The pain of friendship break-ups
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I was deeply, deeply sad. I cried more than I've ever cried about a romantic breakup.

If you found a kindred spirit in another female, you can have the most beautiful, loving friendships where that person feels like a sister. We had such a close bond. I joke that, you know, I think she knows me better than my husband does. Doesn't matter what your age is, everybody's gone through it. So I think it's a massive blind spot in society that we probably need to talk about more. None of us know what the fuck to do when we lose a friend.

The end of a romantic relationship triggers an avalanche of social expectations. There's parental sympathy, completely sanctioned binge eating, friends stepping up to mop you up, songs sounding different, you feeling deep and soulful and getting to immerse yourself in a huge orgy of emotions while you parade your brokenness to those in your life who give a damn.

Putting it that way, you know, it does sound kind of fun. But do you know what I mean? There are countless songs, books, movies, poems and WhatsApp group chats dedicated to the spectacular sadness of romantic breakups. But what if the love we lose isn't romantic? What if it's a friendship? Our close friends and our besties are our tools down, guards down, bearing all, sharing all, ride or die people.

They are the ones we barely laugh with, the ones we cry with, the ones who drop everything to come over in a crisis, who can communicate their knowing with a gorgeous side eye or a hilarious silent twitch of the mouth. They are the ones we choose to be our chosen family.

So when a friendship ends, it can be devastating. But unlike the end of a romantic relationship, there is no template for your grief, no cultural script for what to do next. But that doesn't mean the pain is any less real, and that doesn't mean that it's not something that every single one of us has been through. I'm Yumi Steins. Ladies...

We need to talk about the heartache of friendship breakups. I met my friend Danica in my fourth year of university. Melanie lives in Montreal, Canada. She and Danica were thrown together by geography and circumstance and became fast friends while living together and completing their teacher training.

We joked that it was like the perfect partnership because she did all the cooking and I did all the cleaning. We kind of saw the world the same way. You wouldn't necessarily have to like explain what you were thinking to the other person. Like we would just get it. Like in a romantic relationship, it was all the cozy small stuff that made their friendship special.

We played a lot of Just Dance on the Wii and watched like dumb reality television on TV on our evenings. After they finished their study, Melanie and her friend moved to different parts of Canada, six hours away from each other. We would text really often and FaceTime once a week. I could write to her about anything. I could...

call her and, you know, she'd always be on my side. It was just so nice to have somebody who's always in your corner. Melanie and Danica were each other's person for eight years. Then Melanie started noticing some changes in her friend. Danica had gotten married in the summer and then in the fall, she told me she was pregnant, so I was really excited for her. She always wanted to be a mum.

But her pregnancy was taking a toll on her. She was really tired. And so we weren't able to connect as much. The pair went from messaging every other day and calling once a week to less and less contact. I was lower on the priority list than before, which, I mean, you anticipate that when your friend is going through a big life change. But I think in my head, I had thought,

that that would happen later on once baby arrived. Melanie was used to being in constant contact with her bestie. So she kept reaching out, sending texts here and there, but she wasn't hearing back. So she sent Danica a message saying how much she missed her. And the text that I got back, you know, said like, I'm in survival mode. So I interpreted that as, okay, she's got so much on her plate right now.

I will back off a little bit. I will wait for her to come to me when she has more energy, when she has more time, and I'll let her call the shots. Melanie gave her friend the space she thought she wanted. Three months passed with no word.

When Melanie finally got in touch, she realised she'd misinterpreted what her friend wanted. When Danica said she was in survival mode, she didn't want space. She wanted help. I was actually, I was so relieved in that moment. I was like, this is a miscommunication trope from a rom-com. So she said, I'm in survival mode. You thought that meant she needs space. That's not what she meant. She needed you to swoop in or something? Yes, exactly.

And so I was actually hopeful in writing back to her that we would be able to, you know, say sorry to each other and, you know, talk about how we'd hurt one another and then move past it and get back to where we were. But things did not get back on track the way Melanie hoped. Then she saw something online that changed everything.

When she posted pictures of her baby shower and I wasn't there, I was like, oh, wow, this is really over. What Melanie didn't take into account when she took a step back was that her friend had a history of abandonment and took it to heart when Melanie didn't contact her. She saw it as a breach of trust. Melanie reached out a few more times but was unable to repair the friendship. It's now been a year and a half since they've spoken. I thought about...

doing some sort of grand gesture type thing, you know, like driving to her house or sending her a letter. But I think it's more complicated when you don't live close to your best friend like that in the sense that it's harder to reconnect because you're not running in the same circles. You're not going to be seeing the same people. There won't be those organic opportunities to mend your friendship.

