I was listening to a speaker known for peppering her presentations with generous doses of humour.
But she wasn’t laughing as she shared the experience of a painful breakup – not with a romantic partner – but with her best friend. She said it happened so unexpectedly after she responded to something that had been posted online. Before she could even ask what the problem was, the unravelling began.
She is by no means alone. Friendships seem prone to a degree of fragility unlike ever before. It goes beyond the changes that come with moving away or life transitions.
These are breakups that occur out of worry over what some nameless, faceless keyboard warriors might say.
My family moved to a new town when I was in junior high and within days of the move I met the girl who would become my best friend. She and I had a friendship that was absolutely in sync. Until it wasn’t.
Her life began moving in a direction I wasn’t involved in — and didn’t understand. Rumours swirled around her. I did nothing to stop them. I was too concerned about what others were thinking. We became people who had little to say to one another.
We understand breakups. At least the ones of the romantic variety. But the ending of a tight friendship is tough because it's something we don't talk a lot about. We have an expectation that friendships should last, but they are breaking down with increasing frequency right now.
Analysts who study friendship suggest a lot of factors are at play: political divides that can't be broached, duelling viewpoints in dealing with the pandemic, and a potential reset of those we want in our lives.
Driving that last factor is a perceived need to distance ourselves from anyone who may have anything in their background that could be considered cultural or political quicksand. Guilt by association. It's potential poison. And the internet has a long memory.
It's the reason the speaker’s friend called it quits. A conversation might have remedied things, but the former friend wasn't interested in fixing, just distancing. A study of more than 500 friendships that have broken up in a similar manner found that the posting of potentially polarizing comments led to the severing. It seems that the approval of the masses outweighed the friendship of the two.
I lost my best friend in high school when I became concerned with what others might think. I got her back again. Sort of. On a day I couldn't have planned or predicted she asked if we could talk. We got everything out in the open. It was so good, but also very hard. As much as I emerged with a new understanding of what was going on, it also confirmed that we were in very different places. We realized that while our friendship wouldn't be the same, there was a connection that mattered to us both.
A few months later I sang at her wedding. A few months after that she was at our door when she heard my father had died suddenly. We’d had a difficult, yet necessary conversation that allowed us to move forward. Those conversations aren’t happening the way they need to in our abrupt, reactionary on-line existence. What a shame.
Friendships have always been prone to breakage but what has changed is how quickly they are dissolving and how people are finding out it's over. A therapist who now specializes in digital estrangement felt devastated when a three-decade friendship came to an end through an email. Another was shocked to be unfriended by her best friend and then saw a group text asking mutual friends to ghost her.
A woman who maintained a best friendship with her college roommate was stunned when biting criticisms of her small business, her parenting, and even her wardrobe were posted by someone she thought was a trusted friend. Painful… because so much becomes so public.
We would do well to refrain from litigating friendships online and re-engage living them in real time. The barometer of our friends shouldn't be likes and clicks, but rather love and care. If you have that, treasure it. It’s worth far more than consensus of the crowd. That's my outlook.
