Asking for a Friend

When romantic relationships end, there’s usually a clean cut – a moment, a conversation, an argument that ends things for good. When friendships dissolve, the break is usually way less clear, if it’s clear at all.

—

Support our new independent production (and get bonus content galore!) by joining TTFA Premium. We now offer tiers as low as $4.99 / month. Sign up.

Our email subscribers get first dibs on ticket sales, new merch, show announcements and more. Join our mailing list here.

Did you know we’re on TikTok? Yep, it’s true. Follow Nora. You can catch up with TTFA on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook using @ttfapodcast. Nora's Instagram is @noraborealis.

—

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Listener 1: It's incredibly painful when someone that knows everything about you decides they don't like you. They don't love you anymore.

Listener 2: It was just so bizarre that this person that I had spent so many formative years with just kind of disappeared.

Listener 8: I literally just let it go. And I wanted him to know he hurt me. And I wanted him to know that I had had enough. I feel like just because you have history with somebody, it doesn't give them an excuse to be shitty. 

Listener 3: It was really, really hard, because she was so much a part of so many things for so long.

Listener 4: It kind of was just a very unhealthy, toxic relationship that I was trying to control and equally just frustrated about.

Listener 5:  It sucked. And she … I really loved her. And I still do, I suppose. I mean, part of me does.

Every heartbreak is the same. You love someone. Your lives are intertwined. You know each other as well as anyone could … and then you don’t. 

And every heartbreak is unique, because every relationship has its own fingerprint, its own DNA, its own shorthand language that dies when the relationship does. Countless ways two people can signal to each other: I know you. I got you.

And then what? Marriages end in divorce. Romantic relationships end in breakups.

But what about friendships? Because in all the years we’ve been making this podcast, we’ve somehow never talked about this – about the agony of losing a friend. Not to death, but to the messiness of life.

Listener 1: My best friend of, like, 30 years, ghosted me 11 years ago. I'm still not over it. And I've thought, like, “Why have I been able to get over breakups with romantic people, romantic partners, but I've been completely unable to get over this?” She ghosted me right after my dad died, while my sister was sick, and my mother was sick, and I was probably in the worst place I could be.

Listener 5: Sometime in early 2019, I found out that she actually had really strong feelings for this guy and is, like, in love with him. And at that time I did not then tell her that I slept with him a couple of years prior. I didn't think it was important. I thought it would just probably make her really angry for probably no reason. So I just didn't say anything. Those two ended up becoming official, and he consequently told her about it. And she ended up freaking out, as I thought she would. And it led to a couple of months of bickering. Then a couple of months of silence. And then eventually the end of the friendship.

Listener 6: Neither of us are perfect, and I'm sure we both made our share of mistakes. But it was just really hard to feel like I've been trying and trying and trying to make this person fit. And so we kind of had it out and kind of shared, I think, how we both were feeling and realized we were just at a crossroads in our friendship. And we just haven't really talked since. This year I realized a few days after my birthday that she never texted me, even on my birthday, which was so strange to have somebody that's such a big part of your life and not even hear from them on a day that you expect to hear from random people on Facebook. And to not hear from this person. And then the same thing happened when her birthday came. I realized a few days after her birthday that I actually hadn’t reached out to her.

We got hundreds of messages like this, filled with the pain of losing a friendship. 

So many of you said that you didn’t even end the friendship. You were ghosted. You ghosted someone else. It fizzled. It faded. 

What happened? 

Nothing happened. 

Everything happened. 

Life happened. 

Listener 7: Like so many widows, I lost a lot of my friends – I actually lost almost all of my friendships – when my husband died when I was 28 years old. My best friend of several years, I was having a mental and physical health crisis about a year and a half after my husband died, and I was having suicidal thoughts, and I texted her and told her that I was, and asked if I could come to her house. And I started driving there. And I just got this gut feeling all the sudden, like, “This isn’t okay. She’s not going to be able to receive me in this state.” And so I turned around and went somewhere else and wound up living out of my car for, like, the next several months. And never heard from her again. 

