long lost friends

july 30 | weekly warm-up

Write about a valued friendship in your life that came to an end. It doesn’t matter how long or how short the friendship was. Reflect on how the relationship began, how it ended, what you gained from it, and how you coped with the loss.

Tip: Choose a friendship loss that you have the emotional capacity to explore right now. You don’t have to go for your most difficult memories.

I’m not sure what’s harder, making friends as an adult or losing friends as an adult. When we talk about loss here, we don’t have to narrow it down to departure from life. We’re talking about friendship breakups and growing apart as well. It’s a distinct kind of grief, isn’t it? And it’s one that often goes unacknowledged and played down.

In an article for The Atlantic, Jennifer Senior says:

“You lose friends to marriage, to parenthood, to politics—even when you share the same politics. (Political obsessions are a big, underdiscussed friendship-ender in my view, and they seem to only deepen with age.) You lose friends to success, to failure, to flukish strokes of good or ill luck. (Envy, dear God—it’s the mother of all unspeakables in a friendship, the lulu of all shames.) These life changes and upheavals don’t just consume your friends’ time and attention. They often reveal unseemly characterological truths about the people you love most, behaviors and traits you previously hadn’t imagined possible. Those are brutal. And I’ve still left out three of the most common and dramatic friendship disrupters: moving, divorce, and death. Though only the last is irremediable. The unhappy truth of the matter is that it is normal for friendships to fade, even under the best of circumstances. The real aberration is keeping them.”

However it presents itself, friendship loss is complex, and it’s going to demand its pound of flesh at some point in our lives. A friendship is a love story, isn’t it? Our favorite love stories take us on a journey from the beginning of the connection, to how it grew, through all its nuances and complexities, and sometimes to how it ended. This article is a great reference for how to craft friendship arcs in our stories. This is what we’re going to explore for our exercise this week.