused Rebecca of political grandstanding in their most recent correspondence, rather than talking about wellness. But Elisa also confessed that perhaps Rebecca happened to be catching her on a bad day—Elisa’s mother had just phoned, and that call had driven her into a rage.

This last point gave Rebecca an opening to share something she’d clearly been wanting to say for a long time: Elisa was forever comparing her to her mother. But Elisa was also forever complaining about her mother, saying that she hated her mother. Her mother was, variously, “sadistic,” “untrustworthy,” and “a monster.” So finally Rebecca said:

In all the ways you’ve spoken about your mother, I don’t recall you ever describing to me the actual things she’s done, what makes you feel so destroyed by her.

To which Elisa replied that this was exactly the manipulative, hurtful type of gaslighting in which her mother would indulge.

It was at this moment that I, the reader, finally realized: This wasn’t just a fight over differences in philosophy.

If our friends become our substitute families, they pay for the failures of our families of origin. Elisa’s was such a mess—a brother long dead, parents long divorced—that her unconscious efforts to re-create it were always going to be fraught. And on some level, both women knew this. Elisa said it outright. When she first wrote in The Wellness Letters that Rebecca smelled like her mother, Elisa mused:

What’s my point? Something about mothers and children, and the unmothered, and human frailty, and imprinting. Something about friendship, which can and should provide support and understanding and company and a different sort of imprinting.

A different sort of imprinting. That’s what many of us, consciously or not, look for in friendships, isn’t it? And in our marriages too, at least if you believe Freud? Improved versions of those who raised us?

“I have no answers about how to ensure only good relationships,” Elisa concluded in one email to Rebecca. “But I guess practice? Trial and error? Revision?”

That really is the question. How do you ensure them?

Back in the 1980s, the Oxford psychologists Michael Argyle and Monika Henderson wrote a seminal paper titled “The Rules of Friendship.” Its six takeaways are obvious, but what the hell, they’re worth restating: In the most stable friendships, people tend to stand up for each other in each other’s absence; trust and confide in each other; support each other emotionally; offer help if it’s required; try to make each other happy; and keep each other up-to-date on positive life developments.

Read: Arthur C. Brooks on how to make your friendships deeper

It’s that last one where I’m always falling down. Keeping up contact, ideally embodied contact, though even semi-embodied contact—by voice, over the phone—would probably suffice. Only when reading Elisa and Rebecca in atom-splitting meltdown did I realize just how crucial this habit is. The two women had become theoretical to each other, the sum only of their ideas; their friendship had migrated almost exclusively to the page. “The writing took the place of our real-life relationship,” Elisa told me. “I felt like the writing was the friendship.”

In this way, Elisa and Rebecca were creating the conditions of a pandemic before there even was one. Had anyone read The Wellness Letters in 2019, they could have served as a cautionary tale: Our COVID year of lost embodied contact was not good for friendship . According to a September survey by Pew , 38 percent of Americans now say they feel less close to friends they know well.

The problem is that when it comes to friendship, we are ritual-deficient, nearly devoid of rites that force us together. Emily Langan, a Wheaton College professor of communication, argues that we need them. Friendship anniversaries. Regular road trips. Sunday-night phone calls, annual gatherings at the same rental house, whatever it takes. “We’re not in the habit of elevating the practices of friendship ,” she says. “But they should be similar to what we do for other relationships.”

When I consider the people I know with the greatest talent for friendship, I realize that they do just this. They make contact a priority. They jump in their cars. They appear at regular intervals in my inbox. One told me she clicks open her address book every now and then just to check which friends she hasn’t seen in a while—and then immediately makes a date to get together.

Laura Carstensen told me during our chat that good friends are for many people a key source of “unconditional positive regard,” a phrase I keep turning over and over in my mind. (Not hers, I should note—the term was popularized in the 1950s, to describe the ideal therapist-patient relationship. Carstensen had the good sense to repurpose it.) Her observation perfectly echoed something that Benjamin Taylor, the author of the lovely memoir Here We Are , said to me when I asked about his close friendship with Philip Roth . What, I wanted to know, made their relationship work? He thought for so long that I assumed the line had gone dead.

From the May 2020 issue: Benjamin Taylor on Philip Roth’s gift of empathy

“Philip made me feel that my best self was my real self,” he finally said. “I think that’s what happens when friendships succeed. The person is giving back to you the feelings you wish you could give to yourself. And seeing the person you wish to be in the world.”

I’m not the sampler-making sort. But if I were, I’d sew these words onto one.

Perhaps the best book about friendship I’ve read is The Undoing Project , by Michael Lewis. That might be a strange thing to say, because the book is not, on its face, about friendship at all, but about the birth of behavioral economics. Yet at its heart is the story of an exceptionally complicated relationship between two giants of the field. Amos Tversky was a buffalo of charisma and confidence; Daniel Kahneman was a sparrow of anxiety and neuroticism. The early years of their collaboration, spent at Hebrew University in the late 1960s, were giddy and all-consuming, almost like love. But as their fame grew, a rivalry developed between them, with Tversky ultimately emerging as the better-known of the two men. He was the one who got invited to fancy conferences—without Kahneman. He was the one who got the MacArthur genius grant—not Kahneman. When Kahneman told Tversky that Harvard had asked him to join its faculty, Tversky blurted out, “It’s me they want.” (He was at Stanford at the time; Kahneman, the University of British Columbia.)

“I am very much in his shadow in a way that is not representative of our interaction,” Kahneman told the psychiatrist Miles Shore, who interviewed him and Tversky for a project on creative pairs. “It induces a certain strain. There is envy! It’s just disturbing. I hate the feeling of envy.”

Whenever I mentioned to people that I was working on a story about friendship in midlife, questions about envy invariably followed. It’s an irresistible subject, this thing that Socrates called “the ulcer of the soul.” Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, told me that many years ago, he taught a seminar at Yale about the seven deadly sins. “Envy,” he said dryly, “was the one sin students never boasted about.”

He’s right. With the exception of envy, all of the deadly sins can be pleasurable in some way. Rage can be righteous; lust can be thrilling; greed gets you all the good toys. But nothing feels good about envy, nor is there any clear way to slake it. You can work out anger with boxing gloves, sate your gluttony by feasting on a cake, boast your way through cocktail hour, or sleep your way through lunch. But envy—what are you to do with that?

Die of it, as the expression goes. No one ever says they’re dying of pride or sloth.

Yet social science has surprisingly little to say about envy in friendship. For that, you need to consult artists, writers, musicians. Gore Vidal complained, “Every time a friend succeeds, something inside me dies”; Morrissey sang “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful.” Envy is a ubiquitous theme in literature, spidering its way into characters as wide-ranging as Lenù and Lila, in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels , and pretty much every malevolent neurotic ever conjured by Martin Amis (the apotheosis being Richard Tull, the failed novelist and minor critic of The Information , who smacks his son when his rival lands on the best-seller list).

In the spring 2021 issue of The Yale Review , Jean Garnett, an editor at Little, Brown, wrote a terrific essay about envy and identical twinship that feels just as applicable to friendship. My favorite line, bar none: “I can be a very generous sister—maternal, even—as long as I am winning.”

With those 15 words, she exposes an uncomfortable truth. Many of our relationships are predicated on subtle differences in power. Rebalance the scales, and it’s anyone’s guess if our fragile egos survive. Underneath envy, Garnett notes, is the secret wish to shift those weights back in our favor, which really means the shameful wish to destroy what others have. Or as Vidal also (more or less) said: “It is not enough to succeed; a friend must also fail.”

At this point, pretty much everyone I know has been kicked in the head in some way. We’ve all got our satchel of disappointments to lug around.

But I did feel envy fairly acutely when I was younger—especially when it came to my girlfriends’ appearances and self-confidence. One friend in particular filled me with dread every time I introduced her to a boyfriend. She’s a knockout, turns heads everywhere; she both totally knows this and doesn’t have a clue. I have vivid memories of wandering a museum with her one afternoon and watching men silently trail her, finding all dopey manner of excuses to chat her up.