Listener 9: In all honesty, I might have been able to get over the whole dating a guy I talked about marrying thing – emphasis on might. But what I can't get over is that she lied to my face about it. How was I not worth the conversation? 

Listener 1: I think partly why it hurts so much is because a friend is someone who knows everything about you. And friendships are supposed to be forever. You always hearing that, you know, “Best friends forever!” But also, friends aren't always forever.

In the closet where I record this podcast, there is a box of notes. It’s actually a gallon Ziplock bag filled with notes. Notes I scrawled out with glittery, multicolor gel pen on wide-ruled notebook paper. Notes that were folded into paper footballs and complicated origami before being carefully slipped into a friend’s hand in between middle school and high school classes – hoping the teacher wouldn’t notice, because HOW HUMILIATING WOULD IT BE IF MR. NEWMAN were to intercept this little letter and know exactly how I felt about Derrick?

(I will say that everybody knew how I felt about Derrick. I literally told people I LOVE DERRICK ROBINSON, hoping it would get back to him. If it did, he did not care. And that is okay.)

But the notes. I’ve carted these notes around with me for the past 20+ years because they’re a time capsule of all of these friendships. And most of them are filled with the minute of being a tween or a teen.  Hot topics like: Who likes who? And where are we hanging out this weekend? Will David ask me to homecoming? The answer to that last one was no, he would not. And I would tell high school me, “If you have to exchange 30 pages of communication with about a dozen people asking if a boy is going to ask you to do literally anything, he is not going to. He is not going to.”

Some of these notes are so heartfelt, they’re so emotional. They’re love letters. And they bring me right back to tenth grade when I read them now. 

And some of them are actual, honest-to-goodness letters – letters that my friends and I sent through the actual U.S. Postal Service during college because believe it or not, 20 years ago, not all college dorms had internet access, and there was a certain magic to walking physically across campus, putting your key in the little mailbox, unlocking it, and finding an envelope sent from another nondescript cinder block building 600 miles away.

Some of these friendships in these letters, they're gone. I have notes from girls and a few guys who were so deeply entrenched in my life and are now strangers. Now complete strangers to me. And this is normal, I know. Our friend circles expand and collapse and combine all the time, bringing new people in, letting others fade away. Some friendships just end. Nothing malicious, ust the circle of life. 

When we asked our listeners about friendships, friendships that ended, friendships that failed, dozens of you wrote in to tell us about your hardest, most hurtful, most life-changing breakups.

And that’s what we’ll talk about … after this break.

—

While we were working on this episode, an article came out in The Atlantic by a staff writer named Jennifer Senior. It was called: “IT’S YOUR FRIENDS WHO BREAK YOUR HEART – the older we get, the more we need our friends … and the harder it is to keep them.”

The article was about – duh – friendship. The ones that last. The ones that don’t. Why.

And I saw that article everywhere. It hit so close to home. I immediately tried to figure out who at The Atlantic could connect me with Jennifer Senior, and then I took an hour of her time stressing about why the hotel wifi was so bad and apologizing for that, and then talking her ear off about many irrelevant topics and also this topic, friendship.

Because I have lost a lot of friends. Mostly in fadeaways. Sometimes in an explosion. And when it comes to an explosion, those are always because I was a jerk. I was a huge, huge jerk. If you roll the tape back on most of the friendships that no longer exist, you’ll see it was on me. It was on me.

And ohhhh, the shame. The shame of it all! Of the friendships that just sort of faded and the friendships that exploded. Because friendships are so important. They sustain us. They nurture us. They form us. And like any relationship, of course they’re not all forever. 

Jennifer wrote this piece in 2021, when she was going through what she calls “a Great Pandemic Friendship Reckoning.” 

I’m going to quote her here: “All of those hours in isolation had amounted to one long spin of the centrifuge, separating the thickest friendships from the thinnest; the ambient threat of death and loss made me realize that if I wanted to renew or intensify my bonds with the people I loved most, the time was now, right now.”

