friendship & losing friends & receiving friendship

friendship matters. and losing friends — that matters too.

The purity culture-haunted circumstances of my childhood and adolescence, added to a personality characterized by an intense need to please others and follow rules, conspired to create a young adulthood marked by no breakups with boyfriends, because I have never, in fact, had a boyfriend.

This is a weird thing to tell you in writing without feeling like I’m trying to make you feel pity for me. So let me state very clearly: I do not tell you this in an attempt to make you feel pity for me. I’ve got a really beautiful life, with a lot of really good people in my life, and I’m grieving and grateful and the Lord is with me.

I tell you this factoid about my dating life simply because I think it is important context for the actual subject of this post. I’ve never been through a romantic breakup, sure. But I have been through what were effectively friendship breakups. Several of them. And they were (and are) very, very painful.

I happen to be someone who has spent much of her life haunted by a very deep longing for friendship and community. As I have grown into my late twenties, I have begun to see just how deep and how constant this longing has been, on par with (and perhaps at times even greater than) my longing for romantic companionship.

I also happen to be someone who, due to a variety of relational circumstances and poorly articulated theological teachings that were common in my childhood and adolescence, believed by college somewhere deep in my gut that the best model for my participation in the relationships I cared about was codependence. I needed to care for others — that was the way to keep them around. I needed to merit their love and patience. My needs, my wounds, my story, they could just go on the back-burner whenever a given situation seemed to demand this. I was the supportive best friend. I needed to stay that way. Especially if someone was going through a breakup or had a more tortured past than I did. My suffering “was less intense,” and it could wait.

I got pretty good at playing that role. I was doing my best. My friends were doing their best. But these two things — the longing for community and the codependence — did not mix well. There came a point in a few of these friendships where I could no longer sustain the exclusively supportive friend role. I could no longer consent to losing myself, erasing or sequestering my own history of loss, for the sake of making friends comfortable or leaving all the space for their loss or needs, no matter how much I loved them or wanted to be able to do this. So a few times, I had the devastating experience of choosing — with much fear and trembling — to articulate my needs to people I loved, and who I know loved me as best they knew how, and having those needs rejected, belittled, or ignored. Which led to the ends of the friendships.

Each of these losses were unique, even if the patterns were similar, because each person was different. And each of these losses were emotionally, existentially, even physically devastating.

I do not yet have a lot of language for this. Every time I have suffered a friendship breakup, I have been utterly heartbroken. By August 2021, I was at a place where I truly felt I knew nothing about friendship. Everything I had tried, everything I knew how to do, had not worked: I had hurt others, and they had hurt me, and it was clear that this was largely because of patterns I kept replicating and couldn’t seem to reshape. I needed God to plant and grow something new in me. And he did. My grief over the friendships that ended is still very alive in me, but I have new hope. He has shown me that community is wider, more holy, more diverse, and more humbling than I knew how to imagine before the grief.

We don’t have much language, or very many narratives, for friendship loss in our cultural dialogue, which is arguably overwhelmed with language and stories and songs that help us talk about romantic loss. I am learning to write about my experience of friendship loss. I am learning to tell the stories. I do not pretend to be good at it yet, or to have a lot of advice or even suggestions for how to walk through this kind of loss. But right now I have three little observations I would like to offer.

First, friendship loss can be just as painful, and just as existentially troubling, as romantic loss (if not more so). It deserves space in your life, just like you deserve to take up space in your friendships. Your friendship loss has dignity. It’s okay if it overwhelms you. Give it space — in prayer, therapy, grief recovery, solo walks in your neighborhood, good long crying sessions. Let it open you. Once given that space it will deepen you.

Second, friendship — like romantic relationships — ought to be reciprocal. If you’re like me, this is hard to practice: my impulse is to give and give and make others comfortable until I’ve faded myself into near-oblivion. My impulse is also to expect a friend to be everything to me in return for this, which they cannot be. A mutual give and take is important. A healthy knowledge of my limits and your limits is essential — and, when practiced, beautiful, and sweet. It’s important that you’re heard and honored when you express that you’re hurt, even if the friend can’t solve the problem the way you want them to. It’s important that your friends be curious about you. It’s important that both of you can hold space for change in each others’ lives, for grief, for personal growth trajectories.

Third, the transformation that has happened in how I hope for and build my relationships might be summarized thusly: By the time I got to college the only measure or practice of intimacy I understood was how much “deep stuff” we shared with each other. We needed to be able to talk about our deepest wounds and fears; to share about the longings that haunted us; etc. etc.; or else the friendship wasn’t real or close. Not only were these kinds of confessions the mark of a close friendship, they were also the way to build a close friendship. Many of my college friends and I got close through conversations that I now suspect were an unfortunate, if innocent, form of trauma bonding. This was never sustainable.

Now I want to grow close to people in simpler ways. I want to build relationships out of creativity, out of shared love of goodness, out of the people we are and the active joys we take in our lives. That is, I don’t want to build relationships out of the parts of me that have been marred and made empty by the weaknesses of this world. Friendship needs to hold space for that, yes, but I think its foundation needs to be built on goodness that is shared, from the casual to the intensely creative. I want to build relationships out of the parts of me that have been made new, healed, by the Life of Christ made alive in me. I want to grow in trust over nights spent drinking wine and watching The Bachelor together, shared activities like camping or traveling or going for hikes, casual chats about coffee or succulents or other fun hobbies, or collaborative creative acts (like art-making or baking or decorating the living room) that are engaged in with shared gusto.

Perhaps the reality that surprised me most as God started to renew my understanding and experience of friendship is friendship’s simplicity. It is so simple and lovely to just let one another be who we are, and delight in one another accordingly. To not need someone else to be anything other than who they are, where they are, how they are. To share good things together. To laugh together, cry together, feel hopeful together. To realize I don’t have to work as hard for goodness as I always thought I did. It’s also so, so vulnerable to submit to this simplicity, and then find it is strong, but that its strength has very little to do with me and everything to do with God-given grace.

Valentine’s Day approacheth quickly, and romantic relationships are important, deserving of celebration — but so are friendships.

Wherever you are in this journey, peace to you. May you feel the freedom to be who you are, to grieve as you need to grieve, and to receive the healing grace of friendship as it is given, in all its depth and simplicity.

I’m going to keep trying to write about this. If there’s a question or topic about friendship you wish to see me explore in a piece, let me know in the comments. <3