by Jamye Waxman
PRO: Taking a break from a relationship can help you grow together and can add to your personal growth.
CON: You may grow apart.
PRO: The relationship won’t be the same as it was before. The relationship will hopefully change for the better, and you will feel more authentic.
CON: It can be unrealistic to grasp the concept that someone simply can’t change. It’s a tough realization to know that you cannot change the relationship.
PRO: If you can’t live without each other and are willing to get back together, that means there are important reasons this relationship feels necessary.
CON: It could just be the other person misses what you did for them. And they may only be willing to make up to continue to use you for their needs. You both may be too codependent.
Now it’s time for you to make your own list. What are the pros and cons for breaking up versus taking a break in your relationship?
In the Meantime
Whether or not you get back together, you will need to decide what to do in the interim. For example, do you remain in contact with your sister over certain things, like your mother’s failing health, or do you only speak to her if your mother dies? If you and your ex–business partner still have bills to pay, do you both deal with it, or does one of you handle the details? If your best friend is being honored at your former church, do you still attend the ceremony, or do you celebrate her in a private ceremony at your own home?
And what do you do when it comes to social media when a relationship is pending? Do you plan to remove them from the Facebook facet of your life, or let them quietly idle in the unfollow section of your feed? And if you plan on taking out the big guns by blocking them from your world, do you let them know what you’re about to do?
Whatever you decide, these are things you may want to think about before you break up, especially if you’re looking at the status of your relationship as “pending” or “complicated.” As Michael, a Facebook friend, told me, “I put my sister on my restricted list temporarily without telling her why.” (She had posted something insensitive.) “She got very upset at the demotion and completely unfriended me, which makes me sad. So, always tell.”
And what do you do if you run into each other? Do you completely ignore one another as if you never had a relationship? Or do you smile and nod and move on your way?
Sometimes relationships are brought back together through breaks, and sometimes they are not. Either way, this is an important opportunity for improvement and growth. This is a chance to work on yourself, in and out of the relationship and a chance to work on your other relationships too. And it’s an occasion to decide what’s truly important to you and for you.
CONSIDERATIONS FOR THE BROKEN UP
Want to see this as a break rather than a break up?
1.Back off: Don’t text, call, or private message someone after they’ve broken up with you. Let them be.
2.Enjoy the time apart: Use this time to put things into perspective. It will allow you to see your part in the relationship as well as to really assess if this is a relationship you want to revisit.
3.No begging: If anything, begging induces pity. You’re not looking for a pity party. You’re looking for a way to be a part of this person’s life.
4.Focus on you: Just like the other person has taken some time to focus on their needs, now that you have the freedom to see through the relationship, focus on what you need in your life.
5.Think about change: Before the break up, there were probably more hints or flat-out signs that this relationship was going south. What do you need to change to be in this relationship? Are you willing to make those changes?
6.Don’t be a doormat: You don’t need to be in a relationship with someone who sets restrictions on how you need to act or who you need to be in order to be around them. While changing bad habits is important, not being able to be yourself isn’t going to work for you either.
FIVE
Best Friends Forever No More
“Friendship is like a glass ornament, once it is broken, it can rarely be put back together in exactly the same way.”
—CHARLES KINGSLEY
You don’t go into a friendship thinking it’s going to end, and definitely not that it’s going to end terribly. Most of the time, friendships start out as the best of both worlds. It provides a chance to be intimate, silly, honest, sweet, angry, ugly, and deep with another human being without all the sexual trickiness that gets in the way. Friendship is an opportunity to practice love without being in love. It’s also a chance to learn life lessons about growing, up and apart. Often friendships change, or disappear without a peep. Other times they end abruptly, or intentionally.
We don’t think a lot about what happened to those friendships that ended naturally, over time. We accept that we’ve changed, grown up, had families, or moved to different cities. We focus on our new lives and careers, and because our interests no longer align, we make new friends who we can relate to better. It’s easier to accept the end of friendships that fizzle, or fade away.
It can be difficult to understand that we have a choice when it comes to friendship. But we do. We can be in it, or we can get out. We have the right to choose to end a friendship, and making that choice can be empowering. It’s not only romantic partners who get so absorbed in the routine of the relationship that the relationship itself starts to feel stuck. There is always a way out. Especially if we can feel taken advantage of, undervalued, or bored in the relationship. Making a clear choice to end a friendship can signal a change in perception in your own life. It can show you that you’ve got this, that you’re in control.
It doesn’t matter who did what to whom; when you have to end a friendship, it usually sucks. And the longer the friendship, the more likely the break up will be an extraordinary show—of courage or cattiness. But life is too short to let a friendship bring you down.
