It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart

What makes friendship so fragile is also exactly what makes it so special. You have to continually opt in. That you choose it is what gives it its value.

But as American life reconfigures itself, we may find ourselves rethinking whether our spouses and children are the only ones who deserve our binding commitments.

It is an insolent cliché, almost, to note that our culture lacks the proper script for ending friendships. We have no rituals to observe

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.

“But … it’s the whole idea that friendships are voluntary that makes them positive.”

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

What both of these traits have in common is that I seem to live my life as if I’m under siege. I’m guessing my amygdala is the size of a cantaloupe.

Most of my withered friendships can be chalked up to this terrible tendency of mine not to reach out.

Lorde), all deep friendships generate something outside of themselves, some special and totally other third thing. Whether that thing can be sustained over time becomes the question.

The more hours you’ve put into this chaotic business of living, the more you crave a quieter, more nurturing third thing

It gets trickier as you age, living. More bad things happen. Your parents, if you’re lucky enough to still have them, have lives so different from your own that you’re looking horizontally, to your own cohort, for cues. And you’re dreading the days when an older generation will no longer be there for you—when you’ll have to rely on another ecosyste