Q. I’ve essentially grown up my entire life with the same best friend. Everything I did we did together. We are now 21 and she’s got into a relationship with someone I really can’t stand and has had what feels to me like a complete personality overhaul in the matter of a few months. She has really pushed me to the sidelines and despite everyone’s advice (mainly my mum’s) it doesn’t feel like just a phase. It feels like the slowest and most painful break-up I could ever have imagined. I feel like I’m really losing her and I don’t know how to do life without her. How do I cope with my person not being my person any more?
A. Oh, darling. I’m sorry. This is, unfortunately, a rite of passage. I so wish it wasn’t, because I remember how painful it is, but it’s a normal part of growing up. I think of my closest friendship from childhood as having two parts: before romantic love and after romantic love. Before boyfriends, we were each other’s everything: weeknights, weekends, phone calls (an ancient method of communication from the Noughties), holidays, plus-ones at family events. After boyfriends, we never got that back. But — I don’t think we were meant to get that back. I don’t think anyone is meant to have exactly the same friendship from childhood until death. For what it’s worth, the friendship I speak of, which went though exactly the same rough patch you describe, is still my closest friendship now.
The first thing I’m going to advise is that you have an honest conversation with her and give her a chance to acknowledge her behaviour and how it’s affecting you. Don’t do this how I did it, which was to be strange and passive-aggressive and needy until I drank too much and then shouted at her for “abandoning” me: 10/10 would not recommend. Go for dinner or a walk and tell her that you’re finding this new phase of your friendship challenging and you want to be able to support her and her new relationship while also retaining something of the bond you’ve always had. Be careful not to hurl a list of carefully noted accusations at her, specifically citing all the things she’s done that have made you feel left out. It will just make her defensive and she’ll retreat further into her relationship because she will feel attacked. Only give her all the specifics if she asks for them.
Then, if this doesn’t change anything, let her go. I don’t mean ghost her or break up with her or make some huge point of your friendship being over. I mean: stop trying to make it work if she doesn’t want to make it work. It’s humiliating, will corrode your self-esteem and will make you slowly angrier and angrier. Let her go. Stop trying to force plans, stop trying to remind her of the magic of your friendship. None of it will work. If she has dissolved into her first romantic relationship, forgetting the importance of the relationships that came before him, it’s hard to pull her out of that. She has to realise her mistake on her own.
This is when I get to do the wise and weary old crone bit that I like: the likelihood is she’s not going to be with this man for ever. Hardly anyone is with anyone for ever, apart from Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. They will probably break up at some point in her twenties and she will realise how much she needs her friendships, and when she gets into her next relationship she’ll find a way of being in love without it dominating her entire life. Or, if they do stay together, at some point she’s going to realise that this relationship can’t replace all other valuable relationships in her life and she will want you in her life again.
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At the point when she comes back it will be important to tell her how this made you feel and make it clear that you don’t want it to happen again. Let her explain why she made those decisions. Take the time to understand why it happened. And then the hardest bit: forgive her.
It is so easy to lose yourself to love, at any time in life, but especially when you’re 21. I know how lost and unanchored you must feel, and you have every right to feel angry about how she’s treated you. But I also think it will feel better to try to empathise with her, so you don’t become embittered. For so many young women, the validation of first-time romantic love is so intoxicating that everything else becomes briefly meaningless. It is such a common misstep and one that, I promise, in the grand scheme of things, is so short-lived. No one in their late thirties is so obsessed with their husband that they leave their best friend’s birthday party early to go hang out with him and his friends at some crap pub in Putney. All that stops. It’s a rookie error.
Talk — if that doesn’t work, let her go, focus on other friendships. Don’t wait for her to come back. She’ll come back at some point. All the good ones do and they don’t disappear again.
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