Raising Questions Season 3: Friend Breakups
Hey everyone, thanks for reading. In this newsletter, I’m going to discuss Season 3 of my podcast. If you’re just here for stand up show dates, I have big news, which is that I’m taping a special on October 13th at West Side Comedy club! More tour dates - in Asheville, Philly, & Atlanta - here. I’d love if you came! I also have a new book out soon, Sex for Lazy People, which is now available for pre-order.
And of course, no matter what you come to this newsletter for, you are entitled to a sweet picture of my sweet cat:
Friend Breakups
Social media is a massive part of my career. I don’t hate it, but I sometimes feel guilty. I hate contributing to the toxic phenomenon of keeping people hooked on their phones. I know phones aren’t a monolith, and not everything we do on them is toxic, and maybe it’s better to fight back all the negativity with silly little jokes, but still. I have a complicated relationship to my work. Anyone who doesn’t probably doesn’t have a job, and for that, I envy them.
Sometimes, though, I’m satisfied. For example, when someone tells me a friend sent them a joke of mine. It’s not because I’m so immensely proud to have infiltrated the group chat (I’m guilty of failing to respond in many of my own); it’s because I’m happy to give friends a reason to connect. I know how nice it is to hear from an old friend with a joke that made them think of me. Memes are a part of modern friendship, and I am a part of memes. Put that on my tombstone.
Perhaps my satisfaction comes from my belief that friends are a source of pure, uncomplicated joy. That’s the thing about friendship— it’s supposed to be the one easy kind of love. The kind whose sole purpose is fun, humor, support, agreeing to hate the same people. Everyone acknowledges that romance and family come with complications, and no one likes their coworkers (I mean that as a factual statement true in 100% of all cases). Our friends aren’t supposed to be hard. They’re supposed to be the break from what’s hard.
However, the more I dug into the idea of living with friends—and friendship more generally—the more I realized I’d been vastly oversimplifying the concept. Friendships can be just as challenging as any other type of relationship. In fact, I would argue that because of the way we view our friends—because of the lack of structure and the lack of clear expectations—friendships can be even more complicated.
Adult friendship is having a moment. Maybe it was the viral TikTok of a therapist offering instructions on how to break up with a friend, maybe it’s our realization that men struggle to make friends, or maybe it’s that the Atlantic seems to have deployed an entire team to cover adult friendship. Maybe it’s because of wellness culture; we’re told to cut toxic people out of our lives without being asked to consider whether or not we might be the toxic ones. Toxic vs. non-toxic, hard vs. easy, healthy vs. unhealthy, as though any of us are one or the other, as though nothing that’s difficult can also be good.
I ran a Twitter poll asking if people thought we needed friends to be happy. It seemed like an obvious question: yes—friends are the one pure kind of love, as I just said. Then again, when people talk about whether or not women can “have it all,” they don’t even include friendship—they only include a career and a family. There are so many things to fill a life—family, pets, a fulfilling career, hobbies, a sense of purpose, more pets (I firmly believe that if I got six more cats, I would no longer need a purpose). Maybe friends are just one of many possible options. It’s dark to imagine a person without friends, but maybe that’s because we picture a very lonely person. What if I told you Obama didn’t have any real friends? Would that depress you? (FWIW, I think he has friends, but I’m not sure).
As I expected, most people said yes to my poll. Some folks dropped thoughts in the comments; many along the lines of “yes, unfortunately,” which suggests friendship is not the pure joy I believed it to be. But more surprisingly, 19% said no. We’re told friendship is so important, but almost a fifth of people thought someone could live joyfully without it. Or, perhaps, that the costs outweighed the benefits.
One person responded, “I think the definition of ‘friend’ needs an examination and re-assessment.” And some are reassessing. The term “found family” has become a popular way of describing the people with whom we choose to build a life. I don’t love it, because it’s used synonymously with “friends.” What if you want a distinction between the two? What if the joy of friendship comes from the lack of definition or expectations—from the fact that we ask our friends for very little in the way of formal commitment. It doesn’t have the built-in expectations of a romantic relationship, for example. Without that, it’s harder to betray a friend, since no pacts have been made. If we start counting on friends as a source of stability, as our “found family,” are we putting too much pressure on them?
But there’s a flip side to the ambiguity. Because friendship is not monogamous, we don’t know what our friends are like in their other friendships. We don’t know what they expect of their friends, we don’t know if we’re lagging behind their other friends. We never DTR.
