Free extract: BFF? The Truth About Female Friendship
The agony of friend break-ups
I wanted to give you, my dear readers, a little something from the book. And the chapter that’s had more women contact me than any other - from Manchester to Mexico - is the one about friendship break-ups: how to do it, whether we should do it, what we can do if it’s been done to us. I’ve been as crap at it, and confused by it, as everyone else - believe me.
Friend-dumping really is a universal problem. I’ve had women message to say how heartbroken they’ve felt and that this made them feel less alone. Others have told me this chapter gave them the balls to pull the plug on a friendship (hope it worked out as you wanted, don’t sue me).
I tried hard to put as much positivity about female friendship as I could into my pages, given it’s far from all doom and gloom, but the brutal way so many friendships have ended - after DECADES sometimes - is a story we clearly need to hear.
Below is just an edited taster of chapter nine. The whole thing contains a lot of stories from women, myself included, about falling out or being ghosted - and also from those women who have done the dumping.
Enjoy…
“Until it happened I probably wouldn’t have used the term heartbroken for a friendship, but it hurt the way a romantic break-up would,” says Georgie, 37, who fell out with her oldest friend after feeling she hadn’t shown up for her during the pandemic.
“I’m not sure I can explain the physical feeling accurately, but it felt like I needed to scream it right from my stomach and that it hurt my insides on the way out,” she explains. “I would compare it to times of grief. It felt like I couldn’t control my emotions at all.”
Welcome to the decidedly unfriendly world of unfriending.
It doesn’t have to be a big blow-up, or brutal ghosting. It can sometimes be a slow fizzle. Maybe you had a door slammed in your face, or been unfriended on social media. Possibly, you did the unfriending yourself. But it’s pretty inevitable at least once in your life. The Spice Girls might have tried to convince us that friendship never ends but – as Sporty, Ginger, Scary, Posh and Baby now know all too well – that ain’t the truth.
This is the truth: being dumped by a female friend can be just as heartbreaking as any romantic split. The same gut-whisking pain and bewilderment. The same waves of realization that threaten to knock you off your feet when they hit: she is not in your life any more. The same montage of memories playing in your mind: drinking frozen margaritas outside with your gloves on, the time she asked for Durex paint in the DIY shop, the way she held your hand when you needed it.
Full disclosure: I haven’t covered myself in glory when it comes to breaking up with friends. Ghosting wasn’t a thing in the noughties, but that’s what I did when I stopped inviting another girl to our post-university meet-ups.
What I should have done was to talk to her and tell her we all felt like she was always looking over our shoulders for a better offer. There were good reasons for walking away from that friendship, but there was also a good way to do it – and I didn’t take it.
Why? Because female friendships have no ‘till death do us part’. No milestones when things are great, or recognition when they fall apart. We don’t discuss how to maintain them, like we do our romantic relationships. It means we’re lost when it all starts to go wrong: we don’t know how to react or whether it’s even worth trying to save. Often, we just walk away.
Pretty much every reason you might end a relationship also applies to female friendship. But while the symptoms might be the same, the sympathy isn’t. If you get dumped, everyone rallies round, offering support. We know what romantic heartbreak looks and feels like, and we want to help ease the agony. With a friend break-up? It can feel incredibly lonely.
I’m going to level with you – this chapter has been one of the toughest things I have ever written. Forget magma; beneath the Earth’s crust there is a hot, swirling, liquid ball of pain, guilt and shame around the end of female friendships. I only had to tap lightly at the surface to release a river of molten emotion from almost every woman I asked. It shocked me because it’s so easy to imagine that you’re the only one going through these experiences, but, trust me, you’re not.
Of course, you can’t stay friends with everyone forever. For lots of reasons, you might grow apart. Some are destined to be temporary, linked to a particular workplace, club or hobby before fizzling out. That’s normal. But what shouldn’t be normal is the way women are going about ending long- term and close friendships like they’re utterly meaningless – with the other person left devastated and in the dark.
When a friendship starts to wobble, we don’t know what to do. We see it as a failure. But what we definitely don’t want to do is talk about it. Forget that very sensible option. No thank you. Much better to bottle it up, secretly brood over the thing your friend has done to upset you without telling them, and then – when they do it or say it again entirely unwittingly – snap and walk away. Good, glad we’re all agreed on the most adult way to handle this.
Women are socialised to want to smooth things over – we are taught from a young age to be pacifying and gentle. And we’re just so very good at it. So we allow the comment that caused offence to go unchallenged. We ignore one- up(wo)manship. We let unspoken resentment, jealousy, guilt and hurt build up until we’re internally furious, and furious that our friend can’t see how furious we are with them, even though we haven’t shown them our fury. We’re too busy hiding it, furiously.
It all means that we are more inclined to reach that ‘final straw’ moment and end a friendship without an explanation. To pull up the drawbridge, drain the moat and change the castle locks without a word about why to our now ex-friend.
It’s this I find troubling. The way so many women are left feeling guilty, ashamed and blindsided. The impact can last for years and can be, as one woman put it to me, ‘worse than divorce’.
“The only way I am able to come to terms with it is to listen to my psychologist when she says that people weren’t behaving as they usually would during the pandemic,” says Georgie, whose pregnant friend refused to meet her new baby, outside, after restrictions had been lifted.
“But I can’t get past her not talking to my husband and trying to figure out a way to meet. So I just told her that I needed some time, in the hope that I could eventually let it go. She said if I wouldn’t talk about it now, then our friendship wasn’t aligned. We’ve had no contact since.
“I just needed the anger she caused to be out of my life and so I needed her out of my life.”
Buy BFF? (currently under a tenner). It could be the perfect last minute gift for a friend/sister in need or a really passive aggressive present for one who’s hurt you…