When you enter into a contract with someone, one of the things that you agree on is the terms on which the contract ends. You don't walk up to the first day of your new job expecting that you work in perpetuity. You retain ownership of your right to leave on the terms agreed.
In romantic social relationships, we have a whole host of exit clauses that are passed on to us our whole lives, from friends, family, enemies, TV, movies, games, music, and a whole lot of reading material. Whether it's a situationship, marriage, a random date, a monogamous or polyamorous relationship, we have a guide as to what constitutes the end.
One area of our lives where this guidance is glaringly missing is friendship. No break up speeches, then trying to fix the relationship, debating whether or not to keep or delete the photos or deciding whether or not to block or unfollow them in other to move on.
There seems to be two acceptable modes to the end of friendship. The scorched earth mode where everyone can agree that the friendship cannot continue and they’ve done something HORRIFYING to you or a measured approach of slowly withdrawing friendship benefits until you have cannot in good conscience be referred to as anything other than an acquaintanceship.
What happens when you simply do not want to be friends anymore? The chemistry is gone and they've done nothing wrong. Your life paths are going in opposite directions and you can’t relate to them anymore. You’re incompatible. Where is the language, the approach, the advice?
I’ve experienced only two friendship break up conversations in my life and it was absolutely freeing to close out a friendship properly and end it on cool terms. What I have more commonly experienced (and more than likely participated in) is ghosting. I make a distinction between hard ghosting and soft ghosting.
Hard ghosting is the process of someone disappearing off the face of your earth. Maybe you’re blocked, or maybe your texts just stay on read forever. Basically, they exist and are fine but are unreachable to you. Soft ghosting is the withdrawal of emotional involvement in the relationship, while remaining in the relationship. So you go from sharing secrets, talking often, making plans, reciprocity of communication and interest, to one word answers, no questions and a lack of interest in your life. Soft ghosting seems to be the preferred route to end friendships. It avoids confrontation, honesty and leaves the door open for hypothetical reconciliations.
The lack of a form to end friendships is a symptom of a larger problem - friendships have no rules. It’s what makes it fun but it’s also what makes it fraught. It seems like friendship is where we dump all our fantasies for other relationships- the zero judgmental policy we can’t get from family or our spouses, the fact that we choose it, the way we can put in as little or as much effort as possible, and still expect it to last forever. We want everything and nothing from friendships, but we exist in a place where there’s no governorship of what the relationship looks like. As we move from institutions like school and graduate training programs, where at least some schedule of social interaction is built in, and move on to continental moves and parenting and new careers and life spaces that demand that every social situation be earned and worked for, we become lost and confused about how to proceed.
I tried to have a conversation with a friend once- I could feel her starting to detach from our relationship and because it was important to me, I tried to have a conversation and because friendship doesn’t rest on any proper form of obligations, she answered my “we’ve been speaking less” which I used clumsily to try and describe a distance I couldn't really articulate with “I don’t have to speak to you everyday”. She had already made a decision I wasn’t part of to distance from me and slowly spent the next few months rewriting the shape of our friendship. It’s been a while since that attempt at staving off a break-up happened and in a way we are still friends, but in all the ways that matter, we aren’t and therefore it joins other friendships in the purgatory where friendships we don’t end go. Those are the friendships that pad up wedding guest lists and occassionally make up the numbers for a bridal or baby shower or last minute trip to Mexico. They don’t know any important details of your life but provide colour to your social media and occasionally reply an enthusiastic “congratulations!!!” to an announcement of something your real friends have known for months. Maybe one day, one of you will need something from the other and you’ll ask or you’ll bump into them at an airport and describe them to your travel companion as a friend.
I can hear some people reading and thinking, “but what’s the harm?” The harm is, we have only so much time and so much energy and only so much room to build community. I think of this phrase often, “if so many are lonely, why are so many lonely alone?” and I think the answer lies somewhere in the friendship purgatories we get stuck in.
Do I have answers? no. I probably have more ghosting to experience and maybe some more soft ghosting to do- or maybe this will open a yearning in me to apply closure to things that should really have been closed. Maybe I will force myself in my own small way to try and develop the language for friendship maintenance and pay more attention to compatibility at the beginning rather than nearer the end.