Friendship Breakups
Recently I’ve been binge watching this show called couples therapy. It’s a show in which real life couples work through their challenges in couples therapy with the support of a phenomenal psychoanalyst. Watching this show reminded me of a series of podcast episodes aired on a podcast called Invisibilia a few years ago before they (sadly) shut down. In this series, they explored the many facets of friendships in our society. The last episode of the series explored what repair work and therapy among friends (who aren’t close anymore, for a plethora of reasons) could look like. They even played a few clips from recordings of therapy sessions between friends, and I remember feeling like my mind was blown by that entire thing, like a whole different world and worldviews have suddenly opened up to me suddenly. I was in my late 20s back then and had already experienced several of these “friendship breakups” as is typical for those of us who grew up before the mass influx of mobile phones and the internet where we just…..grew out of touch with each other.
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These kinds of friendship breakups still happen now in adulthood but we almost learn to expect these to happen and brace ourselves for them. Like when we graduate from masters programs or short term courses, when we move out of a city, when we quit a job, when we leave our regular gym or much worse, the church or other close-knit religious and social institutions we grew up in.
I’m in my early-mid 30s now and what I never expected to live through was friendship breakups that were immediate and sudden much like romantic relationship breakups. Over the last 4 years, I had experienced 4 of these with friends who were in my “top 5” list at different points in time. Losing this many close friends has somewhat marked my 30s and made me weary in life in ways that I cannot begin to describe.
I’m someone who has been partnered for less than a year in the last decade of my life, with no real wish to change this status quo for the foreseeable future. And I find myself constantly wishing we had better tools and mechanisms to repair our friendships. And as I continue lamenting and grieving over the loss of many aspects of our once-close friendship, I also deeply honour the piece of life that we shared together and carry with myself parts of them wherever I go.
And until we usher in that future when we normalize friendship repair the way we normalize romantic relationship repair, I will continue to carry the pain of loss and all the layers of meaning that a good chinese meal from any of the old Hyderabad chinese restaurants, a slow cup of freshly brewed coffee, a long discussion on a long podcast episode on the philosophy of economics and religion, or a bright bunch of freshly cut flowers bring to me.