Here’s Jennifer.

Jennifer Senior: I was suddenly neck deep in conversation with friends about what friendship was, in the literature. You can only kind of be ankle deep, maybe shin deep, into that, because there's not so much. As I said in the story, it's a really unsatisfying body of literature thus far. I just tried to write an essay that bolted all the disparate parts onto one thing. I didn't expect it to do as well as it did, to tell you the truth.

Nora McInerny: You didn't?

Jennifer Senior: No, because there’s no clear thesis! There’s no thesis in there! I'm just sort of skipping from lily pad to lily pad. I think there was probably some kind of appetite to talk about friendship, and maybe approaching it in that prismatic, every which way kind of way was what people wanted at that moment. So it was fine.

Nora McInerny: I think the prismatic element of it is also how we experience this very disorienting sort of loss. One of the things that struck me from the piece was that most friendships don't end in sort of a flaming explosion. They just fade away. And when things fade away – when we don't have, like, a place to point to and say, “Oh, it was this, actually” – I think that is just so disorienting.

Jennifer Senior: Some part of your history dies and vanishes. I mean, you're suddenly without moorings, especially if there's been no formal discussion – and there very seldom is – or some kind of operatic breakup. If that part of your life just kind of drifts off like a wrench in space, it's like losing photographs in an album. It's like, who were you? What were you? It's just one other thing that kind of gets washed away, and that's hard. I think people like having coherent stories to tell about their lives. I think the importance of story has been established to people's lives and, you know, having a coherent narrative to tell. And it's weird that this is a tragedy that doesn't have a name and isn't quite identified as a tragedy. It's just kind of this silent loss. Or, I don't know, reckoning. It's also hard to figure out how to assign the meaning anymore. The movie “Inside Out,” when everybody was fighting really hard to make sure that all of the sunshine-y yellow memories weren't suddenly recast as blue? I mean, it's the same memory, but suddenly because your life circumstances have changed, you now see it in this bittersweet or melancholy light. Not knowing how to categorize a whole phase of life when other things have happened or overtaken it, or the narrative has been violently rewritten? It's really hard. If a friend goes away, you're suddenly not speaking that language. It's almost like you forgot how to speak Dutch. You know, like, you're not speaking it anymore.

Nora McInerny: I was so surprised about the statistic, the Dutch study that you mentioned in the piece, about how we recast our social circles every seven years.

Jennifer Senior: That blew me away, too. I mean, unfortunately, it also made intuitive sense, and if I thought about it and did my own personal inventory, it was probably about right. Specifically, what it found was that every seven years, about half the people in our inner network or social networks of, let's say, the closest 15, switch around, which is … it's amazing. It's kind of shocking. That's a lot more churn than people like to admit.

Nora McInerny: There's this time in our lives that I am sort of entering – middle age – and the demands on your time just become so ridiculous. And you do have this understanding that you write about in your piece, where you're like, “OK, we all get it. We're all busy. We all still care for each other. We all still love each other.” But at some point those obligations sort of slow down, you know? Eventually, like, let's knock on wood, these kids will leave my house eventually. Maybe I won't be working, you know, like, 50 hours a week. And then … we're sort of tasked with trying to reinvigorate, you know, the intimacies of these relationships that used to be so central to our lives.

Jennifer Senior: Who was it when they were talking about getting the band back together? And they said it was like trying to reinflate a souffle? And here's the thing. I think with some friends, it's not like that. You can not speak for 20 years and pick up exactly where you left off. There are friendships that are like that. And I don't know what it is, if it's just the cornice of who you are and who they are, and you can just find who each other is fairly quickly and you love each other that much. And there you are, right back in it. And then there are others for whom it's just a lot harder. But yes, there's a lot that gets taken for granted in middle age when there's just all of this other stuff, all of these claims on your attention and your time. And one of the things that I found hardest were some of the friends who like, let's say, didn't have kids or and who maybe didn't have a partner. I had one in particular who would every two years or so yell at me and say that I wasn't paying enough attention. And I never knew how to handle that. You know? I just never knew what to say, because it's true. You know, like, you have to be mindful. And yet your time is finite.