Furthermore, because friendships don’t have a clear end-date, once negativity enters a friendship, it has years to foment. I like the expression that “holding a grudge is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” Except, it’s far easier to give up grudges with people who are gone from your life (I’ve finally forgiven my ex I haven’t spoken to in 12 years, no congratulations necessary, thank you). In an ongoing friendship, a grudge can give you power. It’s a shield against your own mistakes. The longer the stronger, when it comes to grudges.
So, maybe we could start asking the questions. What do we expect of our friends? How often do we see them? How do we ensure we’re both initiating plans enough that one doesn’t feel like they’re making all the effort? What are the activities we do together, and the activities we don’t? Do we take trips together? Do we visit each other? How do we balance talking about heavy things without asking for an emotional commitment the other might not have the bandwidth for? And when do we call off a friendship that’s run its course?
One hypothesis I have about my thirties is that friendships and romantic relationships have become more similar to one another. This is based largely on my own experience (it’s a hypothesis, not a hypo….researchedfact). In part, I fight less with romantic partners now, and I don’t spend months in undefined romantic entanglements (I’m making myself sound far more romantically evolved than I am). In part, it’s because my friends and I seem to be making bigger decisions about what we want out of our lives—we’re clearer about how we want to spend our time. And in that sense, both friendships and romances have become better-defined.
But if you can define a friendship at a certain level of commitment, then surely, you can define a friendship as over; about two-thirds of Americans say they’ve ended a friendship—and that’s what I intend to explore this season.
In one of my all-time favorite meditations on loneliness, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, the protagonist—quite possibly the loneliest woman in the world —goes on a journey of self-discovery and makes a friend. A male friend, with whom I expected her to get together romantically, because it was a novel. When they didn’t, I found myself more satisfied. What Eleanor needed was a friend. But perhaps part of my joy stemmed from my belief that friendship is more permanent than romance; that now that she has a friend, she has a lifelong cure for loneliness. That friendship is better, because it lasts forever. Except, of course, it doesn’t.
I once thought friend-breakups were the saddest kind of breakup because they weren’t inevitable; they didn’t have to happen. You could keep accumulating more friends your whole life without getting rid of any—silver and gold. But that runs into one obvious roadblock—you have the same number of hours in the day, no matter how many friends you have. Do you spend less time with each friend, the more you make?
We aren’t taught how to end friendships, because we’re taught you don’t have to. In this Atlantic essay, the author argues that rather than breaking up with friends, we should make more friends. She claims that friend breakups often happen because you’re asking too much of a friend. Expecting them to be too many things for you. The more friends you have, the easier it is to say, “that’s my friend who never remembers my birthday but is so much fun to get dinner with,” or, “that’s my friend who’s often flaky with plans, but remembers everything I tell her.”
I found this argument convincing—setting new expectations around a friendship and understanding its limitations can save it. But surely it won’t apply to all friendships, because what if you need a friend to be a “remember your birthday” friend, and they simply aren’t. Or what if they fulfill all your expectations, but you no longer enjoy their company? Or vice versa?
I’ve lost touch with a number of friends throughout my life—some more intentionally than others. But I never had a friend breakup as guilt-inducing as dramatic as the one I had in high school. I remember the growing tension, but don’t remember the inciting incident, and I don’t think I knew it was a friend breakup at first, but it soon became clear I had kicked her out of our friend group. Maybe I believed the situation would resolve. Except, I never took any steps to resolve it.
To be honest, though, at the time, I was mostly relieved. To no longer have the problem of her friendship to solve. My senior year of high school was a big time for me—I got into college, fell in love, lost my virginity, lost my virginity again when we realized we hadn’t actually gotten it in the first time (picture the Deathly Hallows symbol from Harry Potter 7—the elder wand over the stone). And I told myself she was fine.
The guilt grew, which is probably a good thing. People should be embarrassed about almost everything they did in high school, to be honest. There’s a feeling of deep shame around friend breakups; this sense that friendships should be able to work, and any time they don’t, you’ve failed in a spectacularly unique way. In my early conversations, it’s what my guests have said, too. We’re quick to tell a mere acquaintance about a romantic relationship that crashed and burned, but the same isn’t true of friends.
The question I’m hoping to get at in this season is whether or not friend breakups are healthy. Do they happen because we expect too much of friends, or never set expectations at all, or are they sometimes just inevitable? Is a breakup the only solution? Can two people figure out they weren’t meant to be friends without going through the whole process of formally ending a friendship? Should we be more discerning about who we become friends with in the first place? Can a friendship be meaningful and still end? And what about modern life has brought this topic to the forefront?
Anyway, welcome to Season 3. And now, here’s our first episode, with the immensely charming Aaron….