The Intensity of Female Friendship and its Devastating End

My first platonic breakup was utterly devastating. My best friend started dating the boy that she knew I was in love with, leaving me to sit on the swingset alone, crying onto the glossy pages of the Nancy Drew graphic novel series. It was a betrayal without bounds, breaking my delicate six-year-old heart all over the wooden playground mulch. When I got home from school that night, I took off my half of our matching necklaces, throwing it into the back of my closet, the engraved message of “BE FRI” glinting back at me in total mockery. My mom tried to console me, saying that some people just aren’t meant to be in your life forever.

But I wanted forever, craved my One True BFF with every ounce of my tiny being, and still quietly dream of it in my twenty-two year old body. The intensity of platonic breakups has never waned with age as I hoped it might. If anything, the loss of a close friend has only become more brutal. 

Our friendships operate under the assumption that romantic partners will come and go, that in the end, platonic love is everlasting: your favorite threadbare sweater waiting for you to slip back into its warmth.

But they do end, whether through intentional, painstaking conflict, or simply the natural unraveling that happens with time and change. The script for romantic breakups is not applicable, leaving us to wander aimlessly with ambiguous feelings and unfinished thoughts. You cannot get drunk and make out with strangers in the bar to grieve the loss of your most trusted companion, one whom you undoubtedly loved just as intensely as any romantic partner, but who was never tied to you in the same capacity. The sad breakup playlists don’t cut it, eating a pint of ice cream and crying at a rom-com doesn’t even come close to covering the breadth of your loss. And venting about their wrongdoings leaves you with a bitter taste in your mouth, because you still feel the weight of your own hand in the matter and feel a loyalty distinct to platonic relationships.

After all, our friends are the ones who teach us how to love – it only makes sense that they would be the ones to shatter our hearts most irrevocably. This has especially been true in my friendships with women, which have always been particularly intense. Chalk it up to being queer, or blame it on my birth chart  – I cling to my platonic relationships with vehemence, prioritizing them on an equal level to my long-term romantic partnership. 

While coping with the recent loss of a close friend, my partner tried to console me, saying that we would eventually make up and everything would be fine. As kind as his intentions were, I felt that he didn’t understand the true depth of my loss. Most men I know can go months without seeing their close friends, and even longer without having a truly vulnerable conversation about their emotions or experiences. My friendships with other women have always been my primary outlet to be unapologetically raw with my feelings – losing one of them meant losing not just a casual companion, but an intimate confidante. The loss of any of those relationships felt far more gutting and irreconcilable to me than it seemed to be for my masculine friends, who could ebb and flow in their friendships, often without much resentment to prevent any future reconnections. 

While there are many explanations for this gap in experience, I find the most resounding to be those connected to Simone de Beauvoir’s conception of female otherness and its implications in friendships between women. Under this lens, men are defined as the irrefutable subject, capable of trading with unlimited currency and connecting with each other over social and political capital alike. Add that to cultural stigmas around their emotional expression, and their friendships are bound to remain just below surface level. Yet femme friendships deal in the currency of solidarity – with the subtle intimation that it is our Otherness, our very nature as the Object to the cis man’s Subject, that allows us a far deeper understanding of each other’s existence. Our secrets, pain, and longing feel safer in the hands of those who can recognize those experiences in their own lives and reciprocate the vulnerability therein. There is no need for preface or explanation in the way that there is in interactions with men, whose socialized language rarely translates directly with our own and often positions us as inferior objects, even if unintentionally.

Yet it is this very understanding and unparalleled intimacy that lays the groundwork for an especially tumultuous ending.

The ending of a femme friendship, particularly one at the hands of direct confrontation, is gut-wrenching. It is not just the ending of your connection to another person, but an abrupt cutoff to a part of yourself that can only be accessed in the safe presence of someone who understands you wholeheartedly. You bury bitterness and longing in equal measure as you pass the coffee shop that you frequented with a person now gone from you, feeling that familiar tightness in your throat when you listen to the playlists you made for each other, scorning the tears that will inevitably fall when you find some weird gift that they made for you, an inside joke immortalized in plastic beads or misshapen clay trinkets.

My own recent platonic breakup routine has consisted of: avoiding my bookshelf and every associated memory contained there, begging myself not to be the only one to text first, going to therapy sessions where I usually just end up talking about astrology, and laying on my kitchen floor long enough to know the exact location of every paint stain on the bottom of my cabinets.

Though my friendships have ended for various reasons, and on an emotional spectrum from casual to nuclear, nothing wears on me more than a lack of reciprocity. A lack of trying, and a clear disinterest in maintaining the relationship beyond my initiation, is the quickest way to spur my impulse to disengage. If my communication about my own discomfort or desire for reciprocity goes unacknowledged or is outright invalidated, I quietly bow out, knowing that it is far better to bear the ache of a clear ending than to stomach the prolonged torture of insecurity. 

But I am racked with grief, regardless of the manner of ending. I walk around my apartment, a shrunken version of myself, slowly collecting various photos and knick knacks that remind me of them, placing them into a shoebox in the back of my closet. The memories are out of sight, and I try to convince myself that they are out of mind, if only to claw my way out of an ambiguous and all-consuming loss. I think back to all of the friendships that have come and gone, all of the women that I have loved and will love in the future. Unfortunately my mom was right – some people aren’t meant to stick around. And even as I try to remove evidence of this truth, I know that the intensity of those friendships can only allow me to love more deeply the next time around, as long as I let it.