Nora McInerny: Yeah. You identify in the piece as being, you know, the kind of friend who just doesn't reach out. And I am too. I am the kind of friend who left college and just never, ever talked to anyone again. Not even out of, like, anger or anything like that. I was like, “Well, I don't know. They probably don't need to hear from me.” I just, that's how I- that's how I treated a lot of people. And I'm kind of embarrassed by it. 

Jennifer Senior: It's common. It's common. And yes, it can be your and my secret shame that we're not better at this – although, now it's not so much of a secret. But I mean, it's unusual to have somebody who has that kind of tenacity and that kind of, I don't know, attentiveness.

My youngest child just graduated from preschool, and he would come home from school and regularly update me on his friendship roster. This preschool actually refers to every student as a “friend,” which is funny when your kid is basically ratting on every kid in the class and says something like, “So and so kicked a friend in the face today and he had to think about his choices.” And you ask him, “Well, what friend did he kick in the face?” and your child says, “Me. He kicked me in the face.” [laughs]

But even if they're forced to call every child their friend, I think my child knows what the word means, what it means to be a friend. Because he will come home and he will say -- I’m making up the names but not the situations -- “Jasper told me today we aren’t friends anymore. Lincoln is my friend today. Jemima is not my friend; she poured milk in my lap.”

Boom. You’re in or you’re out. It’s just that simple. 

We don’t do that so much as adults. Not the pouring of milk in the lap or the declarative ending of a friendship.

In fact, of all the people we heard from about the end of a friendship -- of all the people I KNOW who have gone through the end of a friendship -- there were not many (I can only remember one, which doesn’t mean there were more, but I can only remember one), that was an unconscious uncoupling. Where both parties sat down, assessed, and said, “Look, we aren’t enemies, but this friendship is over.”

What I'm saying is that adults are not as good about ending friendships as preschoolers. 

Jennifer Senior: I would certainly be interested in the cultivation of better rituals for that kind of thing. I think that would be terrific, if we could develop a vocabulary as a culture for how to do this. I had the experience, maybe a couple of years ago, with a woman who I really like a lot. She's wonderful. She's lovely. But her interest in cultivating a friendship was sort of so overwhelming to me, and I finally had to say to her explicitly, “I'm sorry I'm not being as responsive as you'd like me to be. What I think I want you to understand is that I'm not even really all that good at keeping up with the people I have known for 30 and 40 years, and I'm still trying to figure out how to be good at that. And so if it looks like I'm not interested or that I'm- that I keep holding you at arm's length, it's because I'm finding it hard to even accommodate them. I'm just not very good at organizing my time.” And just saying it made things a whole lot better. It wasn't like me feeling resentment and going, “Why is she still after my time?!” I needed to explain what the problem was.

Nora McInerny: We never communicate these things. We also don't have any sort of like cultural scripts for, “Oh, this is the kind of friend I am. This is the kind of friend you are. This is what a relationship could look like.” We just go into these things thinking everybody is exactly like us, and that it's perfectly acceptable to expect, you know, whatever this woman was expecting of you, or, you know, for me to be like, “Oh yeah, it's perfectly normal. I'll never email you. I'll never call you. [laughs] But I'll still think of you fondly and, you know, and hopefully we'll see each other every ten years or something.”

