This has been the hardest topic I’ve ever written about. In my life. Not the writing of this particular piece, but the many false starts and the tens of thousands of words that just didn’t hit right. It was a messy process. Finally, the thesis about how to grieve friendships came to me, because when I did an Instagram poll, the most-asked questions were ‘how to know if you should stay friends’ and ‘what to do when a friendship ends’. Plus, I’ve been struggling with these questions myself for quite a few years now, and recently went through the grieving process. It hurt like hell but it cleared years of internal struggle. I hope you find something helpful here.
Friendships’ Changing Tides
Recently I’ve had to come to terms with some friendships that no longer serve me. Maybe my perspective has changed, and I now see that we’ve grown in different directions. Or my expectations have changed. Or I just need a fresh start. Some of them I struggled with for years. I kept trying to force them, even though there was more than enough evidence in their actions that I wasn’t considered a close friend. I kept thinking, “One day they’ll come around! I just need to work harder, like I do with my career. They’ll see me for who I am, finally.” But it never panned out that way. Every time I interacted with them, it was way more nervousness, anxiety, internal struggle than camaraderie, laughter, support. Maybe I was dumb in trying to be close to people because we were technically friends, in name.
You know how women stay in relationships with unavailable men, because they think to themselves, “But he says he loves me!” all the while his actions show otherwise? That’s what it felt like, but with friends. It’s been a string of broken promises, deterring anytime I try to make plans to join in. For the longest time I still held people in high regard, hoping that if I bettered myself, organized events for us to get together, offered to lend a shoulder when they were going through tough times, it would be enough. But just like how my parents saw me being in the cross between two cultures and I’ll never be the real deal, the hardest thing was coming to terms that I would never have real closeness with certain friends.
Time to Say Goodbye
So I’m grieving these friendships. We don’t talk about grief enough regarding the dead so it’s all the more stigmatized to talk about grieving people who are still alive. But grief simply means loss. And the pain you feel from grief exists because at some point in time you used to love them, and probably still do but just can’t be around them. Nothing lasts forever so not everyone is a “forever” friend. It’s perfectly okay to have friends for reasons or seasons. So grieving is a very healthy thing to do. It will take time, but trust me, it’s worth it.
What makes it harder is that more often than not, there’s no explosive breakup. It’s distance slowly creeping in, the indifference (maybe even ghosting), not knowing where you stand but not knowing how to talk about it, the invites being turned down more than accepted, greater periods of time passing when one of you would WhatsApp the other. So in turn, when you grieve friendships there’s usually no reason for you to be so direct as to have a talk with them, although you can, and I’d encourage it if it’s someone you still want to keep as friends.
When I started to google about friendships, I felt so embarrassed I’d have to ‘stoop’ so low. Shouldn’t friendships, out of all relationships, come naturally and casually? (basically telling myself: What’s wrong with you?!) Friendship isn’t like dating where there are rules (if even made-up ones like only text 3 days after a date), or marriage where there are laws, or family where there’s literally blood bonding you. But of all the relationship advice out there, there’s marriage counseling but no friendship counselling, there are programs on how to be a better leader but not on how to be a better friend, and a million songs/movies/books about finding true love but not about finding true friends. Not to the same degree at least.
Now there are a lot of things you can do by communicating with your friends before deciding the friendship has passed its expiration date or that it’s not what you need in your life right now (ie. set boundaries, initiate hanging out). I’ll leave that topic for another day.
The following suggestions more for internal work to decide whether the friendships are worth pursuing (if so, yay!), how to process years or decades of friendships that have run their course, and how to start a new journey to attract friends you’re so excited to see, and 100% deserve to have.
10 Practical Ways to Grieve Friendships
PART ONE: Are we still friends?
During my months-long research journey on friendship, I came across this sentiment more than a few times: that friendships ending can easily overshadow divorces. So is that enough reason for you to try some of these techniques I’ve personally tested?