Have you ever had a romantic breakup? No, I have not. I am in fact married to my university sweetheart. So I think that's another reason why this is hurting me so particularly hard. I have a much better understanding now of what

heartbreak can feel like and how you're just looking for that closure and thinking about what you could have done differently. And it's the not knowing that's painful, isn't it? It's so painful. I just want to know for sure if it's over or not. Is there a chance for us? Because we were such great friends and I miss her. Women, you know, we can be deeply supportive of one another.

This is Dr Hannah Correll. Hannah is a clinical psychologist who has written a book about friendship breakups. Hannah is passionate about her work, so much so that she came into the studio at 38 weeks pregnant. I actually considered bringing, like,

Kitty litter, like those blue blankets just in case my water broke in here. I have always wanted to help deliver a baby, so this was kind of exciting to me. But I stayed on track and focused long enough to ask Dr Hannah about the power of platonic female friendships.

You don't get everything from one relationship, right? So in your marriage, you might not get all the things you need from that one person. So you can, you know, draw on those things from another person. And if you found a kindred spirit in another female, you can have the most beautiful, loving friendships where that person feels like a sister.

What's different about female friendships compared to male friendships? What we know about friendships is women tend to have relationships based on talking and interacting and intimacy, whereas men will have relationships based on physical proximity and doing a task. If you ever talk to your partner after they come home from seeing friends...

You know, and you say, oh, how's gym going? Oh, I don't know. You know, we didn't talk about it. We just watched the footy. You know, they're doing a physical activity, but they're not talking. Right. I feel sorry for men when you put it like that. It sounds really rough. Yeah, I think it must be quite lonely. Yeah. Even though our friendships are foundational to our lives, there's very little current research about them.

I think we've slowly kind of chipped away at different relationships, relationships with partners, relationships with family. But I feel like friendship is lagging behind in terms of research and labelling of behaviours and our emotional intelligence around how do we interact in a friendship? Probably because it's maybe the least formal out of those relationships. It seems to have garnered less attention. And maybe because it doesn't make money? Yeah. But

But interestingly, every single person I speak to about it has gone through some kind of relationship breakdown with a friend at some point in their life. Doesn't matter what your age is, everybody's gone through it. So I think it's a massive blind spot in society that we probably need to talk about more.

What does the science say, Dr. Hannah, about why good friends are so important? Oh, my gosh. Well, they're like worth their weight in gold for your brain. A good friend is associated with, you know, turning off your sympathetic nervous system. That's that dinosaur brain we talked about and turning on your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and restore system.

So in non-science speak, what Dr Hannah is saying is that our besties can help switch off the fight or flight, there's a shark coming to eat me, everything is a disaster part of our brains, and make us feel relaxed and calm. That's when a friendship is going well. But when it's not, most of us don't have the tools to fix it.

We don't teach people how to deal with conflict at all. There's no class that you have emotional intelligence 101 where you learn how to handle conflict or you learn how to speak your boundaries. Especially women, we're supposed to be don't rock the boat or be easygoing. You know, from a very young age, we're taught...

you know, you're not supposed to complain. And if you express any emotional needs, you're an emotional female. So we really get discouraged from talking about our feelings. And when something goes wrong, the reinforcement from society is not to talk about it. This enforced silencing means that issues in a friendship only become harder to overcome as time goes on.

Most people feel like it's confronting and I'm detonating this confrontation bomb and it's going to explode all over the walls and the ceiling. It's going to be so awkward and they can't bring themselves to do it. And if a friendship does come to an end, Dr Hannah says the heartache can be as crushing as the end of a romantic one.

Our bodies release hormones to try to help us cope with that heartache. This chemical reaction in your body actually hurts your brain, it hurts your muscles, it makes you feel heavy, physically heavy. Wow. And sometimes I'll actually advise people take a Panadol because you're not imagining that emotional pain. There is literally physical pain associated with it.

She was this person I felt very safe around, very comfortable with and like I could be myself. Meet Keisha. You might recognise her voice. She's the gun producer behind the Life Uncut podcast.

