For many people, friendships are one of the most important parts of their life. Good friends help us on our hardest days and laugh with us on our silliest. We trust them with our secrets and they trust us with theirs. Sometimes your soul can connect with someone instantly and a friendship can be formed seemingly out of thin air. Other times, it’s the people you’ve grown up with who have always been by your side. No matter how long you have known each other you always think you’ll be friends forever so it will always take you off guard if a friend breaks up with you.

Friend breakups are similar to relationship breakups in the sense that you lose someone who is close to you. Someone who ultimately says: You are no longer making me happy and giving me what I need. The difference is when you breakup with a serious boyfriend or girlfriend, you ultimately sit down and have a talk. You figure out together that it’s not going anywhere or that one person just isn’t feeling it like they used to. When a friend breakup occurs though, it’s different. It’s almost like breaking up with a random guy you’ve been seeing for two weeks, who’s getting annoying and who you decide to just ignore. Instead of sitting down together and discussing why you can’t be friends anymore, friend breakups seem to end by being boxed out, ignored, and ultimately dismissed. As if all your years together as friends and shared secrets and awesome memories never happened.

While the ending of a relationship with a partner often sucks and it’s terrible to get over, a friend breakup may be worse; especially if you never know exactly why you’ve been dismissed. If you keep trying to hang out or catch up with a friend and are constantly getting turned down or ignored, there’s a major chance you’re being broken up with. If you have no clue why you’re being broken up with it might drive you crazy because you know you’d do anything for that person and you still consider them a close friend. It will break your heart.

It will truly break your heart because you’ll still carry years of memories with you. Small things will remind you of your friend long after they’re gone and you’ll laugh out loud thinking of the funny memories you shared. Then you’ll want to cry because you miss them. Not knowing why it ended will eat at you and you’ll always want to know where your friendship went wrong. It’s different than the pain that comes with a real breakup, it’s deeper and it stings in a way that only an ended friendship could.

You have to let it go. You can’t hold on to the pain it brings you every time you see something you know she’d laugh at. And as much as you care, and feel like you will always care, you need to stop. You need to stop caring because in truth, your friend stopped caring long ago. If you are a great friend, a trust worthy person, and you always try to be positive then you can’t let a friend breakup rain on your parade. It will only bring you down.

Instead, surround yourself with people who genuinely like you for you. Be friends with people who make you happy and who enjoy your company as much as you enjoy theirs. Life is too short to be friends with people you have to chase around or who put in a half-assed effort most of the time. Be friends with people who stand by you through your dark days and cheer you on through your triumphs.

Most of all, don’t blame yourself if you’ve done nothing wrong. If your friend didn’t have enough balls to tell you why she wanted to breakup then you can be sure her reasoning is shit. So stop trying to figure it out and just let it go because clearly, this person doesn’t deserve your time. And you deserve more from a friendship than being let down by a person you cared for and trusted for years.

No breakup is a fun breakup,
The Love Hawk