1/ Annual Friendship Review
I did the most unnatural and cringey thing when it comes to friendships, and I highly recommend you try it out too. Inspired by an idea I came across in We Should All Be Millionaires, author Rachel Rodgers talks about her friend who had this genius idea of doing an annual friendship review. People come and go in your life, like cars that onramp and exit a highway. This is going to sound cold, but if they leave, there’s no need to save too much precious real estate in your head for them. It’s not like you’ll forget them entirely, it’s more about dropping expectations that they’ll text you on your birthday or reach out semi-regularly. Like pruning a plant, give life to the relationships that are still thriving and gracefully say no to the ones that are wilting.
I highly recommend checking Out Amy Chan’s set of questions called How to Find Your Trusted Tribe to help you objectively review your friendships. If you want to next level it, you can even rank your friendships on a spreadsheet. Yeah it’s weird AF but don’t knock til you try it.
If you don’t want to do something that seems like homework for friendships, here’s a quick + dirty route. You know that saying that you take on the traits of the 5 people you associate the most with? Take a look at your friends’ friends characters. Are they the type you admire, respect, find yourself wanting to be a better friend yourself? Make yourself use the “FUCK YES or no” rule. And don’t let yourself respond with anything else.
2/ Free Therapy Qs
Therapy can cost upwards of $200 a session! My therapist sets her hourly rates set at $175/hr. Thank goodness our benefits covers that. If you don’t have access to a therapist, what I find equally helpful is to ask yourself the questions a therapist would inquire anyway.
Sometimes the hardest thing is to figure out what the right questions to ask are. Kati Morton, who’s a therapist herself, talks about her friendship journey and the questions her therapist asked her. If you want to watch her YouTube video, it’s only 13 minutes.
Take out a journal and write down these questions, along with your response. Don’t overthink it:
- When did your friendship begin? Perhaps the relationships began when you weren’t the best version of you, like I wasn’t. Perhaps these were childhood friendships that began before you became an adult. And all people can see is the old you. You (very likely) might not be the same people you were when you first met and decided to be friends. The reasons why you bonded in the first place might not be things you look in friends now.
- Would you be friends if you met them now? Just because you’ve known someone for a long time doesn’t mean the relationship needs to continue. I think this is one of the most telling questions you can answer for yourself. And be prepared to feel big feelings when you do approach this Q.
- Do you feel excited to see them? It’s crazy but I actually felt really drained to see the friends that I most wanted to be closer with. If this sounds like it might be you, circle back to #1 – Annual Friendship Review.
- Are you putting in roughly the same amount of effort? You’ll know if a friendship isn’t balanced if you feel resentful, likely because you haven’t set up proper boundaries and tend to always extend across the fence to pick up some slack.
- Do they ever apologize? If you’re a chronic people pleaser like I am, you might always be apologizing but did you ever stop to think that there might be some things that your friends may have done to contribute? Just remember: they’re not all wrong, and you’re not all right. Maybe things just aren’t a fit anymore.
3/ Friendship Timeline
This one’s also pretty awkward to do. Having been gaslit for a big part of my childhood, I’m always prone to doubt myself. I read on some therapist’s Instagram that every time something happens, just jot it down in a note. That way, you can visually see that perhaps this friendship isn’t going the way that you’d like it to. I found this helpful for the friendships that involved a lot of unsaid things, like not responding, deferring your requests to hang out, inviting other people to your get togethers. Sometimes I thought it was all in my head.
It wasn’t until I noticed that a group of friends invite me out for girls night out an a weekend trip that I realized I never got to do these things with the friends I wanted a closer relationship with most. Or more so, those events would happen – just without me in the picture.
– unknown“Stop being shocked by repeated behaviour.
Notice patterns and believe them”
Looking back on your history with a more objective perspective helps you decide where you see the friendship going since you’re no longer caught up in the same emotions when seeing someone respond for the first time.
And maybe you’ll see, through historical data, that maybe your friends fall into one of these not-so-great categories. The following Ig carousel from Create Kids Inc really helped me recognize that the friends I wanted to be closer to actually exhibited quite a few of these traits, and me being a people pleaser doesn’t help.
See if any of these apply to you or your friends:
(Images via Create Kids Inc on Ig.)
Note: I personally find it easier to learn about things through a child’s lens, so not to be condescending by offering a childcare perspective.
