A little heart-break

I usually write about mainly happy things on here, which one of my friends (Christopher!) will snigger at because he often refers to me as incredibly miserable. But this post is a bit of a sad one.

If you google, there are lots of helpful articles on how to act during a break-up. Life tells us how we should be feeling, what we should be eating and the stages of moving on. Google ‘breaking up with a friend’ and there’s no where near as much. I read this blog post recently which someone had shared on facebook, and it got me thinking about my break-up.

I had a lot on my plate during the ‘break-up’ and have had a lot on my plate since. So it’s fair to say that the situation took a while to sink in. I’m not even entirely sure what happened, was it me? Was it her? What did I do? Why did it break?

I actually think that breaking up with a friend is harder than breaking up with a partner. The friend is the person that you go to, with everything, who probably knows you as well as, if not better, than your loved one. When that friend has been in your life for over a decade and it’s suddenly gone, how are you supposed to act? Did I fight enough? Should I have said something different?

I’ve always been the kind of person to have a small amount of friends, but true friends. To me, if someone can’t be bothered to contact you to check in with you, are they really a friend anyway? But what goes through someones head when they want to stop that contact with you? Is it like a relationship break up where they just fall out of love with you? Why do they just suddenly not want to be a part of your life anymore?

One question I kept coming back to was ‘where do I draw the line?’. At what point, as the person who’s ‘lost’, do you just give up? How many times should you ‘try again’ when you’re ignored or not contacted for ages? Should a friendship always fall on one person to keep it going, is that ever fair?

I read a quote “a friendship is a constant battle between love and hate. One person always loves the other more” – whilst I’m not sure this is entirely true in every situation, it does sort of make sense. In a friendship there is always a slight imbalance of one person doing more of the ‘work’ but I do believe that does shift at times.

So, if you’re reading this after having a friend ‘break-up’, I hope it gets better for you. You are totally entitled to feel as crappy as it if were a relationship break up, and perfectly entitled to feel even worse than that too. Like anything, it takes time to heal.

Ems xx

Le plus beau cadeau de la vie est l’amitié {The best gift of life is friendship <3}