Why does a friendship breakup hurt more than a romantic one?

Breakups are never simple, and sometimes, neither is a friendship breakup

Letting go of someone you care about when they were a big part of your life is a drastic change to make.

But what happens if you break up with a friend?

We've all experienced it at some stage: the feeling of slowly drifting from a close friend.

You may be on the receiving end or the one distancing yourself, but regardless, it's never a pleasant experience.

Why does a friendship breakup feel worse?

According to experts, there's a reason why friendship breakups can hurt more than romantic ones.

Clinical therapist Miriam Kirmayer, who specialises in young adult and adult friendships, spoke to Time magazine on the psychology behind these conflicts.

With romantic relationships, we enter them with the understanding that they have potential to end.

However, with friendships we don’t view them in the same way.

“Friendship breakups are incredibly common and normal and inevitable, but we often personalise that and see it as a failure because it is so unexpected and because it is so uncommonly spoken about," she said.

Usually with romantic breakups, we can give a particular reason for it: not having the same life goals, someone cheated, falling out of love, etc.

But with a friend, we can't apply the same reasons.

You can't really cheat on a friend, or resent them for working until all hours.

So what qualifies as a reason to breakup with them?

Saying goodbye

The older we get, the more we seek out genuine relationships.

As life gets more hectic, we need to have people we can rely on and trust.

Last year, The Guardian wrote an article on ending friendships with a genuine and honest conversation.

One woman ended a six year friendship upon realising how selfish her friend really was:

"My friend called me just as I was about to give birth. Her parents had paid for a six-week trip abroad for her, and she was complaining they wouldn’t pay her rent while she was away.

"She never even asked me how I was," she explained.

After bringing this up, they never spoke again. However, the woman said "I just couldn’t rely on her and that’s something I need from a friendship.”

How do you deal with it?

At the end of the day, we all deserve a good support system.

If you were in an unhappy romantic relationship, the remedy would be a breakup. Shouldn't the same rule apply for platonic situations?

"There's this expectation that friendships should be easy for adults, and that obviously isn't true for many people," Kirmayer said.

We move cities, change jobs, have different schedules. It would be impossible to constantly maintain the same relationships throughout life with all of that change.

Life is also too short to feel unhappy when we are capable of making change.

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