My tendency in such situations is to turn my role into shtick—I’m the wisecracking Daria, the mordant brunette, the one whose qualities will age well.

I hated pretending I was above it all.

What made this situation survivable was that this friend was—and still is—forever telling me how great I look, even though it’s perfectly apparent in any given situation that she’s Prada and I’m the knockoff on the street vendor’s blanket. Whatever. She means it when she tells me I look great. I love her for saying it, and saying it repeatedly.

In recent years, I have had one friend I could have badly envied. He was my office spouse for almost two decades—the other half of a two-headed vaudeville act now a quarter century old. We bounced every story idea off each other, edited each other, took our book leaves at the same time. Then I got a new job and he went off to work on his second book, which he phoned to tell me one day had been selected by … Oprah.

“You’re kidding!” I said. “That’s fucking amazing.”

Which, of course, it was. This wasn’t a lie.

But in the cramped quarters of my ego, crudely bound together with bubble gum and Popsicle sticks, was it all that fucking amazing?

No. It wasn’t. I wanted, briefly, to die.

Here’s the thing: I don’t allow myself too many silly, Walter Mitty–like fantasies of glory. I’m a pessimist by nature, and anyway, fame has never been my endgame in life.

But I did kinda sorta secretly hope to one day be interviewed from Oprah Winfrey’s yoga nook.

That our friendship hummed along in spite of this bolt of fortune and success in his life had absolutely nothing to do with me and everything to do with him, for the simple reason that he continued to be his vulnerable self. (It turns out that lucky, successful people still have problems, just different ones.) It helped that he never lost sight of my own strengths, either, even if I felt inadequate for a while by comparison. One day, while he was busy crushing it, I glumly confessed that I was miserable in my new job. Then go be awesome somewhere else , he said, as if awesomeness were some essential property of mine, how you’d define me if I were a metal or a stone. I think I started to cry.

It helped, too, that my friend genuinely deserved to be on Oprah . (His name is Bob Kolker, by the way; his book is Hidden Valley Road , and everyone should read it, because it is truly a marvel.)

It’s the almost-ness of envy that kills, as Garnett points out in her essay—the fact that it could have or should have been us. She quotes Aristotle’s Rhetoric  : “We envy those who are near us in time, place, age, or reputation … those whose possession of or success in a thing is a reproach to us: these are our neighbors and equals; for it is clear that it is our own fault we have missed the good thing in question.”

And I have no clue what I would have done if Bob hadn’t handled his success with humility and tact. If he’d become monstrously boastful—or, okay, even just a little bit complacent—I honestly think I wouldn’t have been able to cope. Adam Smith noted how essential this restraint is in The Theory of Moral Sentiments . If a suddenly successful person has any judgment, he wrote, that man will be highly attuned to his friends’ envy, “and instead of appearing to be elated with his good fortune, he endeavours, as much as he can, to smother his joy, and keep down that elevation of mind with which his new circumstances naturally inspire him.”

This is, ultimately, what Amos Tversky failed to do with Daniel Kahneman, according to The Undoing Project . Worse, in fact: Tversky refused to address the imbalance in their relationship, which never should have existed in the first place. Kahneman tried, at first, to be philosophical about it. “The spoils of academic success, such as they are—eventually one person gets all of it, or gets a lot of it,” he told Shore, the psychiatrist studying creative pairs. “That’s an unkindness built in. Tversky cannot control this, though I wonder whether he does as much to control it as he should.”

But Kahneman wasn’t wondering, obviously. This was an accusation masquerading as a suspicion. In hindsight, the decisive moment in their friendship—what marked the beginning of the end—came when the two were invited to deliver a couple of lectures at the University of Michigan. At that point, they were working at separate institutions and collaborating far less frequently; the theory they presented that day was one almost entirely of Kahneman’s devising. But the two men still jointly presented it, as was their custom.

After their presentation, Tversky’s old mentor approached them both and asked, with genuine awe, where all those ideas came from. It was the perfect opportunity for Tversky to credit Kahneman—to right the scales, to correct the balance, to pull his friend out from his shadow and briefly into the sun.

Yet Tversky didn’t. “Danny and I don’t talk about these things” was all he said, according to Lewis.

And with that, the reader realizes: Kahneman’s second-class status—in both his own imagination and the public’s—was probably essential to the way Tversky conceived of their partnership. At the very least, it was something Tversky seemed to feel zero need to correct.

Kahneman continued to collaborate with Tversky. But he also took pains to distance himself from this man, with whom he’d once shared a typewriter in a small office in Jerusalem. The ill feelings wouldn’t ease up until Tversky told Kahneman he was dying of cancer in 1996.

So now I’m back to thinking about Nora Ephron’s friends, mourning all those dinners they never had. It’s the dying that does it, always. I started here; I end here (we all end here). It is amazing how the death of someone you love exposes this lie you tell yourself, that there’ll always be time. You can go months or even years without speaking to a dear old friend and feel fine about it, blundering along, living your life. But discover that this same friend is dead, and it’s devastating, even though your day-to-day life hasn’t changed one iota. You’re rudely reminded that this is a capricious, disordered cosmos we live in, one that suddenly has a friend-size hole in it, the air now puckered where this person used to be.

Last spring, an old friend of my friend David died by suicide. David had had no clue his friend was suffering. When David had last seen this man, in September 2020, he’d seemed more or less fine. January 6 had wound him up more than David’s other friends—he’d fulminate volcanically about the insurrection over the phone, practically burying David under mounds of words—but David certainly never interpreted this irritating development as a sign of despair.

But David did notice one curious thing. Before the 2020 election, he had bet this friend $10,000 that Donald Trump would win. David isn’t rich, but he figured the move was the ultimate hedge—if he won, at least he got 10 grand, and if he lost, hey, great, no more Trump. On November 7, when it became official—no more Trump!—David kept waiting for a phone call. It never came. He tried provoking his friend, sending him a check for only $15.99, pointing out that they’d never agreed on a payment schedule.

His friend wrote back a sharp rebuke, saying the bet was serious.

David sent him a check for $10,000.

His friend wordlessly cashed it.

David was stunned. No gloating phone call? Not even a gleeful email, a crowing text? This was a guy who loved winning a good bet.

Nothing. A few months later, he was found dead in a hotel.

The suicide became a kind of reckoning for David, as it would for anyone. Because he’s a well-adjusted, positive sort of fellow, he put his grief to what seemed like constructive use: He wrote an old friend from high school, once his closest friend, the only one who knew exactly how weird their adolescence was. David was blunt with this friend, telling him in his email that a good friend of his had just died by suicide, and there was nothing he could do about it, but he could reach out to those who were still alive, those he’d lost track of, people like him. Would he like to catch up sometime? And reminisce?

David never heard back. Distraught, he contacted someone the two men had in common. It turns out his friend’s life hadn’t worked out the way he’d wanted it to. He didn’t have a partner or kids; his job wasn’t one he was proud of; he lived in a backwater town. Even though David had made it clear he just wanted to talk about the old days, this man, for whatever reason, couldn’t bring himself to pick up the phone.

At which point David was contending with two friendship deaths—one literal, the other metaphorical. “You know what I realized?” he said to me. “At this age, if your romantic life is settled”—and David’s is—“it’s your friends who break your heart. Because they’re who’s left.”

What do you do with friendships that were, and aren’t any longer?

By a certain age, you find the optimal perspective on them, ideally, just as you do with so many of life’s other disappointments. If the heartbreak of midlife is realizing what you’ve lost—that sad inventory of dusty shelves—then the revelation is discovering that you can, with effort, get on with it and start enjoying what you have.

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson made a point of emphasizing this idea in his stages of psychosocial development. The last one, “integrity versus despair,” is all about “the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle and of the people who have become significant to it as something that had to be.”

An awfully tidy formulation, admittedly, and easier said than done. But worth striving for nonetheless.

