Dear Friend — You Left Me No Choice

Twenty-six years of friendship and I finally plucked up the courage to cut the cord

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“To have a friend, you must be a friend.” — Ralph Waldo

It took me almost three decades to realise you didn’t want to be a friend. Certainly not in the way I define friendship. But you lapped up the friendship I offered. And maybe that is at the root of our separation. Perhaps my hopes of reciprocity were delusional. Ultimately, in the end, our friendship expectations weren’t aligned.

I miss you, yet I feel liberated.

There’s a grief.

I ache for the romanticised version of us growing old together and sharing whatever the rollercoaster of life may grace us with.

Untangling from you was part of my self-reclamation. I needed to create distance to seize back my oxygen and inflate my spirit.

And while we are now strangers, I still love you. I still dream about you.

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I want you to know that deciding not to reply to that final text message was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

It’s not that I didn’t want to wish you well for the life flex you messaged me about. But it’s that I had already found acceptance and closure. I had said my goodbye. You just hadn’t realised it.

You could have asked how I was any time. You could have initiated a message to me just to say you were thinking of me. But you didn’t. Instead, you only messaged me to tell me something you were excited about for you.

In that final message, you asked me how I was. But it felt dutiful, rhetorical. Enquiring about me was an afterthought, a polite query shoehorned onto the end of your news. Honestly, it didn’t feel like you actually cared.

I’m sorry I never shared in the excitement of your news. Believe me, I was genuinely delighted for you.

But, for a long time, I’ve felt let down by you. In my mind, a true friend is someone who helps celebrate when life is good and commiserates when life is shitty. You were absent from many of my highs and lows, yet it felt like you expected me to be in the audience of your life, a cheerleader at all the right times.

In truth — it never felt like I mattered to you.

We were constantly in misstep, and this dance was serving no one. It’s not that you were doing anything wrong; rather, I wanted something different. Perhaps we spoke different languages of friendship love, perhaps the friendship I gave was not what you wanted or needed. And if so, I’m sorry, maybe we could have communicated better.

For my part, I wanted to be known and seen, not just to know and see.

But here’s the thing: if you were genuinely curious as to how I was over the years, you could have initiated contact instead of leaving the maintenance of our connection to me. Without my keeping it afloat, I suspect our friendship would have drowned years ago.

Some friendships survive and thrive the divergences of life, others wilt. This is normal. I just never imagined that we would wilt.

Looking in from the outside, it seemed like you managed to show up in other friendships. So maybe it was just a me thing. Perhaps I should have taken the hint long ago.

Honestly, it grew tiring because I tried so hard, desperate to win your favour, but after each interaction, I felt empty, unseen and shrivelled by the disappointment of our lack of connection. The burden of our friendship crushed me. And at this time in my life, I didn’t believe I was worthy or deserving of more, so I took what I was given.

I felt you slipping through my fingers, and for too long, I gripped, I grasped, I held on in hope and fear, unwilling to let you go. Perhaps my insecurity made me too needy, and I restricted and suffocated you.

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Something changed in me when I started therapy. I learned to see my worth, to value myself, to recognise that I matter, and I am allowed to ask for my needs to be met. I am allowed to orbit around my life, instead of putting others at the centre of my being.

When I didn’t reply to that message and allowed its flames to fizzle into embers, I thought your lack of follow-up was telling.

We are all different. I understand this.

We engage with others based on our individuality, and there is no right or wrong. But if I messaged someone with big news and didn’t receive a response, or the sort of response I’ve come to expect over a 26-year friendship, I would have followed up to check in, for fear that something was wrong. Maybe that’s just me.

But I now realise it was never about me, was it?

Because you only saw me in relation to you. I was the supporting act to your leading role.

And that's ok. We must all be the stars of our own shows, while still finding ways to support and nurture all the other stars. How dull a galaxy would be with just one lone star. The way I see it, in healthy friendships, our sparkling and twinkling compliments each other.

In truth, I had no right to complain about how you interacted in our friendship if I kept putting myself in the same position of servitude. Expecting you to change to accommodate my needs was futile. I needed to change myself.

And so I finally surrendered and found acceptance. I didn’t reply, and you didn’t chase, and that was the finality of things. Into the ether our friendship silently evaporated.

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Ironically, I did this to myself. I set you up to not need me.

I know you aren’t someone who needs lots of friends. So when I encouraged you and your now best friend to spend more time together, as you were experiencing similar life events, I should have known I would be pushed out.

It hurt.

It feels shameful to admit I was jealous. But I’m glad you had each other. She gave you what I couldn’t.

It stung seeing your lives pan out in fun nights out - which I wasn’t invited to - posted on Facebook. The sense of loneliness and rejection at being left out gnawed at my insides. I felt rejected. There was no room for me in that friendship dynamic, two’s company and three's a crowd.

So, I took the hint and turned my attention to other friendships.

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I went from being your chief bridesmaid at your first wedding to not even knowing the date of your second wedding.

Friendships come and go. Like the rise and fall of the tide, dynamics change, and impermanence infiltrates the air around us.

Perhaps the process of relegation was what I found so hard. No words or conversation, just an unspoken adjustment to the position I once held.

I’m not sure the friendships that were once the oxygen of all friendships can survive this reshuffling.

Being an invited guest lurking in the background at your baby shower felt peculiar, excruciating even. Here I was on the periphery when there was once a time I would have been the organiser.

And it’s ok. As we’ve said, friendships change. Life ebbs and flows.

But going from being so close to feeling like mere acquaintances with tokenistic annual birthday messages is not my idea of friendship.

We share albums of adventures from our school days and travels. I cherish these.

I can honour our past friendship and remember you fondly. And I hope you can see why I needed to leave what we had in the past.

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I wonder what your story is. Do you feel abandoned?

There is never a good time to end a friendship. And sometimes a definitive end is not needed; we just allow ourselves to drift apart. But for us, I needed closure. This endless hope and pretence was crippling me.

Perhaps you think I am heartless, as I know you were going through a tough time. Did you know I was also going through a tough time?

You have no idea how many hours I’ve spent discussing you and our friendship patterns with my therapist.

I told my therapist I thought you would be angry at me and hold an attitude of “How dare she…”. Maybe you do, maybe you don’t.

I hope you know that drifting away from you took more courage than I believed I had. And I’m proud of myself for letting go. If you are truly honest with yourself, I suspect you also feel a sense of liberation.

I can love you from afar. My wish for us both is a long, happy and healthy life.

If we happen upon each other at some point in the future, I hope we will exchange smiles and well wishes and not just pass as bristling strangers.

You are a star in my friendship sky; keep twinkling.

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If you read AN regularly and benefit from the content, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Or, you can show appreciation for my work and buy me a coffee.

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You may also enjoy my other Substack Life Without Children, a place for readers and writers of life without children, whether by choice or circumstance.

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You can also find my writings and musings on Medium, where I write about well-being, feminism & personal growth.