(Un)natural conclusions

On platonic breakups and ambiguous loss

The Three of Cups from the gorgeous Radiant Wilds Tarot, a deck gifted to me by a friend. (All photos by author)

No breakups are easy, but the worst ones I've been through were platonic. There's a lot of overlap with losing a lover: the agony of their sudden absence, informing your shared friends, maybe processing a shocking betrayal. But there's one big contrast in the aftermath. When romance wilts, there are palliative social scripts available: the “plenty of fish in the sea,” from your auntie, or the dreaded “it’s not you, it’s me” from your soon-to-be ex. However inadequate, at least these sayings exist, comforting you through a familiar ritual and the implication that this too shall pass. But when a friendship dies, part of the struggle is that people don’t know what to say to you.

The platitudes reveal the relationship hierarchy in our culture that exalts romance, such that losing a partner is devastating, but losing a friend is akin to an inconvenience, one hardly needing special acknowledgment. It makes sense that we're drawn to the clichés, since a key facet of processing grief involves having people around you affirm the pain. With ambiguous loss, the suffering can be amplified by the inability of those around you to fully appreciate its impact. This idea is mostly attributed to events like an incarceration or a miscarriage, but also fits less dramatic circumstances like, say, losing touch with a beloved confidante and having no one to hold your heaviest secret. 

I used to pride myself on clean breakups, with no lingering mysteries and emotions being calmly, but fully, expressed. There wouldn’t be good guys or bad guys, only guys who agreed it was time to tap out. But that wouldn't mean it was a simple decision. Was I truly unhappy enough to break both of our hearts? Would it matter if the rift is technically salvageable, but I wasn't up for the job? If there’s no built-in expectation of forever together, why is there seemingly no natural conclusion? 

American culture assigns romance a highly specific sequence. There's the meet-cute that kicks off a courtship, during which deep affection blossoms. You drop the "L" word and drop your drawers, ideally in that order. A diamond is procured. Something, something, baby carriage. It's literally embedded in us via nursery rhyme, as apparently you're never too young to get the message. As you grow up, you're taught to never question it. Such is the meaning of love.

But “friendship” is much more malleable, and can be warped to fit any setting or circumstance. We’ve got “work friends” and “mom friends,” we've got “close friends” and “casual friends,” we've got “internet friends” and “IRL friends.” We've got friends who fit in half those groups at once. We've got friends who we live with, and friends we haven’t seen in literal years. We've got friends we made while in diapers and friends we made last week. 

Maybe it’s a good thing that “friend” has seemingly no inherent meaning. It lets us adapt it to serve our own purposes, and to build relationships that actually serve us rather than flawed collective ideals. But it’s certainly no surprise we're unsure how to react when we hear a friendship has ended. “Friend” alone doesn’t reveal what someone means to you. 

Lovebirds, or “just” friends? (North Carolina, 2020)

My hardest breakup was with my former best friend of nearly twenty years. We met in second grade and were instantly inseparable. We were both outspoken, boy-crazy, and wickedly smart. We shared a knack for creative expression and bounced between drama classes and dance studios on any given night, tying up the landlines in between. Puberty came for us long before our classmates, which made us feel like pioneers. She taught me how to send flirty texts, how to use a tampon. She took me to my first concerts and set up my MySpace, always coming first in my Top 8. She appears in nearly every girlhood moment worth remembering. 

There were brief standoffs, like when another girl made us a trio, before the two of them formed a tighter bond and began to exclude me. But we always found our way back, at least until adulthood. That's when I started seeing our friendship through a clearer lens. For each heartwarming memory, I could conjure a colder one, like an early playdate after her family's adoption of a Golden Doodle, whose vigorous barking upon my arrival she explained with "He's probably just scared of Black people." Or many years later, when I gave her an exciting update on my love life for her to immediately respond that she was repulsed by the thought of eating pussy. 

