If you too are a warm-blooded mortal with two legs and a beating heart, there's a good chance you have experienced the end of a friendship.
Not to be confused with a romantic breakup, platonic endings - and the unique heartbreak they bring - are a normal part of life. And yet, they sometimes don’t feel that way.
While romantic breakups can come with a culturally accepted roadmap, dramatic hair transformations, Bridget Jones reinvention arcs and an endless catalogue of songs and films, friendship breakups exist within a grey area. There isn’t necessarily a socially acceptable mourning period for the loss of a friend, and no guidebook, rituals or clear path for how we should forge a way forward.
This, of course, raises an important question: how do we grieve a friendship in a culture that doesn't always see its ending as a significant loss?
Harry Blatterer is associate professor of sociology in the School of Communication, Society and Culture whose research focuses on friendship.
Through his work, Blatterer suggests that understanding why friendships end requires looking at their unique place within Western society.
“The thing about friendship, it's actually a secondary relationship in a sense,” explains Blatterer.
“When people are pressed to decide between their romantic partner, spouse or children, they're always going to usually put them first, and the friend comes second.
“In sociology we would say that friendship isn't institutionalised. There are no legal rights or obligations, but also very thin cultural descriptions of what it is.
“This creates a lot of freedom, but that also means there is nothing at stake; you can just walk. But there is no protocol for when that happens.”
It is within this tension of freedom and fragility that many friendships can end. More often than not, these endings emerge not from dramatic conflict or betrayal, but through the ordinary transitions of life, as the circumstances that once brought people together begin to change.
“Life course transition can be fading away points,” says Blatterer.
“It's partly institutional as we go through primary school and the secondary education system, we have a pre-made group of people that are around us. Once people get into full-time employment, time shrinks, then romantic relationships might happen, and life shrinks again, and then immediately, the secondary status of friendship kicks in.”
Yet despite the ephemeral nature of platonic relationships, Blatterer doesn’t understate the psychological impact these endings can have.
He describes this as a form of "ambiguous loss" - a type of grief marked by uncertainty and the absence of closure, which can leavepeople unsure how to process what has happened.
“In terms of how we deal with that ending, particularly when ghosting can be one of the most prevalent ways, research would refer to that as unclear endings, an ambiguous loss, has deep psychological repercussions,” says Blatterer.
“In order to fix this, you have to get to a point where friendship becomes so important on the societal level that we have therapeutic institutions and normalise the discourse around communicating with our friends when we have problems.
“But then we get back to problem number one: we cherish our friendships because we don't have to put in that effort in the first place.”
But perhaps the challenge is not resolving this paradox but working to change the silence that surrounds it.
In having conversation that recognise friendship breakups as a genuine form of loss Blatterer says we can then give ourselves permission to grieve them - long after the friendship bracelet has been tucked away in a drawer.
“We need to give ourselves the space to grieve over the loss of a friendship, because we owe it to ourselves to care for ourselves,” reflects Blatterer
“I think we are at a point in time within Western societies where it's much more acceptable for people to express how they feel, even amongst men - for the most part - which suggests that things are changing. But that needs to continue to evolve. We need to be able to express all our feelings freely, and we ought to, especially when it comes to this type of loss.”
Looking ahead, Blatterer’s exploration of friendship and its place in Western society is far from finished. His upcoming book on friendship, “Friendship and Sociality: Encounters between Privacy and Publicness,’ due for release later this year, will examine both the importance of, and the tensions that shape modern relationships, from how friendships evolve across the life course to the competing demands of work, family and romantic love – one friendship, and sometimes one friendship breakup, at a time.
Top image: Getty Images / Handout