It’s hard to admit, but some of the many friendships I’ve enjoyed in my life have ended. These estrangements resulted in a series of emotions, including an acute sense of failure. I teach relational health for a living so I hate to admit failure at something I teach. But someone out there needs the hard-earned wisdom I can offer, so I’ll try to be honest and helpful. Knife-in-the-back analogy notwithstanding, let me take a stab at this.
the importance of friendship
I believe that God, the great Designer, organised human life like an educational curriculum. The course makes us experts in how to love and be loved—our calling and purpose as beings wired for relationship. The science of human development reveals this plan. Each stage of life features a unique relationship building on the foundation of the previous stage. These stages follow a process something like this: mother bond, father bond, sibling bond, friendship bond, spouse bond, parent bond, grandparent bond. If all goes according to plan, each subsequent trust bond more densely wires our brains for relationship until we’re geniuses at love. What a beautiful design!
Notice that friendship is the first relationship we form outside our family of origin. Friendship serves as a bridge from our family cocoon to the broader world. And friendship skills play heavily into our effectiveness as humans. Life hands us our families, but friends we must work for. Our families are pretty much stuck with us but our friends have no legal, logistical or biological incentive to stay. For this reason, friendships help us grow in new ways. They can also be more fragile and require more effort to maintain.
If the previous stages of relational learning went awry, we come to the friendship stage with a disadvantage. A high-conflict, abusive, addictive or detached family of origin can deprive us of the benefits of healthy bonding. Unfortunately, people with these adverse childhood experiences face a steeper climb toward stable, secure relationships. But there’s good news, too: this challenge can be met with extra effort and intentionality, and we can acquire as adults what our families did not teach us as children. In other words, the art of friendship can be learned.
three reasons for breakups
But not every friendship will thrive. I can think of three main categories of reasons for friend breakups. Allow me to share them, along with some encouragement.
Unresolvable conflict: Some friend breakups involve good, honest people who, try though they might, cannot resolve their differences. During the Covid-19 pandemic, two best buddies came down on different sides of the vaccine issue. They loved each other but sharply disagreed and try as they might to harmonise their views, failed. These two friends decided to take a vacation from each other, praying and thinking through the issues. Once the issue passed the crisis point and they’d both made adjustments to their thinking, they successfully circled back to their friendship.
But even though these two took the sensible approach, thousands of people did not. Friendships became permanently estranged, churches split, communities polarised. As humans we need a robust understanding and acceptance of the complexity of our subjective view of matters and a disposition to give a wide berth to others. What matters most in conflict is not the what, but the how. If we approach conflict with grace, wisdom and a disposition to assume the best, some of the necessary “friend breakups” in which we must part for a time, need not be permanent and need not leave us with a bitter taste in our mouths.
Unbalanced investment: Sometimes one person does all the giving and the other all the taking. This works fine in a parent-child relationship because children are, well, children. But a mature adult parenting another adult? That won’t work as well. A certain fatigue sets in when one individual’s problems become the main fare of the relationship. We are to live “with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love” (Ephesians 4:1,2), but if we give and give to one relationship such that we have nothing left for anyone else, it may be time to erect a boundary.
The needy individual may respond to an honest conversation. Judging will likely cause them to retreat in shame, but a request for change may succeed. Try something like, “When we talk, we pretty much focus on your problems. I’m feeling kind of overwhelmed. I would like to have a listening ear some of the time.” This may provide enough of a course correction to make the relationship more comfortable. A gentle suggestion to seek counselling or mentoring might also yield a good outcome. In some cases, the kindest attempt will fail and the person will walk away with hurt feelings. Let them go. You did your best.
Unhealed betrayal: Some friendships suffer a more devastating rift—that of betrayal. There are Judases in the world and almost nothing bewilders more than their cold-hearted treachery. The Psalmist cried, “If an enemy were insulting me, I could endure it; if a foe were rising against me, I could hide. But it is you, a man like myself, my companion, my close friend” (Psalm 55:12,13).
Sometimes an honest conversation will yield a positive outcome and the betrayer will realise what they’ve done. If not, you must make a hard decision. Can you afford to remain proximal to a person who would only use that proximity to exploit you? To give exploitative people opportunity to do harm is ultimately to harm them as well as ourselves.
take an inventory
In the space afforded by a friend breakup, we can take a moral inventory in which we identify our own contribution to the problem. Rather than dwell on their wrongs toward us, which we cannot change, we should think of how we can better conduct our friendships in the future. Friendships, which add so much to our lives, are not bulletproof. Love can be fragile. But what remains, even in the wake of a friendship ending, is our capacity to learn from our pain and carry on with a deeper determination to love and be loved.
