The Grief We’re Not Allowed to Feel
“I swear to God, the pain of losing a female friend that, for all intensive purposes, was my best friend, and was so prevalent in my life, my family’s life, my children’s life – and then just to have that go poof? It’s like part of your soul – I don’t wanna say it died because it rebirths – but part of it is gone permanently. Permanently gone because that’s not replaceable.” – Patrice Poltzer
When Patrice said those words during our recent podcast conversation, I felt them in my bones. Because here’s what nobody talks about: friendship breakups can shatter you in ways that romantic breakups never could.
And yet? Society acts like you should be over it by Tuesday.
The Breakup Nobody Sees Coming
Let me paint you a picture. You have this friend – maybe since high school, maybe from college, maybe someone who became family when you moved to a new city. They know your coffee order, your family drama, and your dreams at 2 am. They’ve held your hair back, celebrated your wins, and sat in comfortable silence during your lowest moments.
Then one day… they’re just done.
No explanation. No fight you can point to. No closure. Just… gone.
When I had my own friendship breakup, I cried myself to sleep multiple nights a week for almost a year. Because I’d get in bed and my brain would start wandering – what had I done? What was wrong with me? What did I miss about our friendship that was now just… over?
But here’s the thing that made it worse: when I tried to talk about it, people would give me this look. This “oh, that’s unfortunate, but…” look. Like I was being dramatic about losing a friend.
The Rules We Never Agreed To
Think about what happens when someone goes through a romantic breakup. We have rituals for that grief. We bring ice cream. We plan girls’ nights. We let them take a mental health day. We understand they’re mourning a whole future they’d imagined.
But friendship? shrugs “You’ll make new friends.”
Except… will you? And should you have to?
Here’s what I realized: we don’t give friendship breakups the weight they deserve because friendship doesn’t have a societally recognized “trajectory.”
With romantic relationships, we see the path – dating, commitment, maybe marriage, maybe kids, life partnership. When that crumbles, people understand why you’re devastated. All those milestones, all those plans, all that future – gone.
But friendship? We act like it’s just… hanging out. Like it doesn’t matter that this person was going to be in your wedding, hold your babies, sit with you when you’re old, and retelling your stories.
In our recent episode on friendship breakups, Patrice shared her story about losing her closest friend of over a decade – someone who was there for the birth of her first child, who knew her family, who was woven into every part of her life. The way she described it as “one of the greatest tragedies and mysteries” of her life? That’s the language we should be using for these losses.
What We’re Really Grieving
When a deep friendship ends – especially suddenly – you’re not just losing one person. You’re losing:
The safety net. That person who made everything feel manageable because you knew they had your back, no matter what.
The witness to your life. They knew you during important moments when nobody else did. They held pieces of your story that no one holds now…
The future you’d planned. All those “when we’re old” conversations, the trips you’d take, the way they’d be part of your kids’ lives.
Parts of yourself. The version of you that only existed with them – the inside jokes, the shared language, the way you were completely yourself in their presence.
No wonder it feels like part of your soul went missing.
The Silence That Makes It Worse
What made both my friendship breakup and Patrice’s so particularly brutal wasn’t just the loss – it was the silence. The complete unwillingness to talk about what went wrong.
When someone you trusted that deeply just… stops communicating, it messes with your reality. You start questioning everything. Was our entire friendship fake? Did I misread every signal? Am I the villain in a story I don’t even understand?
As Patrice put it in our conversation: “I kept asking, ‘Can you just tell me what I did? Like, so I can at least reflect on it.’ And she never would respond. She just kept saying, ‘Yes, you do. You know.’ It was almost psychological abuse in a way.”
That lack of communication? It’s the real red flag. I’ve had fights with friends, breaks, pauses, honest and hard conversations that made us both cry. But when someone puts up a stone wall and refuses to engage… that’s when you know you’re dealing with something different.
The History That Never Dies
Here’s something nobody warns you about: even after a friendship breakup, the history is always there.
It’s like walking into a room you’ve been in before and being flooded with memories. You’ll see their favorite restaurant and remember that conversation you had there. You’ll hear a song and think of the road trip where you both sang it badly. You’ll have news – good or bad – and for a split second, think “I need to tell…” before remembering you can’t.
The person who knew that version of you? They’re still out there, carrying those memories, but you’re strangers now.
In our episode, I share much more about what it’s like living with this weird mix of intimacy and distance – having all this information about someone who’s no longer in your life, and how that affects you in ways you don’t expect. The whole conversation really digs into the layers of what we’re actually processing when these relationships end.
Maybe That’s Okay
But here’s what I’ve learned, and what Patrice said so beautifully in our conversation: maybe not all friendships are meant to last forever. And maybe that’s actually okay.
“People play different roles in your life. They shape you, and it’s really great. And sometimes, maybe that’s just enough. However long they are in your life, that’s okay. Because it’s making room potentially for you to expand your heart to other people.”
This doesn’t make the grief less real. It doesn’t mean you should “get over it” faster. It just means we need to normalize the fact that friendships have highs and lows, seasons and chapters. Some end painfully. Some fizzle out. Some transform into something different.
And all of that? All of that is part of the human experience of loving people.
What You Need to Hear
If you’re reading this because you’ve been through your own friendship breakup – the dramatic kind or the slow fizzle – I need you to know something:
Whatever you felt was valid.
The months of confusion. The self-doubt. The way you analyzed every interaction, looking for clues. The dreams where you were friends again. The grief that caught you off guard at random moments.
All of it was real. All of it mattered. And you weren’t being “too sensitive” or “dramatic.”
You were mourning the loss of someone who mattered deeply to you. Someone who knew parts of you that maybe nobody else will ever know in quite the same way. Someone whose absence left a hole that’s shaped exactly like them.
The full episode goes so much deeper into this experience – from the confusion and self-doubt to the way these breakups affect our other relationships and how we think about friendship moving forward. Patrice’s vulnerability in sharing her story, and the parallels to my own experience, create this conversation that I think a lot of people need to hear.
The Permission You’ve Been Waiting For
So here’s what I want to give you: permission to grieve friendship the way you’d grieve any other significant relationship.
Take the time you need. Feel the feelings. Talk about it with people who get it. Don’t minimize the impact this person had on your life just because society doesn’t have a neat category for it.
And maybe – maybe – start talking about it more openly. Because the more we normalize the reality that friendship breakups are real, painful, and deserving of support, the less alone people will feel as they go through them.
If this conversation resonated with you, I’d love for you to listen to the full episode. There’s something powerful about hearing Patrice tell her story in her own words, and about understanding that you’re not the only one who’s been through something like this. Sometimes we need to hear our experience reflected back to us to realize we’re not alone.
Reflection Question: Have you ever had a friendship breakup? Did it fizzle out or was it dramatic? What was it that made this friendship breakup difficult – and did you feel like you had support processing it?
Ready for more honest conversations about the reality of adult friendship? Subscribe to Friendship IRL wherever you listen to podcasts. Because friendship is complicated, beautiful, and sometimes heartbreaking – and we’re going to talk about all of it.
