Breaking Up With Your Bestie
No matter what she says, you are kind, you are wonderful, you are a legendary ho.
I’d rather walk over floor Legos with meaty bare feet than experience another bestie breakup.
As a straight, I know I am supposed to center romantic love as the one and only, True and Everlasting “relationship” there is for breakups, but hell hath no fury like a woman currently experiencing some fucked up shit her friend did, and has had enough.
Or, over the years, it’s kinda fizzled into a few texts every four to six months, and your heart will not go on with this lack of attention. There is no room on this floating door, so good luck, sink or swim at your own peril, Jackie.
Or maybe your bestie is attached to an unkept beard with two eye sockets who is ruining her life in all ways and you refuse to read yet another chapter in the book she’s writing, Surviving A Downward Dick Spiral: A Manoir.
Or, she’s not talking to you — which is similar in pain to tearing your heart out of your chest, Temple of Doom style, and placing it in some crackling frying pan oil. Who even knows why she’s gone silent. Let’s be honest, you are a gift and have always been there.
Surviving a lady breakup is not for the weak. A breakup with your ride or die can often turn vicious with the kind of emotional melodrama typically reserved for emo boys with sideswipes and eyeliner. And indecently tight pants.
I know Dolly Parton wrote “I Will Always Love You,” about a guy, but just think of the lady friend who got away the next time you wait for Whitney to drop her vocal after the pause in the middle and tell me it doesn’t light your soul on fire with the kind of longing and despair that could power Texas with renewable energy.
If you listen to Whitney and have mommy issues, there is no coming back from that. Like, good luck being a whole person with that song and a mother/daughter relationship that can best be described as “it’s complicated.”
I write having done both, and I’m barely hanging on people. You’ve read my newsletters.
I’m not proud of this but lady breakups really bring out the internal misogyny in me. The fact I still roll with feminism is the most optimistic thing I do on any given day. Somewhere out there are my sloppy seconds parading around as caring, trustworthy, brunch-capable women and, my goddess, help the poor souls who happen upon a single one of them. Just know this, future roadkill, before they send you some outlandish paragraphs in text form attacking your person: you are kind, you are wonderful, you are a legendary ho.
Having survived many lady breakups, there is no place to bottom out. To recoup and renew, to turn on that one Bridget Jones-y movie and feel like, you know what, I CAN GET THROUGH THIS despite the entire mess I have made — the kind of place where, sure we all want to be mermaids, but not the kind swimming in our own tears and snot. And like, yeah, Bridesmaids and Girls Trip are the closest thing to lady breakup flicks but the arc ends like a Christmas movie — everyone ends up friends again — which is entirely unhelpful. Where is the Hallmark movie about the five stages of girl-friend grief that ends with the main lady finding the bestie who completes her?
Or, maybe not completes her, but at least ticks off enough boxes to one day become a Shady Pines roommate, unafraid to hit the cheesecake with you at midnight.
I’ve white-knuckled my way through every bestie breakup, only to one day reach the promised land of “I just don’t care anymore” months, years, a full decade later. These women, my former friends, have lived rent free in my head up until they did not. Some I knew as girls, some were psycho hose beasts, one was a Single White Female wannabe, and others were more like paper cuts. But each and every single one of them took something with them as they departed.
I have to say, for almost all of them, I’d rather give birth via butthole than live through the emotional recovery of a fresh lady breakup — the pain is just too great, every single time.
Alright, maybe I am exaggerating. But also maybe not.
No one will catch me uttering “best friend” like that’a a designation I would participate in without first arming myself with steel, possibly a flame thrower, and most definitely a catapult so I can fling their shit far, far away from me.
It’s true that the pandemic shrank our friendship circles, and for some of us that’s a really good thing (I’m in this camp), but maybe you’re someone who isn’t ready to move on quite yet, but want to get there (I’m pulling for you).
With all of my breakups, I know what friendship doesn't look like. Even better, I know that every friendship isn’t “forever.” In fact, almost all of them are not. There is something to — and this took me a really long time to understand — honoring the lifespan of a friendship. In Fight Club, the dude-iest movie to ever dude, one type is “single-serving friendship” or a friendship that lasts for a moment in time. In Fight Club's case, plane rides (or quite possibly multiple personalities, but I’m not going there).
Friends don’t always grow with us and we do not always grow with our ladies. “Ride or die” is aspirational, not necessarily achievable. The friends I have now aren’t better or worse than my previous friendships; they are simply different because I am different.
I no longer lead with the abandonment chip I have on my shoulder and more years on this planet has brought the realization that occasionally being left out is a gift. The friendships I have now do not hinge on “remember when.” Light a candle and pour one out for that. When a friendship is based solely on nostalgia, it’s a zombie flick — an undead friendship is unsustainable and rots the brain.
So do what you have to do to heal: block with wild abandon, take no prisoners to protect your heart, and eat however many carbs it takes, and know that, at a certain point, you’re done correcting the record for their conspiracy theories. Honor the parts that were joyous about the friendship and then keep it moving.
MOMMIE DEAREST
The new Celebrity Skin Book Club pick is in! For May, we’re reading MOMMIE DEAREST by Christina Crawford. Y’all. The Instagram Live is going to be so good.
And if you missed it, last weekend Janelle from Renegade Mothering (and her daughter, too) + Me dished all things Diana: Her True Story. Watch the full sesh here.
CURRENTLY
Reading: Ring Shout / Just added: Work Won’t Love You Back // Listening: (Dawning of A) New Era // Podcast: Everything is Fine (A podcast for women over 40) // Coveting: These mid-century wall plates
Share FLOP ERA with the kind of friend who WOULD NEVER. The kind who will smell the lotions and the body sprays and knows that you’re more of a blue polish kinda gal.
OK, so this the SECOND exact thing I needed to read today. Feeling this one hard at the moment.
So friendships fade away sometimes. Even the ones that you thought would last forever, which is crazy hard. But for me, the harder part is being the last one to notice. Like, "Wait ... how long have you been far too busy to connect with me in any meaningful way? At what point did 'I'm so busy' start meaning 'I'm blowing you off?' And why did it take me so long to notice?