Why Don't We Treat Friendship Break-Ups as Seriously as Romantic Ones?

Michelle Elman has had her fair share of heartbreak—but when her best friend of eight years ghosted her, she felt a new, confusing kind of loss.

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When I imagined my wedding day, long before I pictured my groom, I knew with certainty who my maid of honour would be. Jane* was my forever best friend, my ride-or-die or, as it's known in Grey's Anatomy (a show I forced her to watch with me), my person.

We met on the first day of university. Our rooms were opposite each other and, amid the chaos of unpacking with our parents, we just shared a quick 'hi' and 'bye'. But after a few days, we were inseparable. So much so that if I turned up at the uni bar without her, people would ask where she was. And it stayed that way even after we left Bristol and moved in together in London.

I never imagined that our friendship would end, let alone in the way it did: With a ghosting. When we talk about romantic relationships ending, we talk about the loss of the imagined future we thought we'd share, but what's rarely discussed is how that shared future also exists within platonic relationships. Jane and I, for example, had planned our hen-dos even when there wasn't a boyfriend in sight; and long before we'd turned 25, we had cemented our joint 30th birthday plans—a luxury five-star holiday to somewhere with a beach and preferably a villa over the sea.

In romantic breakups, we have a shared—if cliché—language, whether that's 'it's not you, it's me', 'let's just be friends' or acknowledging that we want different things out of life. Friend breakups are murkier waters. There's no script for how to handle them, how to grieve them, or how to grapple with the guilt you might feel or the fear that you're a 'bad friend'. And so, while most of us have come to accept that romantic heartbreak will, one day, come for us, few of us are prepared for friendships breaking down in this same way.

"ARE YOU JUST NOT GOING TO REPLY?"