Elisa recently wrote to me that what she misses about Rebecca is “the third thing that came from the two of us. the alchemy of our minds and hearts and (dare i say?) souls in conversation. what she brought out in me and what i brought out in her, and how those things don’t exist without our relationship.”

From the July/August 2014 issue: The power of creative pairs

And maybe this is what many creative partnerships look like—volatile, thrilling, supercharged. Some can’t withstand the intensity, and self-destruct. It’s what happened to Kahneman and Tversky. It’s famously what happens to many bands before they dissolve. It’s what happened to Elisa and Rebecca.

Elisa hopes to now make art of that third thing. To write about it. Rebecca remains close in her mind, if far away in real life.

Of course, as Elisa points out (with a hat-tip to Audre Lorde), all deep friendships generate something outside of themselves, some special and totally other third thing. Whether that thing can be sustained over time becomes the question.

The more hours you’ve put into this chaotic business of living, the more you crave a quieter, more nurturing third thing, I think. This needn’t mean dull. The friends I have now, who’ve come all this distance, who are part of my aging plan, include all kinds of joyous goofballs and originals. There’s loads of open country between enervation and intoxication. It’s just a matter of identifying where to pitch the tent. Finding that just-right patch of ground, you might even say, is half the trick to growing old.

This article appears in the March 2022 print edition with the headline “It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

“I’m Losing Friends” — SOLVED

“Why am I losing friends? Is it normal to lose friends as you get older, or is something actually wrong with me? Why do all my friendships end? I feel so frustrated over this! Also, how do I get over losing a friend when it happens?”

Throughout my life, I’ve both made friends and lost friends, and sometimes I’ve been obsessing about if it was something I did.

This article will explore some of the common reasons friendships end . We will go over how to work through this problem and also show how to be okay with losing friends.

Reasons for losing friends

Life situation where it’s common to lose friends, underlying reasons for losing friends.

• Common questions

Let’s start by covering common reasons for losing friends:

1. Doing something that upsets your friends

Sometimes we do things that are off-putting to friends without even thinking about it. It could be things like…

• Not being considerate enough about your friends’ emotions
• Being too self-centered
• Being too negative
• Using friends as therapists
• Getting stuck in small talk and not forming close friendships

It can be hard to know if you are doing something wrong. If it’s a pattern in your life that people aren’t interested in keeping in touch, it can help to try to identify if you make any of these mistakes.

You can read more in our guide “ Why can’t I keep friends ”.

2. Having lost a natural venue to keep in touch

If you know most of your friends through school or work, you risk losing touch with them when you change jobs or graduate, since the natural venue to meet up is gone. Now, you suddenly need to make an effort if you want to keep in touch.

You can try reaching out to a small group that you know went along well and ask if they want to meet up together. Even better is to create a new venue to meet up:

• Doing a team sport together every weekend
• Making it a habit to meet up a specific day every week for after-work
• Developing a hobby together with people who share your interests

3. Not reaching out to old friends

Sometimes we’re so worried about coming off as being needy or try-hard that we don’t reach out to old friends. A good rule of thumb is to reach out to old friends at least twice over the course of a year to see if they want to meet up.

Don’t just write “We should meet up one day”. Be specific. “I’d love to catch up. Do you want to go for drinks next week?”

People are busy and declining an invitation doesn’t automatically mean that they don’t want to hang out. But if you ask them twice and they decline both times, think about if there’s something you do that might put them off.

4. Going through significant life transitions

Every decade, we go through major life changes. For example, in your 20s, you may start living on your own and establishing your career. In your 30s, you might be having or raising a family. It can be even more of a challenge to keep or make new friends in your 40s , as you may be plugging away at your career, raising kids, and even taking care of your parents. In your 50s, you might be sending kids off to college and thinking about retirement.

Of course, everyone is different, and nothing follows a prescribed plan. But if you intend to keep and retain friends throughout your entire life, you might be setting yourself up for disappointment.

• Try to accept your fear of losing friends: Acceptance is an important part of working through any fear. It’s okay to accept that some friendships might not last forever. Instead of beating yourself up, ask yourself this, what did I learn from this friendship? How did I grow? How can I look back on this relationship fondly?
• Never stop trying to make new friends: No matter how much you love your current friends, don’t shut down the opportunity to make more meaningful connections. Say yes to social invitations. Engage in small talk with strangers. Ask new people if they want to have coffee or lunch.

Our guide on how to make friends can help.

5. Being really busy

Unfortunately, losing touch with friends is easy when life gets busy. In fact, you may not even recognize the change until several weeks or months.

Good friendships require maintenance and effort. If you’re always too busy to spend time with others, you might not be putting in the full work.

Be proactive when it comes to your friends:

• Set reminders on your phone to text or call certain friends. This may seem inauthentic, but if you’re really busy, you may need this reminder.
• Plan a monthly lunch or dinner and put it on the calendar. Try to arrange this meeting well in advance. That way, everyone can rearrange their schedules accordingly.

6. People end up in relationships

Losing friends to relationships is extremely common. When people enter relationships, all sorts of changes happen. They may become infatuated with their new partner and want to spend every moment with them. They might also want to spend more time getting to know their friends. Finally, they may no longer have any interest in “single-person activities” like going to bars.

• Give them some space: New relationships are exciting. Don’t confront your friend about their changes right away- they’re likely to get defensive or upset with you.
• Get to know their partner: This can be one of the best ways to show effort in your friendship. People love it when their friends get along with their partners. It makes planning events so much easier.
• Share your feelings: After some time has passed (at least a few months), it’s okay to tell your friend that you miss them! Don’t accuse or blame them for drifting away. Instead, consider reaching out with a friendly text like, hey, it’s been a while! I miss you. Can we plan a night to have dinner together and catch up?

7. Money issues

If you think money is complicated, you’re not alone. According to the American Psychological Association, money is the top cause of stress for Americans. [ 1 ]

When it comes to friendships, money can be even more complicated. For example, maybe a friend asks to borrow cash, but they don’t pay you back. Maybe they always expect you to pay when you two go out together. Maybe you’re on an extremely tight budget, but your friends don’t seem to understand this struggle.

It’s painful to think about losing a friend over money. Here are some suggestions to try:

• Don’t assume you know your friend’s financial situation: You never really know the full picture. Just because they make a lot of money doesn’t mean they have a lot of money and vice versa. If they say they can’t afford something, don’t challenge it.
• Suggest cheap or free alternatives: If money is tight, ask your friends if they’re willing to be flexible. For example, instead of going out to dinner, see if you can have a potluck.
• Stop loaning money: This one may be difficult, but it’s an important rule. Try to avoid loaning friends money, even if they promise to pay you back. This can cause a few problems. First, they might not pay you back, and you may resent seeing them spend money on other things. Or, they may pay you back, but then ask you again. If you want to give a friend money, it should be a gift.

In high school

High schools can be cliquey. Once people find their group, they may only want to spend time with others in that group. If you don’t belong to a clique, you may even feel like an outcast.

• Join a club or hobby: It’s easier to connect with like-minded people who share a mutual interest. Even if it feels scary, try to attend 1-2 meetings to see if it’s a good fit. When you talk to other members, try to focus on asking them questions about themselves. The specific questions don’t matter as much- you just want to get people talking, as it increases the chance of having a conversation. What got you into playing the guitar? Who’s your math teacher? What kinds of events do you guys do?
• Focus on becoming more outgoing with others: Shy people can have a hard time making friends in high school. We cover how to be more outgoing in our extensive guide.

After college

Unfortunately, you might lose friends after graduating from college. This shift may seem so unexpected. College friendships can feel so tight-knit that you don’t anticipate ever drifting apart. But after college, people may move away, settle into demanding careers, and enter serious relationships.

• Keep a group chat going: It’s one of the easiest ways to stay in touch with people, no matter how busy everyone gets.
• Send birthday cards: Most people send a birthday wish  or Facebook message. But a personalized card feels so much more personal.