PART TWO: How to Grieve Friendships Past Due
If you decided that there are some friendships that have lived their course, here are some somatic exercises /actions you can take to be with your pain. Do all you can to move through them and not stuff them down.
4/ Sit with Your Pain (do NOT skip this!)
Set your phone timer for 15, 30, or even just 1 minute. Sit in a quiet room. If you have tight hips and are sitting cross-legged, make sure you have props to support your knees. Start the timer, sit with your emotions and don’t check your phone until the timer rings. Welcome the pain in as if it were a guest. Once the guest gets bored, they’ll leave – in due time. Know that if you forcefully reject your emotions, they’ll push back with the same force, or hide underground. Give yourself a hug. Cry. Let your heart cry if physical tears don’t come out.
I didn’t want to call this “meditating” because there seems to be this idea you need to reach nirvana or some inner peace. Sitting with your pain is more like being a medium and letting it flow through your body. Sometimes it may feel like toxins leaving your body. Remember that when you’re healing from grief, “sometimes the healing hurts more than the wound.” You got this.
5/ Slow Down
- Yoga. With thousands of free yoga classes on YouTube, it’s easy to do a class in your own home. My go-to is still Briohny Smyth’s Grounding vinyasa whenever I’m processing emotions. Yoga a great way to get in some gentle (not necessarily easy) exercise when you don’t feel like doing high intensity workouts.
- Pace. All the great thinkers walked around at super slow speeds. It’s a repetitive motion that allows you to clear your mind. When you’re feeling shitty about friendships that ended, and you need something to sooth your anxiety, whether your go-to is smoking, food, or chewing a pencil, try replacing it with pacing.
- Take a walk. Just being outside breathing fresh air can do wonders. If you can get yourself out to a nature hike, even better. It’s kina cool being around really tall trees and thinking about how small you – and your problems – really are in the grand scheme.
- Walk slowly in your own home. Unlike pacing where you’re walking back and forth in the same spot, try getting to different areas of your home, slowly. It’s weird but when I do this after sitting with pain, I notice different things, mainly how I need to clear some clutter haha but it feels a lot more intentional and I actually clear it instead of walking past it and pretending not to see it for the millionth time.
- Listen to A LOT of music. I’ve written about my grief playlists, but it seems like every time I grieve someone different, I have a different ‘theme’ song. For friendships, Sarah McLachlan’s Fallen was my song of choice. It just came to me in between writing this. And when I heard these lyrics in her haunting voice, I knew the song found me at the right time:
“Heaven bend to take my hand
Fallen, sarah mclachlan
Nowhere left to turn
I’m lost to those I thought were friends
To everyone I know”
6/ Take Yourself Out. On a Date
You know all those things you wish your friends would ask you to do, or you wish you had a friend to do something niche with… be your own friend and do it anyway. If you wanted to catch the Barbie movie with girlfriends all dressed up in pink, take yourself on a movie date! If you wish your friends would invite you out to catch up over coffee… buy yourself a latte! Treat yo’self! I’ve gone to concerts, some rooftop bars, local trips by myself before. And you know what? I always ended up meeting and talking to people there.
7/ Allow Yourself to Do Nothing
We watch people on social media living their best lives and we do ourselves the disservice of social comparison. You might feel anxiety to do more for reasons like: proving to yourself you have friends, that people like you, etc. When you’re grieving and all you feel is pain 24/7, and when it seems we need to be productive all the time… try the complete opposite: do nothing. Watch that reality show you feel guilty spending time on, go for a bike ride, sit around. Not literally do nothing but do simple things without giving yourself extra pressure to perform or capitalize on something. Get a fancy drink and don’t post it on social media. More like that. When you give yourself time to retreat in the smallest of ways, it opens up space for your grief to simply be there beside you.
PART THREE: Start a New Friendship Journey
8/ Declutter Your (Physical and Mental) Space
I found myself drawn to decluttering my physical space whenever I think about grieving relationships. It’s probably because mentally I’m looking at life through a cleansing lens. I was a Marie Kondo fan for a long time, but her way of decluttering never worked that well for me. Recently when I came across The Minimal Mom’s video on how to declutter each room in your house, I found it MUCH better! Maybe cuz she tells you it’s okay to get rid of stuff that’s in perfectly good condition but you have no use for anymore.
