How to find peace after breaking up with a friend

Losing friends is an inevitable part of life, but that doesn't make it any easier. How do we even begin to get over the emotional roller-coaster of a friendship breakup?

How to find peace after breaking up with a friend

You always hear that as you get older your list of friends gets smaller. No matter how many times your parents, teachers or social media tells you this inevitable fact, you never quite believe it until it starts happening to you.

Since turning 20, I've drifted from friends I’ve known for a huge chunk of my life. I moved away to uni, they stayed home; maybe it was bound to happen… We stopped texting, meeting up and eventually grew apart to the point where we now know nothing about each other’s lives.

I really thought all these friendships were strong, that we’d be hanging out at the pub in our mid-thirties. Reminiscing about high school and a time when we didn’t have so many adult responsibilities. At the start I found myself feeling bitter and sad; this was the first time in my life that I had felt the sting of losing people that were close to me. I began to understand that what my mum had once told me was true.

After the dust settles you might realise that you were never that close anyway, not everyone you were friends with as a child naturally fits into your adult life. I began to accept this change was for the best. We had outgrown each other and that was okay.

I soon worked out that acceptance is not always so easy after losing somebody I considered a best friend a few years ago. Unlike my childhood friends, this time it felt less like us naturally drifting apart, and more like an abrupt and unexpected halt to our relationship.

I imagined that this person would be in my life for a long, long time. I’ve heard some compare the feeling of losing a best friend to breaking up with a romantic partner, but it tends to feel worse. Maybe that’s because we expect to go through a lot of romantic relationships to find the right person, but friends will always be there no matter what life throws at you.  

So, how can we begin to move on when somebody so integral just disappears? What do we do with all the memories, feelings and investment we had in their life?

It can be easy to place all the blame on them. You tell yourself that they didn’t put any effort in or convince yourself that you resented them all along. Sometimes I would even pretend I didn’t care - that I was completely unaffected by the whole situation.

In reality I was deeply hurt by the loss. Sometimes I felt abandoned and upset, then angry and irritated the next time I thought about it. I questioned what I had done wrong, why was I not good enough for this person anymore? Other times I felt like I was over it until somebody brought it up, or I saw that they had made a bunch of new friends - then all the negative feelings would come back.

Almost a year had passed, and these thought cycles remained. As much as I told myself and others that I didn’t care about what happened, it was obvious that this was not true. After opening up to one of my closest friends about how upset I actually was, I knew that I had not in fact come to terms with it.

This admittance felt like the first step in trying to truly accept that this person was no longer in my life, and probably never would be again. In order to move on I needed to admit that I was hurt and allow myself to be upset.

You have to look at the situation for what it is; you lost somebody you cared deeply about and getting over that is hard. I stopped analysing the small details about what went wrong, I stopped blaming the other person for everything. I admitted my own failures in our friendship. I wanted to focus on the positive impact that this person had on me. My friend had brought so much fun into my life and that’s how I wanted to remember the time we had spent together. Holding on to so much resentment was clearly not beneficial for the healing process.

Once I had decided to accept my feelings, things became a lot easier. I wrote my friend a letter that I didn’t intend on sending and cried when I read it back through. A weight had been lifted and I felt like I had begun to genuinely move on.

It’s been over a year since I wrote that letter, and I can now say that I have, for the most part, accepted what happened. But I would be lying if I said that I didn’t feel a twinge of resentment sometimes when I hear them mentioned, or even revert back to blaming them for our relationship breaking down. I think that’s a valid and normal feeling, as long as that feeling quickly disappears, otherwise you might have to reassess if you’re really over it.

Ultimately, losing a friend will never be easy. It’s likely to happen time and time again throughout our lives. The most important part is allowing yourself to feel sad, angry, resentful, or whatever emotion you may have about the situation. Acceptance should soon follow, allowing you to invest your time and energy on the friends that remain. Be excited, even; there are lots of people you have yet to meet who will enrich your life, just as your ex-best friend did once.

Header Image Credit: Deanna Harrison

0 Comments

Post A Comment

You must be signed in to post a comment. Click here to sign in now

You might also like

Poetry Jam’s 12th Birthday: Everyone needs to hear this

Poetry Jam’s 12th Birthday: Everyone needs to hear this

by Ellie Blackwell

Read now