Good Friend/ Bad Friend
Like brushing your teeth, exercising, and eating your veggies, good friendships are important for a healthy, long life. Good friends are dependable, honest, there for you in a pinch, and respectable listeners, and they won’t gossip about you behind your back. Research proves that we need these types of people in our lives. Overall, people with strong social networks have been found to live longer lives—especially after traumatic events including cancer or heart attacks.1 Strong social support can also help to lower blood pressure, promote brain health, delay the physical impairments of aging, and enhance our ability to deal with stress.2
It may come as no surprise that bad friendships do the opposite, wearing you down, tearing you up, and even making you eat more.3
Negative social interactions can also impact our health in other ways. A 2011 study done by UCLA’s School of Medicine found that negative interactions increased the levels of inflammation-causing proteins that have been linked to cancer, depression, heart disease, and high blood pressure.4
That doesn’t mean a fight (or two or three) with a friend will kill you, or that you should immediately halt all communication. But it does mean you should be wary of excess arguments.
Then there’s also the emotional damage of a negative friendship. These types of relationships can lower our self-esteem and make us feel pretty worthless. They can cause us to feel extreme emotions, like enraged or depressed, and a bad friendship can make us doubt our ability to choose good people to surround ourselves with in life.
It gets even more confusing if the friendship that once helped us flourish now makes us recoil. We may not be able to see where the turning point happened. Or even if we do, we don’t always understand how someone we were once so close to can feel so distant.
Even though we know these relationships need to end, ending a relationship with someone who was once a good friend can be stressful in the short-term and the long run. Of course, the length of time you’ve been in each other’s lives may play a role in the lengths you’re willing to go to salvage the friendship.
As we get older, having friends who have known us forever and seen us through good times and bad is valuable and rare. And because we place a lot of value on our friendships, needing to end one can make us feel even worse than a romantic break up. We may think things like if we couldn’t keep a friendship afloat, how could we possibly make other relationships last? These negative thoughts are not only damaging but also can destroy us from the inside out.
What we can learn through the heartache and pain is the value of friendship. Sometimes we find that it’s high enough that we can’t actually place a value on it. And when we realize that a friendship devalues us, it’s time to make a change.
Real-Life Break Ups
“Sia was my best friend all through high school. We were often asked if we were sisters, and we most definitely tortured her brother as if we were siblings. I loved her like family, maybe more, and spent most of my free time with her. But when we went away to college, things changed.
After a phone argument that had to do with her ex-boyfriend and me watching The Simpsons, we stopped talking. We didn’t officially break up, although I remember she said something along the lines of not doing this (friendship) anymore. It seemed easy for her to just choose to let me go, and maybe at the time I deserved it (I had been mean to more than one friend in high school).
I looked at it as a big fight that we chose not to resolve. She went on to become even closer with the other girls we grew up with, and I went my separate way. We’re still cordial, on the verge of becoming even friendlier, but the ‘unofficial’ break up changed our relationship. I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve spoken to Sia since our friendship ended twenty-two years ago. And there are days, still, that I wish it hadn’t happened at all. But managing to at least stay in each other’s lives, albeit peripherally (we occasionally text and say we should talk), has been an acceptable consolation prize for the end of a long-standing friendship.
Still, the break up was devastating, especially when I saw her a few years later at a college event and she introduced me to her new best friend by saying, ‘This is Jamye, my best friend from high school. And this is Sheri, my best friend in college. Wow, past and present best friends in one place.’ I felt like an object and not a person, and I remember being sick to my stomach.
Because I had placed such a high value on our friendship, that statement took me to a new low. It was as if I was punched in the face by the fact that Sia had moved on. She didn’t have the same space for me in her life, and what I valued in our relationship (our secret language, our conversations, our desire to protect one another) was something that wasn’t there any longer. While it hurt to end the friendship, I knew we had made the right decision.
It’s not always that cut and dry, but ending a friendship doesn’t mean we have to forget what it was like to have that person as a friend. In fact, I still enjoy what Sia and I once had, and I wouldn’t change a thing about our relationship all throughout high school. Her friendship was an integral part of my life, and it inspired me to want to meet other people and enjoy other relationships similar to the one I had with her.” —Jamye
“When I first moved to the city where I live, I became friends with a girl during orientation for school. It turned out that she was originally from my hometown and went to my rival high school. I didn’t know her growing up, but we had friends in common. I remember thinking when I met her, ‘We’re either going to be best friends, or she’s crazy, or both.’ Well, the final option (both) turned out to be true for a while, until it became clear that ‘crazy’ was too much for me to handle. I tried to slowly extricate myself from the friendship, but that didn’t work. And all my friends just kept telling me to walk away, but I felt so guilty (and I was a little concerned that I might cause boil-your-bunny Fatal Attraction craziness if I actually ‘broke up’ with her). Ultimately, about one and a half years after I met her, I did finally ‘break up’ with her. I used yet another bad life decision she was making as my excuse, telling her that I could not stand by her while she was making this decision, and I was sorry I wasn’t a better friend.” —Katie
Why Breaking Up with a Lover Is Easier Than Breaking Up with a Friend
Ending a friendship can hurt more than ending a romantic relationship. Whether she’s been your best friend since first grade or the girl you met last year at that Halloween party, friendships can be life-changing events. But just because you once had matching jewelry declaring your friendship forever doesn’t mean it will always be that way.