In my mind, I apply this to relationships and think, “that’s right, they are a perfectly good person, we just aren’t on the same page anymore!” Anyway, her tips are to have three garbage bags/boxes. The first to throw away, the second to donate, the third are the things you want to think about. I did this with each cupboard in my kitchen and BOY DID IT FEEL GOOD! Caveat: give yourself a time limit for the items you want to reconsider otherwise they’ll end up sitting in your hallway for… weeks.
Now back to Marie Kondo. What I did take away from her KonMari philosophy is the gratitude exercise. When you think of each friend, say thank you to them in your heart, then let them go. Or at least expectations of what you think needs to happen in that friendship. They were your friend for a reason or season, and it’s just life that we keep moving – and more likely than not, in different directions.
9/ Create an Ideal Friend Avatar
If you have your own business or are familiar with the marketing practice of creating personas, why not apply the same practice to friendship?! I was talking aloud to my husband and what we expect of friends. Without a second thought, I said to him, “if you asked our kid what’s a friend, she’d say: someone to eat ice cream with, someone to play with…” I ran with this idea and drew a cartoon and wrote out all the characteristics I’m looking for in future friends, including: we can run to one another crying, we reach out to each other regularly, etc. Who knows, maybe you’ll even find most of the traits in someone one day! If you run your own business, do this for your ideal squad (aka your business BFFs) too.
Next Level it #1) What I think would be really cool is if you and people you’re still good friends with all did this exercise together and shared it. Maybe it’ll give you all an opportunity to be better friends to one another.
Next Level it #2) Another thing that really inspire me from the book is to write out your Ideal Friend characteristics into something like a job description. Then post it.
For example… “WANTED! 7 bad ass broads who are interested in making millions, sipping rose, sharing genius ideas, and next-leveling every part of our lives!”
10/ Be Your Own Best Friend
When I read Lane Moore’s You Will Find Your People, she talked a lot about being chosen. Like how when we were younger if any guy shows interest in you, you feel that dopamine hit because you’re CHOSEN and you should take whatever scraps he gives you. Because there are no legal or familial ties to friendships, so much of it is based on choice. When you become an adult, it almost never crosses your mind to ask yourself, at if you met certain friends for the first time today, would you still choose them? (refer to #2)
It wasn’t until I watched Dr Susan Livingston’s TEDx talk about her being dumped by her best friend, and what she did to pick herself up that put me in a “new beginnings” headspace. She said that after being dumped, one day she looked in the mirror and said “You, I’m going to be your friend” (or something to that effect). I never really thought about being friends with myself or choosing myself. Seeing myself from a third party lens made me treat myself kindness – for the first time ever.
I started saying things to myself like, “You’re gonna declutter. But if you only get a little done, that’s okay. It’s a process.” VS “OMG look at this mess! You’re never gonna have a perfect house like they do on Instagram.”
My hypothesis is that when you’re your own best friend and you treat yourself kindly, you extend that grace to others around you. And maybe you’ll attract awesome sauce friends like you detailed out in your Ideal Friend Avatar (#9) 😊
—
If you read this far, I hope you found it somewhat helpful. In the process of writing this piece, many sweets were consumed (cake, strudel, chocolate, toast). The difference now is that I’m giving myself grace and not further judging myself. And I’m 100% sure even though I feel good now, the grief will be an ongoing process and pop up at the most unexpected times.
A few last thoughts:
You deserve good friends who are excited to be around you.
If anything, I wrote this article as a reminder that I deserve good friends too.
I wish you love, peace, and faith that maybe your best friends are yet to come.
xo, Miranda
Resources
- You Will Find Your People: How to Make Meaningful Friendships as an Adult, by Lane Moore
- BFF: A Memoir of Friendship Lost and Found by Christie Tate
- Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, by Sheila Liming
- Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close, by Aminatou Sow, Ann Friedman
