Letting a Friendship End Without a Reason Is Allowed

For about two years I put effort into a friendship that had stopped working, on the assumption that there was a problem and that problems have solutions. There was no problem. We had known each other for eleven years, we had both changed, and the thing that had connected us had finished. It took me an embarrassingly long time to allow that as a possibility, because the vocabulary available for a friendship ending is almost entirely about fault.

Romantic relationships get a full language for ending well. Friendships get either a falling out or a drift, and drift is described as something that happens through negligence — you let it lapse, you did not make the effort. So a friendship that ends without a rupture gets read as a failure of maintenance, and the person noticing it tends to respond by trying harder, which is what I did.

What trying harder produced was two years of meetings that both of us, I now think, were attending out of obligation. I would leave feeling flat and interpret the flatness as evidence that I needed to invest more. I raised it twice, in the careful way, and both times we agreed to see each other more often and both times it did not help, because more frequency is not a remedy for a connection that has run out.

What finally shifted it was a very ordinary observation: I did not want to tell her things. Not that I could not, or that she would react badly. I simply did not think of her when something happened. And when I noticed that, I realised I had known it for at least a year and had been treating it as a problem with my attention.

We stopped. Not with a conversation — I want to be honest that I did not manage a good ending, and I would do that differently. We just stopped scheduling, and after about eight months exchanged a warm message, and that is where it has stayed for three years. Neither of us did anything wrong and I still think well of her.

The thing I would tell someone in the middle of this is that the test is not whether you enjoy their company; you can enjoy anyone’s company for two hours. The test is whether they occur to you. Friendship is mostly an involuntary thing where a person comes to mind when something happens, and when that stops, the meetings are a form of respect for what it used to be, which is fine, and is not the same as it being alive.

And the grief is real even though nothing happened, which is the part that surprised me most. There is no event to point at, so there is no permission to feel much about it, and I felt a great deal about it for months. I would say to anyone in that position that the absence of a reason does not make it smaller. It just makes it harder to explain to anyone else, including yourself.