Friendships, while often burdened with similar problems as relationships, rarely end with the clear-cut breakup. Rather they often slowly shrink into nothingness and nobody says a word.

The nice thing about breaking up is that you know where you stand with someone. Typically breakups happen between lovers. New series of rules are negotiated: you can go to the Eagle on Friday nights if I can have Saturdays; you can’t talk to me but don’t hug me; never speak to me again, etc…

Through the breaking up process, the space needed to create a healthy or desirable situation can be built up intentionally. As feelings mend, new rules can be negotiated.

In friendships we often play things by ear, make assumptions, fail to communicate. It is within our inability to communicate broken trust, hurt feelings, jealousy, and other difficult emotions and thoughts that we slowly degrade our friendships into nothingness.

Without a social contract, similar to the relationship breakup and understood across community, a friendship can become a never-ending bout of painful emotions, hurt, and anger that spreads horizontally throughout community through gossip, assumptions, and indirect communication. This situation sucks.

Perhaps we could learn something about clear communication from our relationships and translate that into our unhealthy friendships. Perhaps we could learn to break up and move on with clear rules about communication defined.

Rather than having long, painful, drawn-out friendship deaths, I’d prefer to know where I stand with someone, feel the pain, mourn the loss, and move on. Trying to save a friendship when one half has given up is not worth the damage that it does.