Jennifer Senior: And also just the idea that there might be a kind of taxonomy for friendships. She's a giraffe, and she is an elephant, and that one is a penguin. And, you know, just, that there are different kinds of people who behave in certain sorts of ways. And then it might be easier just to know who you're dealing with. I told a different friend who was a newer friend – she's not anymore; she's like a friend of 20 years now – but I said to her, when we first became friends, “I'm very bad at reaching out. I appear to not be a reacher outer.” And she said, “I'm so glad you told me that. I won't take it personally then, if I do more of the reaching out.” And I said, “Yes, exactly, please don't. I'm sorry. I know it's a really shitty trait.” But it just helps. It helps. You know? I think, if we can perhaps identify ourselves. And I think that the way that friends also pick up the slack, that they fill some function that our families of origin couldn't or didn't, is fascinating and makes them even more fragile and vulnerable and fraught. And maybe it would be worth talking to our friends about that. “Maybe I'm expecting something of you that is unfair to expect. You can't compensate, possibly, for the deficiencies that I grew up with.” Even something as simple as that. It takes a lot of awareness to even know that you're searching for those things. But sometimes it's worth doing.

Sometimes, it’s worth doing.

When we get back, we’re going to dissect the breakup of two best friends.

—

One of the things Jennifer and I talked about is how with romantic relationships, there’s usually a clean cut – a moment, a conversation, a fight that ends things for good. It’s not always a clean ending – romantic breakups can obviously be very, very messy – but it’s at least obvious to all parties that whatever you had is now over.

When friendships dissolve, the break is usually way less clear. You drift apart. One day, you simply stop reaching out to each other … you stop playing phone tag … you stop trying to find that time to get together.

But not always.

We were actually working on this episode, one of our producers, Jeyca, said, “Oh, well, actually, I went through a friend breakup, and it was very, very clean cut.”

Jeyca: I sent her a text essentially saying, “I don't want to be your friend anymore.” Like, “You said some stuff that really hurt my feelings, and I just don't … like, I don't think that we should be friends.”

Yep, that is very clean cut. That is very clear.

Something that Jennifer hit on in that Atlantic article and during our conversation is how, in American culture especially, we don’t have a way to talk about friendships and work through conflicts with our friends the same way we do in romantic relationships. This means that lots of friendships fall apart because we aren’t communicating what we need and don’t need to our friends. We aren’t communicating our expectations. And then when our friends fail to meet our unspoken standards – standards that we may not even understand that we have – we’re hurt, disappointed, we feel betrayed. It’s just a lose-lose scenario.

And in a lot of ways, that’s what happened with Jeyca and her friend Anna. 

The two of them met in high school. They were initially part of different friend circles – and then those friend circles started to become a lil’ Venn diagram their junior year. 

Anna: I was kind of getting out of a friend group and merging in with the people who, you know, more fit my energy, the activities that I liked. So we got pretty close then. And then we were at different schools the first year of undergrad, and we'd visit each other. And then we had this year where all of our friend group were at different schools, and then we all transferred to the U of M, so we needed somewhere to live, and we kind of went for it. And her and I shared a bedroom with the bunk bed from my childhood bedroom.

Jeyca: Way too many people for such a small space. But it was fun, because it was like we are both finally getting the college experience that I think we wanted to get from our previous school, but didn't. 

For listeners who aren’t familiar, the U of M in this case refers to the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. 

Jeyca: We lived in a small apartment where it did not matter what you did, you would never get a noise complaint, because it was all students. So we threw a lot of big parties together. We would go out, and this was like, we were at that age where it was like, “We'll walk. It's only three miles. We'll walk. It's cold, but that's okay.” So just getting ready to go out together.

Anna: We had a big phase where we were going to shows every weekend, probably a couple of times a week. But if it was just her and I, we'd just hang out, do whatever, go on a walk, watch a movie.

Jeyca: She and I also, we were just like such chaotic people living together. She and I couldn't seem to keep our room clean. And so then we'd have, like, big cleaning days because it would just get out of control. For me, it was clothes everywhere. For Anna it was food because she loved to cook.

We talked to Jeyca and Anna separately as a little bit of an experiment. There’s always so many sides to any story, and we wanted to see how their perspectives of the end of their friendship aligned or diverged. 

Anna: I feel like it was a lot of little things spread out, where in the moment, we would have, like, a little … little argument or something would happen, and then we'd move on from it. But I think eventually that all just built up more for her than for me.

