For my 30th birthday, I hosted a game show about me. It was a ridiculous affair held in West London, where people that I’ve known and loved through the years participated in a series of rounds including: a rap round where guests had to write and perform a verse over Skepta and JME’s “That’s Not Me”; an arts and crafts round where the best drawing of me won; a music round featuring songs from the year I was born and, of course, a defend your embarrassing boyfriend round. The lead-up to 30 was stressful in a way I can’t help but cringe at now; the age carries a symbolic weight that I had attached the pressure of completeness to, as if I’d be cemented at 30 and never change. Despite these irrational fears, my 30th was probably the best celebration I’d ever thrown. After years of dragging friends through intense yearly physical activities – zip-lining, gymnastics, pole, and even aerial skills – a game show felt like a lighter option, something everyone could enjoy.
Still, between the singing, dancing and early-morning revelry, a low hum of sadness accompanied me. There was something missing. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate the friends and family who’d come to take part in yet another of my mad ideas – but I felt haunted by the absence of the friends who I’d assumed would see the day with me. Friends I used to speak to daily – sharing everything from the mundane details of what I had for breakfast to the intricacies of my menstrual cycle – weren’t there for a milestone celebration. It would be easy to say that these friendships had tumultuous endings with clean breaks, where the lines of right and wrong were clearly drawn, but they weren’t, which made it even more painful. The specific experience of grieving a friendship break-up that cannot be located in a single event is a form of “frozen grief”, a term coined by American psychologist Pauline Boss. You are frozen when you cannot process such a loss, because the cause of its demise is unclear.
Friendship fallouts are an endless source of fuel for the content factory. Women and girls applying makeup or skincare while revealing the story of a best friend who betrayed them can temporarily break the doomscroll. The storyteller is always the victim, the former “best friend” always the villain, and it falls into an easily digestible narrative even when the poster asks, “Am I the problem here?” I often wonder how the breakdown of years-long, nuanced, and complex friendships can be reduced to short clips that portray ex-friends as cartoonishly evil, stripped of their humanity. That said, I do secretly envy posters like this; they have a story, a timeline they can reliably use to trace the end of a friendship. What I lacked in clarity consumed me with sadness. Kat Vellos, author of and founder of community program Platonic Action Lab, describes friendship as blooming from four seeds of connection: proximity, frequency, compatibility and commitment. When the end of a friendship cannot be traced to a single moment of betrayal, she says, it can often be attributed to the absence of one of these seeds.
In my case, certain friendships have fizzled because groups have splintered and formed friendships with other groups, creating new ecosystems I wasn’t part of. It can be hard to trace where things really ended, but sometimes, I can remember the last proper conversation we ever had. My friend Fi and I spoke every day, sometimes multiple times – but during busy periods, this happened much less often. A week prior, we’d scheduled a hangout. Nothing out of the ordinary, just a catch-up. It was a busy week; we hadn’t FaceTimed as normal. I texted her on the day to figure out what we’d be doing. She replied instantly, “Sorry, girl, I didn’t hear from you. I’m out with my other friend tonight.” And that was that. We never usually confirmed ahead of time; I’d assumed our friendship was fluid and existed without that level of admin, especially for arranged plans. Still, we never really spoke again. I messaged her on her birthday, but she didn’t message me on mine, and when we saw each other in person, once, it didn’t feel like “no time had passed”; it felt like I’d lived 40 lives since our last conversation, and things were never the same.
The older I get, the fuzzier the image of me with a partner and kids is in my mind’s eye. I’m unsure if my future will involve being focused on a traditional family unit – because of that, my friendships are of utmost importance to me. Friends are not consolation prizes for romantic relationships; they are equally, if not more, significant than romantic ones. The loss of a friendship feels like the loss of an imagined future we shared. It is the loss of a support system, and it feels even worse when there is no big lesson to be learned from it, no great “wrong” to work through, just an unsatisfying understanding that things change, and sometimes it is beyond our control to stop them.
Though I felt sad at points on my birthday, I was also grateful for all the new relationships that spawned in the wake of old ones. New rituals created and memories shared. There was also something to learn in the grief, as Elizabeth Day writes in : “Perhaps in the letting go, we had understood something integral about ourselves. Perhaps that was all right. Perhaps that was a kind of love.”