After marriage

Getting married is exciting, but it can also affect your friendships. You will probably want to spend most of your free time with your spouse. Your friends may be resentful of your shift in priorities. If they don’t like your spouse (or your spouse doesn’t like them), it can add more problems.

• Hang out with other couples: This can be good for your marriage and for your friendships. If your friends are in relationships, try to schedule couples dates. This gives your spouse a chance to get to know other people and vice versa.
• Set time to spend time with friends alone: You shouldn’t spend all your free time with your spouse. If you do, your friends will probably stop inviting you out. Only you can find this balance, but make sure that you’re seeing friends regularly.

After a divorce

Unfortunately, approximately 40-50% of all marriages end in divorce. [ 2 ] Going through a divorce can be incredibly painful, and you may lose friends during the process. That’s because friends may feel like they have to choose between the spouses.

This is especially true if you both had mutual friends or if the divorce was extremely messy. Some friends may side with your ex. Others may also feel threatened by your divorce- it might worry them that their marriage is headed in the wrong direction.

• Remember that your friends might feel awkward, confused, or even upset: There isn’t a specific etiquette for how friends should cope when other friends get divorced. They may have their own personal feelings about the situation. For example, they might feel equally close to both you and your ex, and they’re not sure how to handle the change.
• Try to accept when friends cut you off for your ex: Yes, it’s painful. But, whether you like it or not, they picked your ex for a reason. In some cases, an ex-partner may use a mutual friend to solicit information about your whereabouts. If you don’t want to deal with this drama, it’s best to cut your losses.
• Take friends up on their offers to support you: People like when you give them specific directions. If someone says, let me know if you need anything, let them know if and when you need something! It can be as simple as saying something like, I could really use having a night out. What are you doing this Friday?

After having a baby

Having a baby changes every part of your life. It’s one of the most exciting and stressful times you’ll ever experience. While some friends might be excited about your news, many friendships dramatically shift once the baby arrives.

This can happen for a few reasons. First, your priorities fundamentally change. For example, you may no longer have time for happy hours or spontaneous weekend trips. If a friend calls and needs support, you may have to hang up once the baby starts crying.

Your parent friends will probably understand these changes, but your friends without children may have a harder time.

• Continue reaching out to your friends: It’s normal for new parents to spend all their time focused on the baby. But try to make an effort to send the occasional text to your friend. And don’t just send baby photos! Even if your friends are excited about the baby, it shouldn’t be all you talk about- that can get old quickly!
• Invite people over to spend time with you and your baby: It’s no secret that it can be incredibly hard to leave the house with a baby. Instead, ask your friends if they’re willing to come over, order takeout, and spend time with you.
• Make parent friends: Apps like Peanut or MeetUp can help connect with your new parents in the area. These friends will understand the perils of sleep deprivation and questionable baby poop!

After moving to a new city

In psychology, the ‘proximity effect’ refers to the amount of time people spend together. In other words, the more you hang out with someone, the closer you tend to feel. [ 3 ]

This effect may explain why young kids can make friends easily at school. They spend hours with them in the classroom every morning! It also explains why people tend to date other locals or become friends with their coworkers.

Moving disrupts this effect. You’re no longer spending as much time together, and you suddenly might feel like you have less in common.

• Schedule routine video chats: At least once a month, make a plan to Facetime or Skype. The video effect is the closest effect to seeing each other in real life.
• Make plans to see each other: Even though traveling can be time-consuming and expensive, friendships require consistent effort. If you really value spending time together, try to schedule a time to hang out at least every few months.
• Make new friends: Even if you still feel close to people back home, you need local connections. Check out our guide on how to make friends in a new city .

Having a mental illness

If you struggle with a condition like anxiety, depression, ADHD, bipolar disorder, or Aspergers, maintaining friendships can be difficult. Some symptoms naturally affect your self-esteem and socialization.

• Know your triggers: Certain people, places, or situations may trigger distressing symptoms. Consider keeping a journal to write down when you feel triggered. This insight will help you understand certain patterns better.
• Get professional help: Therapy and medication can help you manage your mental illness. If you’re struggling with your condition, consider reaching out to the professionals.
• Use healthy coping skills: Stress tends to make mental illnesses even worse. Get in the habit of managing your stress regularly. You may want to try an activity like meditation, journaling, or exercise.

We recommend BetterHelp for online therapy, since they offer unlimited messaging and a weekly session, and are cheaper than going to a therapist's office.

Their plans start at $64 per week. If you use this link, you get 20% off your first month at BetterHelp + a $50 coupon valid for any SocialSelf course: Click here to learn more about BetterHelp .

(To receive your $50 SocialSelf coupon, sign up with our link. Then, email BetterHelp’s order confirmation to us to receive your personal code. You can use this code for any of our courses.)

Quitting drinking or drugs

Sobriety is one of the best decisions you can make for your health. But it can impact your friendships, and you may lose friends during the recovery process.

When you quit drinking or using drugs, a few things might happen. You may realize that you only spend time with people who also party. You may also realize that you don’t know how to connect with people when you’re sober. These reactions are normal.

• Find other sober friends: Go to recovery meetings. There are 12-Step Groups in nearly every city in the country. These groups are free, and they are a great way to meet other sober people.
• Check out sober apps: Many apps support sober friendships. For example, Sober Grid offers a free sober community.
• Set boundaries with friends who still drink or use drugs: It’s okay to put some distance between you and your former friends. In fact, it may be necessary to take that step to protect your sobriety. Think about what limits you want to set. You may decide that you no longer wish to be friends with some of those people, and that’s completely reasonable.

Lack of socialization

To make and keep friends, you need to socialize with other people consistently. Good relationships require consistent effort. It’s not enough to just hang out once or twice.

Think about the reasons why you struggle to socialize. Do you feel like you hate being around people ? Do you get anxious that people are judging you negatively? Are you afraid of rejection?

These fears are normal, and almost everyone has them. But you need to actively work through these fears if you want to stop losing friends. It can be helpful to remember that:

• Small changes can amount to big changes. Think about small ways you can socialize throughout the day. For example, can you ask your coworker if they want to have lunch together? Can you text an old friend and ask how they’ve been?
• Socialization and feeling comfortable around others takes practice. It doesn’t come naturally for everyone, but you can learn how to stop feeling uncomfortable around people .

Common questions about losing friends

Is it normal to lose friends.

Yes. As you grow and change, your priorities evolve. Sometimes, we outgrow people. Or, you lose touch because you get busy with other things. Losing friends isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes it’s just a natural part of being human.

How to be okay with losing friends

Remind yourself that friendships don’t need to last forever to be special. Tell yourself that it’s important to feel good about the people you associate yourself with. If you continue feeling bad every time you hang out with someone, it’s a sign that you need change.

How do I get over losing a friend?

• Bethune, S. (2015). Money stress weighs on Americans’ health . Apa.org .
• (2020). Marriage and Divorce . Apa.org .
• (2012). Close Proximity and Relationships .  Psu.Edu .

Nicole Arzt, M.S., L.M.F.T. is a licensed marriage and family therapist. She provides therapeutic services for individuals, couples, and families. Nicole received her master’s of science degree from California State University, Long Beach in 2014.

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I thought we would be friends forever. How I finally accepted it was over

We have all heard the math about healing after a romantic breakup. Half the length of the relationship should mend you right up, they say. If you were together for four years, you need to be ready to hurt for about two. Only two years of togetherness? No worries, then: Twelve months will fly by. But what about the math for a broken friendship? Does the “total time together, divided by two” equation still hold true? Is there math for that kind of loss? Can you heal by acquiring a new friend, much in the way a new love can often heal you? 

My friendships have been my haven — where I can go when nothing feels right in the world. I can say things to friends I cannot say to anyone else. Because the very fabric of friendship feels unbreakable, I’ve never worried if I’m going to mess up and suddenly end up on the outskirts of their affection.

