Breaking up is hard to do...

A good friend is in the midst of a terrible break-up. . . she has been agonizing about this for weeks and doesn't know exactly how to go about pulling the trigger. Every time she has the resolve to just do it, she chickens out and can't go through with it. So now, she is kind of stuck and behaving badly in hopes she will be the dump-ee as opposed to the dump-or.

Sound familiar? Of course it does . . . it's a common problem in the dating world. Except, she isn't trying to break up with a boyfriend, she is trying to break up with a friend.

We all know what she is going through---you have an old friend who has seen you through ups and downs or was once number one on your Thursday emails to make weekend plans. Or, this person made a real effort to befriend you when you were new in town or running low on friends to round out plans and the weekly cell phone rotation. In any event, you used to really like/appreciate/enjoy/need this person, but now. . . not so much.

There are tons of reasons why a friendship can go south and most are pretty similar to why a romantic relationship fizzles out: when it comes down to it, you aren't really this person's biggest fan, he/she has developed a sort of toxic personality and you find yourself fighting with them all the time, this friend is sort of a debbie-downer and is starting to effect the rest of your social life, they keep flaking on you and/or taking advantage of the friendship, etc. But how do you make a clean break? How do you tell a friend you just aren't into her anymore?

I feel like have had this conversation with a lot of people in the past few years. With our generation's mobility and delayed entry into full-blown adulthood, we have more opportunities and outlets for making friends than our parents. And with the increase in selection, the odds of picking duds, for lack of a better word, increases, too. Plus, the fact that we are all kind of transient, at least for the first few years out of school, makes developing friend circles quickly a priority, often at the cost of the quality of the friends and friendships.

To be clear, I think this situation differs from the other, more frequent situation of living in a city for a year or two, making good friends, and then moving and possibly losing touch. In the four years I have lived in Philly, I have made wonderful friends who subsequently left the city and who I still hold in the highest esteem and miss almost daily. Though we try to stay in touch, work/life seem to get in the way, but whenever we do have a chance to see one another, its as if no time has passed.

The I-need-to-break-up-with-her situation usually comes up when you have settled into a place and find the friends you made initially really aren't who you expected them to be OR with old friends from earlier parts of your life that you would really like to leave behind, along with the bad habits and fashions from that time. And the question then becomes, how do you break up with them???

I have known people try (and have personally engaged in) the following: the slow-no-call back, the slow phase out over email, not inviting the friend to a major life event like a wedding or housewarming, not attending a major life event in that person's life, etc. But, all of them seem like passive-aggressive tactics that most dating manuals would tell you are TERRIBLE ways to break up with someone. But, I think its really hard to sit someone down and tell them you are no longer interested in being their friend . . . I mean, how presumptuous is that? It kind of seems like overkill and I would certainly fear coming across like a self-righteous ass. I would certainly break up with a boyfriend with a proper break-up convo (in person boys, an email, text message or phone call do not count), but I am a) not sure what a friend break up is supposed to sound like, and b) don't know what is socially acceptable in this situation as it seems like a relatively new phenomenon.

One thing I do know is that I have personally been unceremoniously dumped before and it took a long time for me to get over it and it hurt for years. It certainly made me question my capacity for friendship and whether I was a good person and sometimes, I just wish I had actually been broken up with instead of just left behind. At least then I would know what caused the break and been able to either learn from it and become a better friend in the future, or seen the other person for who they were and made a conscious decision as to their worth, or lack thereof, as a friend. I feel that not saying anything at all is selfish and cowardly because just like with romantic relationships, the dump-or is usually at fault too and by not saying anything and mentally blaming it all on the dump-ee, you do yourself a disfavor by not having learned anything from the situation.

I am not sure how you really go about breaking up with a friend, but I advised my friend to write out her feelings and why she didn't' want to be friends with this person anymore. I suggested she sleep on it and if the next day, she really didn't think there was any reason to continue in the friendship, she should call her friend and end it. I think being adult about it is better for all involved in the long run and I think she agreed with me. I am not sure there is a right way to break up with a friend, but I do think not doing anything at all is certainly the wrong way to do it and it takes bigger person to actually put it out there, even if there are no real guidelines on how to do it. . . .

Any thoughts on friend break ups or suggestions on how to handle them?