The decline of a friendship is a strange thing to go through. You keep making plans because you’ve known each other forever and things are “fine” between you, but every time you leave, you wonder why the hell you’re even doing this.
People find this harder to deal with than an actual fight because friendships come with very little ceremony. There’s no accepted equivalent of “we need to talk,” and friendship coach Danielle Bayard Jackson, author of Fighting for Our Friendships, says that uncertainty is part of what makes ending one so awkward. “The very blurry nature of starting and ending friendships makes it hard to navigate to the end — because when is it the end?” she told TED Ideas.
Psychologist Menelaos Apostolou of the University of Nicosia studied what people actually do when they want out. His study in Personality and Individual Differences identified seven common approaches. Most people would rather let a friendship fade over months or years than have an actual breakup conversation.
Here’s what that can look like, in order from the most gentle to the ones that hurt the most:
- The fade. You reach out less, plans get spaced farther apart, and eventually the friendship just stops.
- Fewer hangouts. Weekly happy hours become occasional plans. Eventually, you mostly hear from each other on birthdays. Via text.
- The excuse. There’s always some reason the timing doesn’t work. After the 5th or 6th reschedule, you’re over it.
- The polite freeze. You still reply, but now it’s all “haha totally” and “hope you’re good” instead of an actual conversation.
- The talk. You sit them down and say, in whatever words you can find, that you don’t want to keep doing this friendship anymore. This is a unicorn in friendship breakups.
- Being unpleasant. You become short and cold with them and hope they take the hint.
- Ghosting. You stop replying and cut off all communication. This one is freaking brutal. Unless their offense is blatantly unforgivable, don’t do it.
Apostolou found that people were more likely to slowly pull away than end a friendship all at once. He told Psychology Today that a slower exit can cause less hurt and fewer fights. He also suggests giving the friendship another shot before you cut it off, especially if there’s a chance you’ve been part of the issue too.
The lack of a big blowup doesn’t make losing a friend any less painful. “A lot of them dissolved because people just don’t invest, and they fade away. But there’s not necessarily bad blood. And so it hurts to lose them,” Jackson told Newsweek.
For people who would rather say something, Jackson has suggested keeping the conversation centered on what you need now instead of presenting a checklist of every irritating thing they’ve done since 2021. On TODAY, she offered this: “I’ve been putting a lot of thought into this, and I just think I need to be in relationships and friendships where I can speak my mind a little more freely.”
There’s no graceful way to tell somebody you don’t want to be friends anymore. But either way, keeping a friendship going solely because ending it sounds awkward isn’t beneficial for anyone involved.
The post 7 Ways People Actually End Friendships, According to Psychology appeared first on VICE.