There’s a lot of support around, and songs about, breaking up with a lover. If you Google break ups, the results all seem to talk about affairs of the heart. Many of us have heard the phrase “Boyfriends/girlfriends come and go, but good friends are forever.” While that sounds solid, it can also be some anxiety-producing bullshit.
It’s easier to find closure in a romance that we tried and tried to make work than a friendship we thought we could fix by ignoring certain parts or hoping they would go away.
In fact, while it may help us to feel empowered to break up in romantic relationships, ending a friendship doesn’t necessarily fuel that same empowerment. Sentiments like “friendships are forever” can make us feel guilty about not wanting to be friends with someone anymore, especially when we continue to hear, see, or read that friendships last a lifetime.
Friendships can drag on a lot longer than other types of relationships. That’s because a lot of these relationships are important for our personal growth and also because friends can be so interconnected that letting go of one person can change the entire dynamic of a network. When ending one relationship impacts an entire community, it can be really hard to rock the boat.
Ending a friendship is challenging when you share a social network, but it can also be challenging when you don’t. If you have a long history of being in each other’s lives or you’ve spent a lot of the most recent part of your life together, you are going to have a tough time choosing how to disconnect. It’s not easy to end things with someone who once was your constant companion. However, constant companions aren’t always constant. People die, move on, and make change all the time.
Why Friendships End
Many times issues in the friendship will be readily apparent. Your friend overstays his welcome on your couch and doesn’t understand why he should pay a part of the rent. Or your girlfriend is endangering her health, or the welfare of other friends, by taking drugs, partying, and making bad decisions.
If it isn’t blatantly obvious but you are always bitter when you think about this person, then make a list of the things you like about them and the things you don’t. Then weigh the pros and cons (this works in any relationship). Ask yourself a couple of these questions: How long has it been since you’ve stopped getting along with your friend? Do you feel like you carry all the weight in the relationship? What about your friend’s habits can’t you stand? Does the beginning of her conversation continuously interrupt the middle of yours? Is she gossipy? Negative? Once you get a better understanding of what it is you feel is happening, you can put things into perspective and determine if there is any possibility to save the relationship.
Friendships can become endships when the relationship is a total drain on our emotional, mental, and/or physical well being. Whether it’s because we are constantly fact-checking a friend who has turned to lying to get by or because we found out our friend has been saying some really mean things behind our backs, it’s never easy to end what once was a good friendship (yes, it’s way easier to end one that never really took off).
A friendship can turn into an endship over one person’s inability to deal with being a “mutual” friend. It may be a case of self-absorption, as in a narcissistic relationship that has gone too far or a manic relationship that has blasted off to the scary side of crazy town.
You’ll have to look at you too. How do you act toward and around this friend? Does your friend bring out your Jekyll or Hyde? Are you hot tempered, cold as ice,
or indifferent to their annoyances? What buttons does she know how to push that bring you up to boil? Once you get into the details of the how you interact, you can see more of the minutia of what is and isn’t working.
Real-Life Break Ups
“I enjoyed—well, some of the time—a friendship with a person who was incredibly charismatic and fun. They had so much energy. But when I really looked at the situation, I realized there was also a level of chaos with this person that I had to look at. And I couldn’t take the chaos. So, I broke it off. What it fundamentally boiled down to was that I valued this one set of things that I was getting from the relationship, but then, the things it came with—the price was too high.” —Marcia
“I broke up with a friend who actually felt more like a sister to me. When we met, I was drawn to her. She felt like she was already a part of me and I needed to know her.
What led to our initial break up was her husband cheated on her with somebody that he and I were friends with. I had no idea. Looking back, that was naive of me. But I truly never thought he’d do that. She felt betrayed by me for being friends with this woman and was upset when I wouldn’t end my friendship with her. There was so much clouding any conversation we had about it that the conversations turned our love and respect into anger, resentment, and blame.
The friend break up was long and drawn out and confusing and weird. In the end, I think she threw in the final towel. But there was so much that led up to it. There were so many curveballs. So much trying again. Then distance. She ended up moving with her husband down to L.A., and after a few sad things happened in her life, I reached out again. We had a face-to-face in L.A. where I told her how sorry I was that everything went down as it did. I told her that I’d love to have her in my life but had no interest in having her husband in my life again.