On the contrary, I have expected to lose romantic loves. Read a book, watch a movie — romantic love is not built to last. It makes sense, right? What kind of relationship can flourish under that kind of intense pressure? Romantic relationships tend to confine us. Fit here, do this, be this, make me feel this. Friendship accepts you as you are. Friendship — oh, glorious friendship — with its giant, flexible confines of acceptance.

When I lost a friend I’d had for 20 years, I was devastated. It was unlike the loss from any romantic breakup I have known. Our love wasn’t chemical, or nonsensical — our love was based on true connection and uncomplicated feelings. Losing her was one of the most intense griefs I have ever been through.

I met her when I went to college. She was one of the first relationships I had that was completely severed from my home. For the first time, I was allowed to create a family away from the family of my origin. Gone were the ideas that you had to tolerate those born around you. This was freedom. The freedom to create camaraderie — the freedom to essentially create a new family. This chosen family took on a role my family members had never filled — the chosen ones, I thought, could not leave me. How could they? No one made them choose me. They chose me, headfirst, knowing me. I thought friendship was the safest kind of relationship I had ever found, flat out. I was right. And I was wrong, too.

She looked like Lea Michele and was the funniest person I had ever encountered. We became roommates and spent every day and night together. We played games and ate snacks and attended parties and laughed. She often made me laugh so hard it hurt. She was fashionable and had the prettiest brown eyes on this planet. They sparkled like they were filled with tiny crystals. Our friendship wasn’t perfect, but that’s the thing about friendship — it doesn’t need to be.

Our friendship wasn’t perfect, but that’s the thing about friendship — it doesn’t need to be.

We remained friends after college and ended up in the same place: Chicago. We no longer lived together, but the rhythm of our friendship remained. Weekday evenings, I’d leave the office where I worked and walk 10 minutes to wait for her to finish her shift at a department store downtown. I’d peer into the glass, past the mirrors and shiny products, and wait for her to look over and spot me — then I’d perform an impromptu jig, hoping to make her giggle. On weekends, we’d bike from neighborhood to neighborhood, eating everything the city had to offer.

For the first three to four years after our breakup, I lived the loss of her as if it were a death. Grief caught me at odd times, and at all times. She was fused into so many parts of my life and memories that I could barely get through one day without her popping into my mind. Eventually, I got rid of everything in my house that reminded me of her — everything. Including an amazing sweatshirt that she’d given me one day. I looked good in it and I loved it. But every time I put it on, the only thing I could hear in my head was: People can stop loving you whenever they want to. Which is true. But it’s not a super cozy feeling, and sweatshirts are designed to be cozy. Of course people can stop loving you. But that’s not something we need to be thinking about all the time. So one day, I packed up the sweatshirt and dropped it off at Goodwill.

It was only recently that I came to understand the truth of how and why our friendship ended. It wasn’t that she uninvited me to stay at her home a day before I flew across the country with my husband and newly 1-year-old son. It wasn’t that I ended up forgoing the visit to her entirely. It was that there was a crucial moment in time in which neither of us had the ability to make each other understand what was happening inside ourselves; neither of us knew how to give that vulnerability to the other person without fear of hurting them. I can only ruminate on why I think she asked us not to come to her living space. She said it was about there not being ample space, but I think more was going on. I was too shocked and hurt to ask if there was something deeper happening. And instead of being sincere about my hurt, and about our discomfort with staying elsewhere, I canceled. In the absence of deep and brutal honesty, we were left with the only thing that can be substituted for them — our only choice was to abandon.

It’s been six years now, and I finally feel differently. Until now, it was painful to merely think of her existence. I had such a hard time understanding she could be in this world and not want me in hers. But starting in year five, I began to finally reach something like acceptance. My shock began to subside. I no longer cannot believe we are not friends. I know it now, the way I know about other disappearances. My mother died a few years ago. As it turns out, people often leave — for myriad reasons — no matter how surely we believe in the permanence of their presence.

My longing for her has subsided finally, too. This past weekend, I walked past the door in downtown Chicago where I used to wait for her at the end of our workdays. I took a picture on my phone. I took four, actually. Snow was lightly falling in the night air. I tried to capture how it sparkled in the street lights. I took a couple slightly different angles that I thought might urge her to remember how valuable our friendship was — how valuable I was.  

For the first time in six years, I felt grateful for the friendship we had had, instead of resentful that we no longer have it.

But I didn’t send them. Instead, I went back through the photos on my phone, alone in the dark at home, and remembered how much I had loved her. How much fun we once had. For the first time in six years, I felt grateful for the friendship we had had, instead of resentful that we no longer have it. I sat there, composing versions in my head of the most perfect text message I could send to tell her all of this. And then I stopped composing, and I deleted all of the photos but one. 

Kelly Green is a writer in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is often cold.

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Home — Application Essay — Liberal Arts Schools — About Losing a Friend: Overcoming the Loss of My Best Friend

About Losing a Friend: Overcoming the Loss of My Best Friend

• University: North Carolina State University

About this sample

Words: 534 |

Published: Dec 27, 2022

Words: 534 | Pages: 1 | 3 min read

When my best friend broke the devastating news to me that she had a brain tumor, she was the one comforting me instead of the other way around. For the longest time, I was in denial, unable to fathom the thought of losing a friend I trusted with my life. Once the reality finally hit me, I was overwhelmed with anger and frustration, directing it at everything and everyone, even questioning God. I withdrew from everyone, unable to cope with the looming possibility of losing my dearest friend in the entire world.

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I will admit I was a little selfish and self-center in the beginning; instead of being there for her I was wallowing in self-pity. Try as I might, I will never be able to comprehend the pain and fear she must have felt. The concept of death at such a young age is hard to grasp, even for someone as mature as her; she struggled to put on a brave face for her family and friends.

At least with me, she could drop her brave façade and be vulnerable. The whole entire situation brought us even closer than before if that was even possible. The six months before she passed away felt like a gigantic, never-ending roller coaster ride. I spent every waking minute I had left with her, doing all the things we normally do and beyond. I would sleep over at her house, and we would stay up late quietly conversing about everything and nothing; it usually ends with the both of us bawling our eyes out, a cathartic experience.

When she finally passed away, I was devastated, to say the least; it did not feel right not having her by my side. I reverted to be the bitter, spiteful, and angry teen; I had no tears left so I resorted to the one thing I had in abundance: anger. Consequently, my middle school year was a rough period for me, I was in in school and in life in general.

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People always say that time heals all wounds, I did not understand what they were saying until now. As I spend more time reflecting on my past, I can see how much I have changed since she passed away. I am not the same angry little teenager anymore: I realized that the best way to honor her is to make something out of my life and be successful. When I transition to high school, I vowed to stop mourning and instead find a way to make her proud. She always loved learning so whenever I feel like giving up, I would think of her and I would have power through. She was my main motivator, always encouraging me to be the best and even now I strive to be better for her. Not only am I living for me, I must live for her too. To succeed in life, I feel like college is an important step to take. Moreover, I will do everything in my power to be a success story, just so that when I can see her again I can tell her that I lived my life to the fullest and found success.

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What I learnt when I lost a friendship

• 23 March 2021

Author: Hannah, 20

Topics mentioned:  friends , problems at school , loneliness

About: Losing a friendship can be tough, but you don't have to go through it alone. Hannah shares what she learnt when a friendship ended for her.

As we grow and develop, it’s natural for us to change, and that can also be the same with our friends.

As a young person, friendship is everything. Fitting in seems like the most important thing and the thought of losing a friendship can seem world-ending.

As we grow and develop, it’s natural for us to change, and that can also be the same with our friends. For many of us, our teenage years are stressful times; not only do we face pressure from our peers, social media, our parents, exams, school, our future and society’s expectations, but we are also trying to find our feet in life. With all this additional pressure relationships can become strained, and this is especially so with young people.

