Jennifer Horgan: How do you break up with a friend when the fire has died out?

And yet, nobody talks about breaking up with a friend.

In my experience, friendships fade out because we don’t know how to end them. They die like fires die, going from hot and raging to cool, grey embers. A friendship can be our everything in youth, our foothold in the world, what helps us make meaning in the mess and tangle of growing. And then, it changes. We move on, move away, make new friends and colleagues. It ends but crucially, and this is what bothers me, nobody actually ends it.

Not ending it in a meaningful way does friendship a disservice. When a romantic relationship ends, there is a necessary and inbuilt ceremony. Granted you might live together, share assets and children, and so an agreement, a conversation, is unavoidable. But even if the relationship is without grown up responsibility, a conversation at least happens. At the very worst a text is sent, an acknowledgement that something significant existed that is now over, exists no longer. It’s important, that acknowledgement. What once was, is gone, you say to one another. And you move on.

Often, nothing is said when a friendship dies. You might see one another again, try to lean into the residual warmth between you. You might find yourself recalling memories, laughing, searching for what is still familiar in a face, a life that has changed. But you won’t name it. You won’t look at each other and say, what we had is gone; it is no longer. 

You won’t share your sadness, which your friendship most likely deserves. You won’t honour that friendship, those formative years, with an acknowledgement of its ending. You won’t talk about it with anyone else, not in the same way as you would discuss an ex.

Because nobody tells us how to break up with a friend.

Now, I understand that friendship break-ups differ. Sometimes there is more calculation in the moving away, even if it is a subconscious summing up of this or that. Other times, it is a genuine change of circumstance.

I was walking home the other day with my son, and I passed a woman in her car. Let’s call her Sara. Sara was my childhood friend. I saw her every day. I knew everything about her, down to the patterns on her underpants. A strange example, but you’ll get my meaning. I was around her house when she or her mother did her washing. I was in her bedroom when she put it away. I knew her in a way that you only end up knowing your romantic partner. We were as close as it gets, outside of being physically intimate.

I saw her in her car and felt a warmth that is hard to describe. It was certainly not the sad remains of a previously raging fire. It was a constant, something I know I’ll feel any and every time I see her. She commented on the height of my son. “He’s such a Horgan,” she shouted across traffic. And then the lights changed, and we each shouted goodbye. There was no pain in it, no embarrassment. I suspect it’s because we genuinely didn’t end our friendship. We just went in separate ways. I’m not willing to say we ever broke up.

Afterwards, hours later, and just before I went to sleep, I texted her. I told her how good it was to see her, and she texted back to say the same.

Other past friends are different. When I meet them there is more sadness than warmth, and it feels as if we have left something unsaid that terribly, at least once upon a time, needed to be said.

 The fire is dead, completely out, and I find it much harder to access our happy memories together because there’s something blocking me, and I presume that something is what exists in between the then and now, the us as a unit and the us as two very altered individuals.

I feel like it would have been different if we’d had a break-up conversation. If we’d said thank you for all the good, the really significant time we shared. And then just like a romantic break up, if we had said goodbye.

Incidentally, I ran into an old flame this week too. When I say old flame, I’m inflating it a bit. We were only seeing each other for a few weeks but we were young, seventeen at most, so it felt significant at the time. We bumped into each other in a bar and had a lovely chat. We have a mutual acquaintance now and we mentioned her and a few other niceties. There was nothing there, no awkwardness, no strangeness, no regret. We had a fleeting relationship and then we, he as it so happened, ended it.

Would I enjoy being around old friends more if the friendship had been book-ended in the same way? I think so.

I know someone whose friend broke up with them as if they were a couple. 

The breakup was via text. It was exceptionally honest. Her previous friend told her that she was too draining to be around and that she was also just too self-absorbed. The person I know was crushed. 

It was too much for her to take and it changed her. She confided that she finds it harder to trust people since.

Is that why we all avoid the friendship break up? Romantic relationships have the complication of sex. If you break up with a romantic partner, it is understood that the fire of physical attraction went out. It was there, and now it is gone. Nobody is to blame. The laws of attraction are negotiated by our bodies, not our minds. They are beyond our control.

With friendship, there is no complication. If you break up with a friend, you are making an unavoidable judgement. There is something about them that you fundamentally dislike. You are no longer happy in their company. Their personality is flawed. Their cons outweigh their pros. Very few people have the resilience to withstand such judgement.

And so, we just step away, let it fade.

I understand that. Still, I think we could do with some cultural appreciation of the end of friendship. A song? A show? Some kind of map or blueprint to ease the pain of it.

Or might we have some kind of ritual? Like that episode in Friends where Rachel, Monica and Phoebe throw photographs and memorabilia of past loves in a bucket and set it alight. We deserve closure on friendships, especially the big ones.

But in any real sense, it is a kind of closure that’s potentially painful to achieve. The awkwardness around lost friendships is that they are too powerful to put into words without the distraction of romance. Somethings are better left unsaid, especially when they are so deeply hurtful.

To say nothing is to continue to be a friend in a way. And that’s something.