Keisha met her bestie when she was 12 and starting high school in Newcastle. They quickly became inseparable. She was a couple of years older than me and so she kind of took me under her wing and we had quite like a sisterly style of friendship. I don't have any sisters, so that was kind of the closest thing I'd ever experienced to a sisterly relationship. And how did the people in your life describe the two of you and your friendship? Two peas in a pod. Yeah.

We used to hear it all the time. We also looked kind of alike, so I think people just assumed that we actually were sisters. Right. So, yeah, they just said that we were little mimics of each other.

Keisha and her best friend's lives were intertwined. We were the type of friends that would spend all of our family vacations together, but also really big moments, so even Christmas. I come from a divorced family and a little bit of a different dynamic to what hers was, but her family had what you would picture as the ideal family. And so I really loved that I kind of got to slide in, like slide myself into that family dynamic.

Even when Keisha moved away for uni, the pair stayed in constant contact. She was the first person I always wanted to talk to. We always knew what each other were up to. We were the first ones to tell each other, you know, anything that had happened or anyone that we'd spoken to or anything that pissed us off. When

When she was in her early 20s, Keisha moved back to Newcastle. For a while, things with her bestie were awesome. But after a few years, the relationship started to change. She started doing some things that I just really didn't agree with. You know, like our values stopped aligning. There was moments where I found out that she'd lied to me. She'd kept things from me about people that, you know, I had dated in the past.

Okay, this is where we're going to blur out some parts of the story at Keisha's request. She still feels loyalty to her friend and doesn't want to sling mud. But when she says their values weren't aligning anymore, she's talking about behaviour that she found morally dicey. She looked at what her friend was doing and thought, ''Ugh, I don't respect you anymore.''

It got to the point where Keisha, in disgust, walked out on her friend at a dinner party. I got quite a few calls and texts from her and that kind of went on for the next couple of weeks. And, you know, I'm not particularly proud to say, but I was very conflict-avoidant at the time. Haven't gotten much better, but I just didn't reply. After 12 years of a loving and intertwined relationship that started at age 12, their friendship just stopped. Stopped.

I think I realized how, you know, there was a fracture that occurred in the friendship. I mean, I didn't ever see it going back to how it used to be. How did you feel in those early days, Keisha, where you cut off contact? It was very uncomfortable. Like I was deeply, deeply sad. I cried more than I've ever cried about a romantic breakup before.

I felt as though, you know, I'd lost this really, really important person in my life that I'd envisioned this future with. It was very strange in the sense where if you compare it to a romantic relationship, if you break up with someone, you tell everyone in your life, hey, look, you know, we've broken up. But I didn't tell anyone other than the people that I lived with. Oh, so painful. How many years ago was this now?

Seven. It still feels pretty raw. Yeah, I still feel really sad about it. And I wonder whether that's because I haven't, yeah, I wonder if it's because I have regret about ending the friendship.

Looking back on the friendship, Keisha can see that she didn't have the skills to confront behaviours she was finding difficult as they were happening, hence the big blow-up. I'm the type of person that's kind of like a turtle, very much shuts down. I wasn't good at hard conversations and I didn't really know how to navigate starting those conversations.

Our resplendently pregnant psychologist, Dr Hannah, says that friendship break-ups tend to fall into three categories. The first is being at different life stages.

Part of what makes a really good friendship is common interests and shared paths in life. So we're sort of like orbiting planets. We have similar energies and similar identities. We're quite close, but we can move away as our planets shift and as our identity changes. For a lot of women, this divergence might be when a friend gets married or starts a family and they are not at that point themselves. The other common reason why friendships end are...

an inability to resolve conflict or issues as they come up. And the other is the classic jealousy. When one friend has more of something that the other wants, be it money, career wins, children or attractiveness, that can leave the other feeling like they're not enough and lead to resentment and bitterness.

I asked Hannah what to do if you want to repair a damaged friendship. The best thing in life that we can offer is earnest honesty about being willing to hear when we've stuffed up and in a non-defensive way. And that takes a lot of vulnerability and guts to not be defensive and to sit and listen, sit with the person and really listen to them and hear them. And if you're the one who has been hurt and put an end to the friendship...

Hannah reckons it's important to plan your approach if you do want to start over. Maybe there's a pre-step one, which is contemplation. You know, actually have a think. What made you uncomfortable? What was it that you didn't actually like about the way the interaction went down? What we need to label is, when you did X behaviour, it made me feel Y feeling. And then set the boundary of, can you please not do that again?