The end of a friendship

For me the pressure of year 11 was the catalyst that broke my last friendship. During the end of year 11 I tried fitting in with other girls but they were never very nice and kept leaving me. That feeling of being completely alone, like I wasn’t good enough for anyone and no one wanted me, echoed feelings I had in my wider life and my mental health seemed to spiral.

At the time, everything seemed too much and like I was drowning. Looking back, I wish I could tell myself it wasn’t worth the sleepless nights and self-destruction. I wish I would have spoken to my school, spoken to my mum, reached out and asked for support. Sitting alone in the corner of the library and refusing to go to school wasn’t the answer. Self-destructing and taking it out on myself only hurt me.

That feeling of being completely alone, like I wasn’t good enough for anyone and no one wanted me, echoed feelings I had in my wider life.

It is so hard as at the time you can’t see the wood for the trees, as the saying goes. It seems all-consuming and like your life is over. When I lost this friendship, I began to hear rumours about me, which really hurt. Unfortunately, it isn’t always easy for people to realise that as we grow and develop, we change and that’s okay. Sadly, the aftermath is often worse than the break-up. I didn’t handle it well.

What I wish I'd known

Looking back there is so much I wish I had done. I wish I had understood that school is not the only chance of making friends and that there would be other opportunities to make friends. Friendships change and people grow apart and that is okay – especially when you are young and growing and finding out about yourself and what you like and what you want to be. You will meet and be friends with people who later on won’t be people you want to spend time with, and the same will apply to yourself - that’s natural.

I wish I had understood that school is not the only chance of making friends and that there would be other opportunities to make friends.

It can help to accept that some friendships won’t last. But it is still so important to have support with the loss of a friendship. First of all, tell someone you trust and explain how you would like them to support you. You can’t force a friendship and if someone doesn’t want to be your friend you can’t make them, however speaking about it to someone can be helpful to get an independent opinion. Sometimes there isn’t a clear answer and nobody is to blame, and you just want someone to sit in the rubbish with you. And that’s okay – you don’t have to muddle on alone.

The friends you meet in school can seem like the most important people ever and you may feel like they’ll be your friends for life. Although for some that is the case, it won’t be for everyone. Many people make life-long friends in other places like college, sixth form, university, at work or in other areas of life.

Focussing on understanding and liking yourself, and being happy with who you are, is such a positive thing to do for yourself. After all, how can we expect people to like us if we don’t even like ourselves? So if you’re struggling with the loss of a friendship, focus on learning to love yourself, spend time on self-care and finding yourself. As clichéd as it may be, finding yourself and being happy in your own skin is so important.

If you’re struggling with the loss of a friendship, focus on learning to love yourself, spend time on self-care and finding yourself.

Losing a friend can be devastating, but please remember that a fresh start can sometimes be the making of a new beginning. A new friendship could be just around the corner; you just have to be willing to have a look.

More information and advice

We have tips and advice to help you find the support you need. Take a look at our guides.

Coping with life

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Read more blogs from young people.

How I learnt to set boundaries with a friend for my mental health

Tips for talking to your friends about your mental health

How to cope with the loss of a friendship

Where to get help.

However you're feeling, there are people who can help you if you are struggling. Here are some services that can support you.

If you’re under 19 you can confidentially call, chat online or email about any problem big or small.

Sign up for a free Childline locker (real name or email address not needed) to use their  free 1-2-1 counsellor chat and email support service.

Can provide a BSL interpreter if you are deaf or hearing-impaired.

Hosts online message boards where you can share your experiences, have fun and get support from other young people in similar situations.

Free, short-term online counselling for young people aged 25 or under. Their website also provides lots of information and advice about mental health and wellbeing. 

Email support is available via their online contact form .

They have a free 1-2-1 webchat service available during opening hours.

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Essays About Best Friends: 5 Essay Examples and 7 Prompts

If you’re writing an essay and want to put your best friend in the spotlight, check out these essay examples on essays about best friends. 

Best friends are those with whom we have formed a deep and unique bond. What makes them remarkably special is that we chose them unlike with family. For this, some even consider their best friends to be extensions of themselves. 

We all trust our best friends wholeheartedly; that’s why they are the best people to confide in. And many of the lasting memories in our lives are those that we create with them. These memories could be filled with waves of boisterous laughter or even the most piercing pain when your friendship is tested.

Read on and find essay examples and prompts that could motivate you to write about best friends.

5 Essay Examples

1. how friendships change in adulthood by julie beck, 2. diamonds are not this girl’s best friend by courtney carver, 3. how to tell your best friend you’re in love with them – by those who have taken the plunge by sirin kale, 4. my best friend died: a real-life guide to coping by gabrielle applebury, 5. is it normal to not have a best friend by viktor sander, 7 helpful writing prompts on essays about best friends, 1. describe your best friend, 2. hanging out with your best friend , 3. long distance friendship, 4. cutting off toxic best friends, 5. falling in love with your best friend, 6. famous literary friendships, 7. a dog is a man’s best friend.

“Hanging out with a set of lifelong best friends can be annoying, because the years of inside jokes and references often make their communication unintelligible to outsiders. But this sort of shared language is part of what makes friendships last.”

The above essay delves into the evolution of friendship throughout the different stages of our lives, from childhood and teen years to family life and retirement. While we have all deferred a meetup with friends several times to attend to family and work, many people still treat their friendship as stable and continuous, even in long lapses in communication. 

You might also find these essays about camping trips helpful.

“My best friend is a magical, rooftop sunrise. My best friend is the ocean. My best friend is a hike in the mountains. My best friend is a peaceful afternoon. My best friend is a really good book. My best friend is laughter. My best friend is seeing the world. My best friend is time with people I love.”

This essay takes on a broader definition of a “best friend,” deriving from Marilyn Monroe’s famous quote: “Diamond are a girl’s best friend.” From having excessive material wants for every occasion, the author realizes that the greatest “friends” in life are not material things but the simple joys that nature and love can bring.

“It was supposed to go the way things do in the movies. Nora would tell her best friend that she loved him, he would feel the same way and then they would kiss – preferably in the rain. So when the 30-year-old arts manager declared her love for her best friend when they were still teenagers, she expected a happy ending.”

Check out these essays about beauty .

The essay by Srirn Kale treats its readers to compelling stories of best friends ending up in marriage and those parting ways because of unrequited love. But, before taking the bold step of declaring your love for your best friend, a relationship guru advises lovers first to read the signs that signal any reciprocity of these deep feelings. 

“Losing a best friend may be one of the most difficult and heartbreaking experiences you have in your lifetime. If you aren’t sure how to process that your best friend died, know that there are many healthy options when it comes to coping with this type of loss.”

Coping with losing a best friend could lead to depression or even suicidal thoughts, especially if your best friend means the world to you. Some coping tips include journaling your grieving process to understand your emotions and confusion better and doing things that can relive your best friend’s memories. 

“If you are happy with the friends you currently have, there’s no need to try making a best friend for the sake of it. You might have friends but no best friend; that’s perfectly OK. It’s not necessary to have a BFF.” 

Not everyone has a best friend. Some would find this fact hard to believe, but a YouGov survey has shown that 1 in 5 of the US population claims to have no close friends. The essay, therefore, explores the reasons for this friendlessness and gives tips on building a bond with potential best friends, starting with your existing circle of acquaintances.

Check out our top writing prompts to help you celebrate and write about best friends.

Begin this essay by describing what your best friend looks like and what traits you like most about them. Then, given these qualities, would you consider your best friend a role model? Your essay can also answer how similar you and your best friend are and what things you both agree on. But if you have more differences than similarities, write how you deal with them or put them aside.

In this essay, describe your favorite ways to hang out with your best friend. What do you like doing together? Describe what a day spent with your best friend looks like and which part you like most about your dates. If your conversations draw your mutual admiration for each other, then talk about what topics make you talk for hours on end and their perspectives on things that you find fascinating.

