Friends fall out all the time. So why does it feel worse than heartbreak?

October 3, 2025 — 10.47am

The break-ups I can’t stop thinking about aren’t the romantic kind, but they inspire the same panicked desperation. The endless checking of texts and Instagram Stories to track someone’s movements. The embarrassing, “hey, are we good?” olive branches that feel as weak as a note left under the windshield wipers of a car you’ve rear-ended. The fear of running into them at trusty haunts or mutual friends’ parties. When I’m awake staring at the ceiling at night, it’s not boyfriends I’m thinking about, but the friends whose lives no longer intersect with mine.

The end of a platonic relationship feels like a particularly sharp pain. Some fall apart suddenly, in chaos and argument. Most I’ve experienced or heard about are less discrete and specific than that. They stretch out and fray, with plenty left unsaid and months or years of two people wondering who will break the silence and neither pulling off the band-aid. Whether they end quickly or not at all, though, they’re equally painful.

Credit: Robin Cowcher

Ten years ago, while writing my first book (a memoir, as 25-year-olds in the 2010s were legally obliged to write), I devoted a chapter to the topic of friendships that existed only in past tense. It took the form of a letter and was vague enough to not point fingers at anyone in particular – including myself. At the time, the change from teens to young adulthood had left a handful of relationships in the dust. There was the person who’d moved overseas and left a trail of shattered relationships in their wake, whose Instagram posts announcing their return to Melbourne no longer inspired me to plan a catch-up. There was the high school friend whose entire identity changed the moment we graduated and became a total mystery. In their versions of events, I’m certain I’d tick some other box in the long list of possibilities for why you stop texting on the birthdays you’ve memorised.

In the decade since writing that chapter, I’ve learned shockingly little, despite collecting a few more files of evidence. Every person I speak to about friendship break-ups has an almost-identical story, and not one of us can exactly trace its narrative contours. One person told me how she believes her sobriety caused friendships to fade out of view. When the context of a relationship relies on the club, switching for morning walks or coffee dates doesn’t touch the sides, I guess.

Another wrote an album about the experience of being ghosted – then realised that her former friend would likely hear it. No experience of writing songs about exes had prepared her for the person who caused her emotional confusion to bear witness to its aftermath.

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My last friendship break-up was also with an artist. In hindsight, it’s a relationship that sounds like a montage in a movie. I remember the first time we met, the day I visited her studio to see her works-in-progress. She helped me hang a gallery wall in my new apartment, and when I asked how I’d patch the holes when I moved out, she assured me she’d be there to help do it right.

I also remember the last time I saw her, and the months of strange silence and strained communication that came after. The day I finally tested the temperature directly – essentially asking if she wanted to see my name pop up on her phone any more, after getting the sense the answer was “no” – I learned about all the ways she felt I’d let her down. She was hurt and then so was I. It seemed too far beyond repair.

After living with one of her paintings in my house for almost a year after that, I finally found it a new home. Seeing it on the wall hurt too much, and tucking it higher on a shelf, behind carefully positioned tchotchkes didn’t do it justice. She’d let me go and I had to do the same to this souvenir of our relationship. When I moved out of that apartment, my landlord issued me with a steep repair bill for the terrible spackle job I’d done.

The one universal thing everyone says about their former friends is that the fractures feel irreparable purely because they appear in relationships with people who know you the most intimately. When you’re putting on a cute, flirty front with a date, it’s easier to recover if they decide not to see you again. When someone knows the candid, uncensored, truest parts of you and loves them until they don’t, it leaves a mark.

Romantic heartbreak gets the blockbusters and ballads, but there are fewer soundtracks and cultural scripts for the messy quiet of friendships that fall apart. But as I’ve seen from talking about it more, there are few people who haven’t experienced it, who aren’t lying awake at night mentally excavating the ruins of these relationships, and who aren’t creating ways to process them by, say, writing about it in pop songs or newspaper columns.

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