Jeyca: So that summer after my sophomore year of college, I got an internship at Minnesota Public Radio, and Anna was working a job that had her working later shifts. My work started at like seven or something like that. So I was there early, done early, and Anna was working later. So our schedules didn't really line up. And so we didn't see a ton of each other, partially because of that, but also partially because at this time she had started seeing a new guy. We'll call him William.

Anna: I was also getting into my first relationship at the time. Like, never dated anyone in high school. So it was that, like, all-encompassing feeling of wanting to spend all your time with this person or think about them or be selfish with your actions and who you're spending your time with. And it's like, looking back now, I was 18, 19, and just like … I wouldn't give, I wouldn't give anybody that kind of energy. [laughs] I was basically living out of my car this whole summer and staying with my parents or staying at my then-boyfriend's house, or just kind of bouncing around between places. And when I would come back to, like, get things or pick things up, there was this really tense energy in the room. Like, we weren't talking like we normally had.

Jeyca: So I didn't see a lot of her that summer. I was working and I was like in my dream internship, but I was also super depressed. Like my depression had hit the worse it had ever been.

Anna: We were also both having our own mental health issues, so I was having crippling panic attacks, where my body would just shake and I would stay home and not socialize. And on the other hand, she was very depressed and trying her best to spend time with people to kind of force feeling better or force happiness. And for a long time we were kind of partners in that and helping each other out. And then I got to a point where I saw a doctor, and I started taking medication, and I started trying to work a little harder on that for myself. And it became harder for me to kind of sympathize with what she was going on with, because in my mind, I was like, “I took these steps, I did this. I'm feeling better. I want you to do that.” And I would try to kind of advocate for her to do that. And then it didn't really happen. It wasn't her time. And that's not her fault. And that's not my fault either.

Jeyca: I called my mom one day and I was like, just started crying. And I was like, “Mom, something's wrong. Like, I don't know what's wrong, but, like, I go to work and I'm so happy with the job I have. But I come home, and all I do is sleep. I sleep and, like, I nap. And I don't do anything else. And I'm crying a lot, and I don't know what's going on.” And my mom was like, “Okay, like, if you need to go see a doctor, we’ll take you. Like, whatever you need.” And so I texted my friends and I was like, “Hi. I'm having a really hard time mentally right now. If you guys could come by, if we could see each other, that'd be really great. I just need to be around people.” And everybody responded and really, like, stepped up to the plate, except for Anna. And that really sucked, because she was the one I expected to, because we lived together. We were still technically living together at this point.

Anna: I think both of us having those pretty strong forces driving us to not act how we want to act or not be ourselves when we were spending every single day with each other. There is nowhere else for that bad energy to go but onto someone that's close to you.

You can hear their stories match up. Anna admits that yeah, she got obsessed with a boy! To me, that is very relatable! I’ve done this. I’ve had friends get very consumed and intoxicated by a new relationship. And Jeyca wasn’t getting what she expected out of the friendship, at a time when she really needed emotional support. 

But here’s where the stories diverge. 

It’s a random summer day, and Jeyca and Anna finally find time in their complicated work schedules to hang out. And to set the scene, I need you to picture one of the happier places on earth. 

It’s Target.  

During this outing, Jeyca remembers Anna talking about her boyfriend William … a lot. 

Jeyca: And that happened from the moment I got in her car to the moment she dropped me off, and she asked not one question about me. And that really struck me. And then I think that prompted a phone call where we kind of talked about it all and laid it all out there. And I was like, “Hey, I just don't feel like you've been here for me. And I understand that, like, we have different work schedules, but I don't feel very supported by you.” And amongst other things, she said that it was hard for her to be there for me with my mental health issues, because it was too much for her. And I was like, “Oh, yikes.” I was like, “I think that's every mentally ill person's, like, biggest fear.”

So, Jeyca sends a text message ending their friendship. 

And Anna? 

Anna: I do not even remember receiving it. I didn't realize how much it was bothering her until everything kind of blew up. I didn't really see it coming. And I think it was definitely her decision, much more than it was mine.