Do different time zones make friends grow apart? Or does distance make the heart grow fonder? First, interview two to three people whose best friends moved to a different country or city. Next, learn how frequently they communicate with each other. Finally, compile these stories and make a smooth transition to each one such that the structure highlights the challenges of long-distance friendships and how each set of friends gets by. 

Discarding best friends is a hard decision. But it is also brave if you feel they are dragging you down. For this prompt, you can pose a list of questions readers can ask themselves to grasp the situation better. For example, is your friend doing you more harm than good? Have you set boundaries that they find hard to respect? Then, explain how reflecting on each question can help one determine when it is time to cut some ties loose.

Falling in love with your best friend can only end in two scenarios: a happy ever after or an end of a beautiful relationship. Expanding on our essay prompt above, list down more tips to know when it is best to confront your best friend about your feelings or work hard to quash your emotions for the continuity of the relationship.

Pick out best friends from novels that formed friendships that touched you the most. They could be Harry, Ron, Hermoine of Harry Potter, Frodo, Sam of the Lord Of The Rings, or even Sherlock and Watson From The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes. First, describe what it is in their friendship that you find most riveting. Then, narrate events that served as the biggest tests to their friendships and how they conquered these challenges. 

What about dogs that some people find more lovable than others? Answer this in your essay by outlining the traits that make a dog the ideal best friend. For one, their loyalty makes us confident that they will not betray us. If you have a dog, write about the qualities that make your dog a reliable and fun companion. Then, narrate events when your dog proved to be your best friend. 

If you’re still stuck, check out our general resource of essay writing topics . 

If you want to ensure that your thoughts flow smoothly in your essay, check out our guide packed full of transition words for essays .

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

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Washington Square News

What Does It Feel Like To Lose a Best Friend?

What does it feel like to lose a best friend? 

One you thought you couldn’t possibly lose. The best friend who managed to stand the test of time, who was constant even as everyone else walked in and out of your life. The kind of best friend you were proud of having by your side for so long despite everything you’d gone through, because you went through it together. It didn’t matter how much you changed or outgrew your friends at home; they just seemed like they’d always be in your life no matter what. 

A best friend who didn’t even have the same interests as you. They were almost your opposite in a way, at least in every way noticeable to the people around you. But you didn’t need them to like the same things you liked. To listen to the same music you did or hate contact sports with the same burning passion. It wasn’t a deal breaker that they absolutely refused to watch “The Good Place,” despite the fact you had just binge-watched it for days. You didn’t need them to do those things because you had other friends for that. No, this friend — your best friend — just knew you in a way you couldn’t possibly know yourself. You had unspoken rules that no one understood. They knew how to give you tough love and advice without ever attacking you. And when you needed each other you were there, even if it just meant listening to them sob on the phone for hours. Their presence was comforting in a way you couldn’t explain even if you tried. Like you had spent the whole day thrashing against the waves and could finally backfloat to the shore.  

What does it feel like to lose a best friend?

It feels like being ripped apart and not into perfect halves. Like you don’t know who you are without them. It feels like a void eating at you when you least expect it. When you break down in the middle of making plans to go skating, because they were the one who held your hand as you clung to the rink. You trusted them to not let you fall, even though you could already see them slipping on the ice. It’s the unfinished plans and promises; did they ever end up confronting their ex like they said they would?  It’s this sinking feeling in your chest every time you realize they’re not coming back. Every time you realize this was for the best, but just wish you could tell them you finally got that internship you had spent months dreaming about.  It’s the double take you do and the weird mix of apprehension and excitement you feel when you think that random person walking down the street is them. You still haven’t decided yet what you’d do if you ever bumped into them again. Because a hug would feel too fake and ignoring them would immediately fill you with regret. It’s the need to know if they’re okay, but realizing it’s not your place anymore to ask. It’s that strange warmth you feel every time you think about them, quickly replaced with a sense of loss, and then warmth again as you find yourself wishing them the best. 

It’s the disbelief at how things could ever get that bad. The nights you play the blame game and kick yourself for letting it get so toxic. For not realizing sooner that the snowball had started running downhill, and once you did it had already gotten so big everything was crushed in its path. It’s the constant questions. Do they still think about you in those moments when everything’s still and there’s nothing left to distract yourself with? Do they miss hearing you laugh? Do they find themselves opening the chat, only to realize there’s nothing left to say? Maybe they watch your face pop up when you’re online and watch it go back to ‘last active.’ Maybe they’re reading that last conversation and wondering if they had just said this differently or sucked up their pride in this one moment, maybe everything wouldn’t have imploded. Maybe they’re constantly wishing for closure, but they’ve realized that nothing will ever be closure. They’re all ‘maybes’ for them, but they aren’t for me. 

Maybe losing your best friend feels like the tears running down your face as you type this. Maybe these tears contain the unspoken rules you had, the silent hugs and the now tainted, yet wistful memories you share. Maybe losing your best friend feels like knowing this is your way of letting go. 

A version of this article appeared in the Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2020, e-print edition. Email Vaishnavi Naidu at [email protected] .

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J M • Jan 6, 2021 at 10:27 pm

Thank you for sharing. 🙂 Was feeling very hopeless from having lost my best friend… and having someone who understands the pain… really helped. … It’ll get better and better. I believe all wounds will heal… as long as we keep letting go, and moving on, and living our lives. Wish you the best.

Dana de vries • Jan 4, 2021 at 4:33 am

thank u for saying this..

Healing From the Loss of a Friend to Suicide

Navigate your personal journey of healing..

Posted July 1, 2018

During the past several weeks, there has been a great deal of attention in the news media to the tragic deaths by suicide of fashion designer Kate Spade and journalist Anthony Bourdain. Sometimes when we learn of such tragic news, it may remind us of the losses of our friends or loved ones who may have died by suicide in the past, making our own journey of healing and hope all the more challenging. After media attention to these tragic losses dies down, it may feel as if we have been left to deal with our own feelings alone, and we may wonder if anyone really understands us or if what we are experiencing is normal.

While there is no easy way to grieve, it is often helpful to know that attention to suicides in the news media may, at times, trigger thoughts of the losses of our own friends or loved ones and may result in our re-experiencing the grief and other feelings we encountered immediately subsequent to the loss once again; such reactions may last for several hours, days, weeks, or months. During these times, it is helpful to understand that such feelings and memories are normal and to know where to find information and resources for support during these stressful times.

Grief Is a Process

No two people respond to loss in the same way. Some may experience physical symptoms such as headaches or changes in appetite and/or sleeping patterns, while others may experience emotions such as anger , depression , or other feelings. Some reactions which individuals experience during the grieving process may include:

Shock Disbelief Sadness

Guilt Denial Pain

Despair Anger Hopelessness

Stress Anxiety Grief

Confusion Numbness Abandonment

Loneliness Rejection Self-blame

The shock and grief that consumes us after we lose someone to suicide can be overwhelming. It can feel like we have fallen into a deep hole and will never be able to get out. These are natural feelings which will likely change as we move through the grieving process and allow the time we need to heal from our loss.

Some Difficult Questions

Will I ever get over this, and if so, how long will it take?

While there is no erasing the loss of a friend or loved one to suicide, over time and with focused attention to the work of grieving, we come to the point in our lives where it feels that the time is right to enjoy life and to move forward with our own interests, plans, and relationships. For many, the entire first year, including the first anniversary of the loss, is difficult, while others grieve for shorter or longer periods of time.

Is it disrespectful to my friend or loved one to laugh or enjoy my life?

For some, there may be a period during which it may not “feel” okay to enjoy your life. This is only natural. But over time, your capacity to enjoy the pleasures of ordinary life will, and should, re-emerge. This in no way trivializes your loss or disrespects the friend or loved one you have lost.

Taking Care of Yourself

This week of increased media attention on suicide is also a reminder that all of us need to take care of our own mental health and the well-being of those around us. If you are struggling, take the time you need for self-care and help seeking, and be sure to reach out to someone you trust or connect with someone you are concerned about. Ask those in your life how they are doing. Listen intently, and seek professional help if needed.