Because if the person knows that that is a boundary for you, then they can respect it. Seven years on from their breakup, Keisha recently came across a post on social media showing that her former bestie has tied the knot. It felt so, so strange because we had envisioned this future with each other and there was never a day that I ever thought one of us could get married and the other one wouldn't.

even know about it, you know. I'd been with her when she met the guy that she ended up marrying. So that felt like I felt this weird dichotomy of being so, so happy for her that she got, you know, this love that she'd always wanted. And, you know, it was like a happiness for her, but from a distance and a sadness that...

we didn't get to be a part of each other's lives anymore. That's really sad because you would have been giving a speech at the wedding and telling the story of how they met because you were there and all of the things. It's like there's a hollow where you're meant to be at that party. You're meant to be at that wedding reception. I just remember being like, oh, wow, that, you know, that happened. Like that just occurred and she looks so beautiful and she looks so happy and I just,

didn't have any idea that this was going on in her life, you know? Yeah. Do you think that she thinks about you? I don't know. I have over the years wondered whether it was the right thing for me to do to reach out or not. And I'm still kind of seesawing on that decision. Yeah. I just, I guess I'm trying to be realistic about the fact that things will never go back to what they were.

I don't know how each of us would feel in terms of being defensive over why the relationship ended or, you know, whether she felt as hurt as I did or whether she blames me for ending that friendship. With many years' distance, Keisha is able to see how things went down with her friend a little differently. I am in a place now where I'm like it's not my responsibility to...

impart my values on other people. If they want to do things in their life that they don't agree with, that's, you know, it's not my place to correct it. I would want to think that I would be a lot more supportive. I think that's something that I regret. I didn't ever...

You know, I didn't ever do the check-in of like, hey, what the fuck is going on? Like, why are you doing this? You know, what's happening inside your head? And I would want to think now that I gave people more grace and a bit more of like an understanding and empathy because I've been afforded those graces as well. It's amazing, don't you think, that she still has so much pull and effect on you and the wounds are so raw seven years on. Are our best friends the loves of our lives? Yes.

I think yes. Yeah, I think that if you're lucky enough to have a friendship that feels so easy like ours did. I'm getting emotional. I think that they can be like a persistent love that you have throughout the rest of your life. You're having tears. I know, I feel very sad. I feel sad talking about it because I feel as though

Like, I'm sad about the fact that we lost that and it could have been something that, you know, we took to our graves. Melanie also still often thinks about her former best friend. I wonder sometimes about reaching out to her again one final time. And I almost feel like I need a reason, like some external reason. Like if she posts that, you know, she's having baby number two, then I would have some sort of impetus there.

for contacting her and that that would be like one final shot in the dark to try reconnecting. Do you think she will listen to this podcast? I don't think so. I had definitely recommended it to her, but I don't think that she will. How would you feel about her hearing this? I would hope that she could hear in my voice how sorry I am for the part that I played and

In everything that happened, how much I miss her and how much I hope we can find some way back to each other at some point. I think I was so angry for such a long time and it takes me a while to work through my emotions and realize that the emotion below the anger was the hurt and the sadness. So yeah, yeah.

Let's say she is listening. What do you want to say to her? Um, I hope everything's good with you. I, I, I know that you're going to be our such a great mom, but yeah, I'd love to hear from you.

Good friends who will show up for you are the measure of a life well lived. People who know you, who witness your life and love you anyway, are a gift whose worth cannot be overestimated. Which is why it hurts so much when they choose to leave us or when we have to quit them. From what I've seen and what I've experienced myself, it hurts just as much to be the one who leaves a friendship as it does to be the one who is left.

Friends leave their marks on us. Their ghosts hang out in our memories, our favourite songs, our food, our histories that they used to share with us. And it's okay to be devastated when a friendship ends. The loves of our lives don't come around very often. So hang on to the ones you love and think kindly of the ones who have been.

This podcast was produced on the lands of the Gundungurra and Gadigal peoples. Ladies We Need To Talk is mixed by Anne-Marie de Bettencourt. It's produced by Elsa Silberstein. Supervising producer is Tamar Kranzwick and our executive producer is Alex Lollback. This series was created by Claudine Ryan. Hey, ladies.

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