The two former friends and roommates move out of that loud, lively college apartment. And if you remember, they are part of a big mutual friend group who are all wondering … Now what? Do we pick sides? Can we still be friends with both Jeyca and Anna if Jeyca and Anna are no longer friends?

It’s uncomfortable. 

And it stays uncomfortable until about a year later, when Anna and William break up. 

At this point, Jeyca had been treating her depression. She’d done some work on herself, she had a little more perspective on how the friendship went so bad so quickly. And she has a hunch Anna could use some support after this breakup, so she reaches out.

Anna: This relationship kind of took my time away from my friends. And it was the day after that relationship ended I got a text from her. And I don't know if it had anything to do with that or, you know, it just happened. But she reached out to me and we started talking about that relationship and she was like, “I hope you're doing okay. We go to trivia every week. Come with us next time.” And then I started doing that, and it was like nothing had changed. It was like everything was back to normal, but in a different way. 

Jeyca: For a while, we went without sort of, like, addressing anything. It was just like, okay, we're starting fresh. But there was like a night that summer where we had all gone out to a party. And I remember sitting out in the backyard just Anna and I, sitting around her bonfire. And I, we sat, we, like, talked about everything that had happened. I think she was really struck by the fact of how quickly I, like, dropped the friendship. And I think being older now and having done some amount of therapy, I was like, “Oh, I get why I do that now. I understand that. ”[laughs] I think I was too young to express that. I was like, “Hey, I have some abandonment issues. So the second I feel like somebody is abandoning me, my brain goes, ‘Well, you should leave them before they can leave you.’” And that's what I did with Anna, was I was like, “I don't want to give her the chance to do that, so I'm going to leave her.” I think it was a catharsis to just get it off our chest and be like, okay, because we'd already decided that we were friends again. We'd already kind of decided to forgive, but it was like sort of beginning the process of acknowledging that we had hurt each other mutually. And if we wanted to move forward and be friends for a longer time, we needed to, like, talk about that.

Anna: We kind of talked about everything and then started talking in circles. And I think we just got to the point where we were like, “Let's move past this.”

I was in Girl Scouts very briefly as a child. I’m not much of a joiner, and I’m a horrible salesperson, but it was basically the only after-school activity, and everyone else was doing it, and I am absolutely a follower. 

At every meeting, we would join hands at the end and sing. And I won’t sing the song to you – you've done nothing to deserve that. But I’ll read the lyrics to you:

Make new friends; 

But keep the old;

One is silver and the other gold;

A circle is round;

It has no end;

That’s how long I want to be your friend.

We sang that with our whole hearts. That’s how long we want to be friends. But it’s okay if we’re not. And also, do we need to rank each other by precious metals? I think not. 

Our friendships -- like any relationship -- change.

Jeyca and Anna’s friendship has changed. Anna lives in another state, so they don’t have those same late nights sharing a bunk bed and swapping clothes and hosting parties, but they keep in touch.

Jeyca: I feel like we're the friends who FaceTime randomly every few months. I'll get a random FaceTime call from Anna and we'll talk for, like, two hours. I still really cherish my friendship with Anna, especially for what it was, and I appreciate it for what it is now.

Sometimes what it is is just the memory of what it was. Some photos saved to the cloud. An ache in our heart when we hear their name. An old piece of looseleaf paper scrawled with secrets, written in glitter gel pen, signed with a w/b -- write back! 

Eventually, I noticed, the note stopped being passed back. Someone is always the last person to write.

But who we were to each other remains, tucked into a box or somewhere in our memories.

Does it hurt? Sometimes. 

Will it always? Maybe. 

Listener 5: My other friends earlier today asked me about this very breakup and asked if our friendship had died. And I thought that was an interesting way to put it. But I told them that, no, I think it just ended. I feel like the death of a friendship implies that, you know, the people in it aren't their own people once it's over, and that's not true. I don't feel any less because she's not in my life anymore. It sucked, but it's over, and I'm okay.