Helping Yourself

Recognize and acknowledge your feelings and reactions.

Take care of yourself emotionally and physically.

Talk to others about what you are feeling or experiencing, which may include making an appointment with a counselor or mental health professional.

Spend time with others.

Balance out emotions related to loss by living the other aspects of your life fully.

Distract yourself as needed.

Honor the anniversary of the loss of a friend or loved one with a meaningful ritual or tradition.

Express your emotions through writing, art, poetry, cooking, or any other way which gives voice to your feelings.

Create a self-care toolbox. Make a list of things that relax you and keep it in a convenient place during this time. Mindfully use one or two every day as a way to keep grounded. Some ideas may include walking, taking a hot bath/shower, reading a fiction book, watching a funny movie, and playing a board game.

Supporting Others

Know the power of your presence and empathy.

Acknowledge the loss of your friend or loved one in some way.

Listen to others' thoughts and feelings.

Encourage others to seek professional help if needed.

And Remember . . . You Are Not Alone

There are many resources available to provide support to those affected by suicide. Do not hesitate to reach out for support as you move forward in your journey of personal healing.

• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK or text "Talk" to 741741.
• Crisis Text Line — Text START to 741741
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Dolores Cimini, Ph.D., is the Director of University at Albany’s Center for Behavioral Health Promotion and Applied Research.

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True Friendship Essay

500 words true friendship essay.

Friendship is an essential part of everyone’s lives. One cannot do without friends, we must have some friends to make life easier. However, lucky are those who get true friendship in life. It is not the same as friendship. True friendship is when the person stays by you through thick and thin. Through true friendship essay, we will look at what it means and its importance.

Importance of True Friendship

Friendship has a significant value in our lives. It is responsible for teaching us a lot of unforgettable lessons. Some are even life-changing so we must cherish friendship. It is not common to find true friendship in life.

But when you do, make sure to hold on tightly to it. True friendship teaches us how to love others who are not our family. Ultimately, our friends also become our family. A true friendship makes life easy and gives us good times.

Thus, when the going gets tough, we depend on our friends for solace. Sometimes, it is not possible to share everything with family , that is where friends come in. We can share everything with them without the fear of being judged.

Moreover, true friendship also results in good memories. You spend time with friends and enjoy it to the fullest, later on, the same moments become beautiful memories. Only a true friendship will cheer on you and help you do better in life.

Through true friendship, we learn about loyalty and reliability. When you have a true friend by your side, nothing can stop you. Your confidence enhances and you become happier in life. Thus, it changes our life for the better and keeps us happy.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Maintaining True Friendship

While it is lucky to get true friendship in life, it is also important to maintain this friendship so that one does not lose out on it. A time comes when we separate from our true friends, but one shouldn’t let distance act as a barrier.

It is essential to keep in touch with your friends so they know you are there for them. Most importantly, we must give our friends the love and respect they deserve. It is essential to treat them nicely so they never forget their worth.

Further, we must also remain honest with our friends. If you do not offer them all this, your friendship may begin to fade. Thus, make sure to pour equal shares of love, respect and honesty.

Conclusion of True Friendship Essay

Thus, we must never rush to make friends. Remember, true friendship cannot be faked. It will need a good foundation. So, a true friendship accepts the person for who they are instead of changing them. A true friendship will never have an ulterior motive, it will always offer selflessly.

FAQ on True Friendship Essay

Question 1: What are the signs of true friendship?

Answer 1: The signs of a true friendship are that they will accept you for who you are instead of trying to change you. Similarly, they will be there for you in good and bad times. They will celebrate your achievements and push you to do better if you fail. Most importantly, they will tell you the truth even if you don’t like it.

Question 2: Who is a true friend?

Answer 2: A true friend is someone who is always completely honest. Moreover, even if we don’t talk to them every day, we know they will be there for us. Thus, silence never gets awkward with them. We may not talk to them or see them for a long time, but when we meet them, it will be like old times.

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April 23, 2024

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Study finds rekindling old friendships as scary as making new ones

by Simon Fraser University

Psychologists from Simon Fraser University (SFU) and the University of Sussex have found that people are as hesitant to reach out to an old friend as they are to strike up a conversation with a stranger, even when they had the capacity and desire to do so. The new research is published today in the journal Communications Psychology .

Scientific research has shown that social relationships are important to human happiness, and that the greater the number and range of friendships that we engage with, the better our well-being. But once relationships are formed, some will naturally wax and wane, with many of us losing touch with friends and family that we were once close with.

As old friends who had reconnected themselves, Professor Lara Aknin from SFU and Dr. Gillian Sandstrom from the University of Sussex in Brighton (U.K.) were keen to find out what stops other people from doing the same.

Sandstrom, senior lecturer in the psychology of kindness and director of the Sussex Centre for Research on Kindness said, "We live in a time when people are more and more disconnected, and have fewer close friends than they used to in years past. And this is despite the multitude of modern-day communication channels available to us. With research finding that it takes more than 200 hours of contact to turn a new acquaintance into a close friend, we wanted to find out if and why people were overlooking another pathway to meaningful connection: reviving pre-existing close friendships ."

Across seven studies, the psychologists examined the attitudes of almost 2,500 participants to reconnecting with lapsed friendships, the barriers and reasons for doing so, and whether targeted interventions could encourage them to send that first message to an old friend.

"We found that the majority of participants (90%) in our first study had lost touch with a someone they still care about. Yet, a significant number (70%) were neutral, or even negative, about the idea of getting back in touch in that moment, even when they felt warmly about the friendship," says Aknin, director of the Helping and Happiness Lab at SFU and co-author of the paper.

Recognizing that people sometimes say one thing and do another, the psychologists designed a study to see how many people were willing to actually reach out to an old friend. Even when participants wanted to reconnect, thought the friend would be appreciative, had their contact information, and were given time to draft and send a message, only about a third actually sent it (28% in one study and 37% in another study).

The psychologists set out to benchmark this hesitance to reconnect by getting participants to rate their willingness to immediately carry out a range of activities, including calling or texting a friend they had lost touch with. They found that participants were as reluctant to reach out to an old friend as they were to strike up a conversation with a stranger—or even to pick up rubbish.

The top reported barriers included fears that one's old friend might not want to hear from them, that it would be "too awkward after all this time," and feeling "guilty." A perception of being too busy—both the old friend and the participant—was the lowest cited reason for not reaching out.

Notably, the psychologists found that participants believed there were only a few legitimate reasons to get in touch, with the friend's birthday reported as the most compelling. Reconnecting over the memory of a shared experience was the second most reported reason. Participants were least likely to consider getting in touch with an old friend to ask them a favor.

As part of the research, the psychologists tested targeted interventions, responding to the findings from four of the studies. Taking inspiration from a previous intervention conducted by Sandstrom on talking with strangers, they found that practicing social connection with current networks by first sending a message to a warm friend, was the most successful strategy, boosting reach-out rates by over two thirds.

Sandstrom explained, "Interestingly, despite people telling us that a key barrier to making contact with an old friend was concerns over how the message might be received, the intervention that we devised to help overcome this anxiety had little effect.

"Given that participants were as hesitant to reach out to a stranger as someone they had previously been close with, we drew inspiration from previous research I had conducted on talking to strangers, which found that practice made progress. When people were given time to practice in a situation that felt more comfortable, namely by sending messages to current friends, they were much more likely to make the leap to messaging someone they had lost touch with."

Aknin adds, "We know from decades of research that social relationships are a key source of happiness and meaning in our lives.

"Gillian and I are old friends, dating back to our time as Ph.D. students in Canada. We've been in touch on-and-off ever since, but most recently reconnected on New Year's Day 2022 when I emailed her to say that I missed her and wanted to collaborate on a new project. We took inspiration from our period of disconnection and decided to study if and when people are willing to reach out to old friends. We hope these findings prompt other people to send that first message to someone that they miss in their lives."

Provided by Simon Fraser University

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