In isolation, her microaggressions (neither constant nor rare) never seemed to outweigh our history. For most of our friendship, I lacked that verbiage to capture those moments, and our dynamic relied on my downplaying their impact. Her ignorance felt unrelated to our closeness — that is, until it didn't. Like so many white liberals, she saw herself as having no work to do, and my gentle suggestions to the contrary would usually trigger defensiveness in her. I don't remember which comment broke the camel's back, only certainty of that snap. That and the clarity of my belief that I deserved a best friend who wasn't stumbling through so much bias just to try and see me clearly. I did my best to explain this when we were in our mid-twenties, and calmly ended our epic run. 

Not long afterward, I found myself sobbing at work. When a co-worker checked in with me, highly concerned, I told them I'd "lost my best friend." When they assumed that she'd died, I didn't set the record straight. I know that's pretty fucked up. The truth is that I desperately needed the loss — that profound, excruciating loss — to be unambiguous to other people for just five minutes. I was afraid that being honest would elicit eye-rolls and raised eyebrows, something my tender heart couldn't take. Even now, five years later, the totality of her absence feels like a wound that will never quite heal.

Whenever I’m in the midst of a personal or spiritual growth spurt, I notice that my tightest bonds will start to fray. The people around whom I so recently felt like my most authentic self start to feel like relics from a past life. Is there a graceful way to thank someone for being an integral component of your life journey, and then dismiss them for reminding you of how messy that work has been? I’m not here to judge or punish anyone for not growing in the same rate or direction that I am. Maybe this is all just a bunch of projection. Maybe it’s just as likely my friends are can feel this intangible shift in progress, and feel grateful for the easy out I give them.

I took this from the rooftop of someone I don’t speak to anymore. (New York, 2017)

Longevity is how we measure success in all relationships, because marriage is the yardstick. For me, it was also sitcom syndrome. When I was younger, being part of a club or friend group that formed in childhood and maintained ties past the threshold of adulthood, like on Boy Meets World and Degrassi, seemed like the dream. It signaled a sense of belonging that once felt so elusive to me. Friends from that far back can keep you honest, keep you from drifting too far from your inherent essence. But maybe having too many of them means you're not growing enough, and that you haven't learned to perceive your own character flaws. 

I've been with my partner for two years, and we often talk about breaking up. Not because we're unhappy, but in fact because we're still wildly in love. We've been planning a move to their Jamaican homeland since the summer we met, and yet we're also highly practical and sense that even a love as enchanting as ours can't launch us past all of life's hurdles. We talk about how we'd like the support of a counselor should we mutually decide to uncouple. When we talk about marriage there's mention of prenups, because we like the idea of allocating assets and building escape hatches while we still want the best for each other. 

I love how our discussions demystify what feels painfully unthinkable in the present. They make it feel less likely that a breakup would permanently eject this person from my life. That's the other thing that makes platonic breakups so gut-wrenching. When a romantic union dissolves, there's comfort in imagining you can find a soft landing in a platonic place. But when a friendship ends, if you don't wish to become strangers, the path forward is suddenly much murkier. 

Americans often deploy the expression "blood is thicker than water" to prove the natural supremacy of familial bonds. But the medieval proverb it comes from is actually “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb,” which means precisely the opposite. It proclaims that it's those who stand with us through life's trials and triumphs who are family in the truest sense, more so than an accident of ancestry. So if it's our friends and chosen family whose devotion matters most, what does it mean to honor them in a culture that refuses to? 

Maybe it means building our friendships with more intention at the outset, declaring that we'll be each other's plus-ones and emergency contacts, regardless of romantic prospects. Maybe we draw red lines around our behavior, like agreeing to only watch our favorite show together, and hold each other accountable for transgressing. I used to wonder whether this much specificity still held romance as the relational Holy Grail, or if it only expands the vision. Things got so much easier when I started to see each new connection as a separate universe with its own natural laws, assuming nothing about what it should offer me. My only intentions with other people are to lead with vulnerability and let things unfold organically.

All relationships end in one of two ways: they dissolve, or someone dies. Neither outcome is preferable to the other, each just is. So many of us see the dissolutions as a personal failure, and avoid them even when we know they're necessary. We do it to avoid pain, too, but that part is inevitable. At least a breakup comes with a bit of agency, and likely a valuable lesson. If how we love is changing, it's only because we are growing. It's only because we're alive. And love has so much to teach us about living well.