When Your Friend Breaks Up With You

PLUS: "Boot."

A Note for You, If You’re Having A Bad Day

Hi My Friend,

Here’s a two-drinks-in series of questions: What was your worst breakup? Does something immediately come to mind when I ask, or do you find yourself rifling through mental ephemera, weighing this against that? Do you still carry a torch? Do you harbor regrets? How did it change you?

I’ve only written about this once before, and then only vaguely. The essay I wrote about it was called “How to Cut Your Own Bangs.” Here’s what I said then:

At the end of my New Orleans visit there was a loss. This is intentionally cryptic because the loss had to do with a person, and although I am fairly sure that this person does not read my blog, it’s still not fair to write about this experience — not really — without their permission. And I don’t want to get their permission, because I don’t want to talk to them. I am not sure when I will be ready to talk to them. 

It’s been five years since this breakup. I’ve written about many other things, including but not limited to my sex drive while being pregnant, polyamorous finances, and talking to my therapist about Palestine. But I haven’t written anything about this. And this was the most important personal event of my adult life.¹

The person in question I am going to call Adele, after the singer Adele. In real life, this person has almost nothing in common with the singer Adele, except they both probably like green juice (?). I have been told by editors that this is what you’re supposed to do when changing a name: choose one that’s so far away from the true name that nobody could possibly trace it back.

Understand that I use the Mindy Kaling definition of “best friend,” where it’s not a person, it’s a tier. Adele was my best friend for the majority of my twenties. Because we spent so much time together, she was the only person who I felt I’d been completely truthful with. Growing up, I’d found truth slippery. My fear was that my own truth would be annoying, cloying, frustrating, and confusing to other people. The truth of my self was that she was too much.

But Adele made me feel like I wasn’t too much. At first, I tiptoed into truth-telling, cautiously proceeding, as though the truth was a vase that I didn’t care about and could easily take off the mantle and throw in the trash. “Oh, that vase? Yeah, I shouldn’t have put that there. That’s not even my vase! Let me just get rid of that.” But Adele welcomed every true story and feeling with open arms. “I’m so glad you told me,” she would say. She’d ask follow-up questions. Slowly, I unfolded as much of myself into her as I ever had with another person.

In All About Love, bell hooks writes, “Widespread cultural acceptance of lying is a primary reason many of us will never know love.” This idea started making sense to me, and it became something I couldn’t un-know. A kind of Magic Eye for the human heart.

As I write this, there’s a busy little room in the back of my mind going over evidence. What went wrong? Maybe I wasn’t as open to Adele’s difficult truths as she was to mine. Maybe I didn’t listen with my whole heart. There was the thing with the cat. (I abandoned my cat with Adele when I moved. Adele hadn’t wanted the cat. She hadn’t ever wanted any cat. Now she was stuck with my discarded cat, and he was pretty mean and rude and hard to live with.) Or did I love her too much? Was I clingy? Was she mad that I moved? While I was growing into myself in my early twenties, I once got too drunk and she had to take care of me. I went through romantic breakups, and she was often in charge of the pieces. Was I always all about me? Did I not give as much as I took?

Adele broke up with me via email, sort of. We got in a fight when I visited New Orleans that March, and it didn’t end well. Adele needed some time, she said, to process what she was feeling. (I think that’s what she said. Some of these details are foggy.) I can’t completely remember how the fight started; it had to do with Adele asking me if I superimposed (that wasn’t the word) a type of mother figure onto her. All I can say for sure is what I heard. I heard, “Our relationship isn’t reciprocal. I take care of you, and you don’t take care of me.” Like I said, that wasn’t it. But that’s how it felt.

I was reactive. The fairest thing I can say in my defense is that I had no control over my reaction. My inner monologue: “I have been trying so hard. What can I do to be better? What can I do to be worthy of a reciprocal relationship with you?” I cried hysterically. I went to the bayou and screamed. I felt I couldn’t stop crying. This wasn’t a good look for a person trying to demonstrate that she is not a child.

Once I was back in Chicago, I tried to give Adele space. Every time I wanted to call, I didn’t. I thought, “I need to be an adult and trust that she will come to me when she is ready.” I felt like I was being so mature.

When she was ready, Adele came to me with an email that said she had decided to end our friendship. It said something like, “I’ve been praying on it.” It said something like, “Don’t think this is because there is anything wrong with you.” My friend, that email still exists in my Archive, but it is the only email I can’t bring myself to read again. I considered trying to read it in late January, because Luke and I were planning a trip to New Orleans, and what if I ran into Adele, but my body turned to stone. When I tried to tell my therapist about the email, I started sobbing so immediately that I was unable to get a single sentence out. It truly felt like the email was a bullet lodged into the most nervy part of my body, and getting anywhere close to it would be more painful than death.

This was my worst breakup. I’d been in lots of longterm romantic partnerships, and I was historically bad at dealing with their fallouts, but I’d go through them all again, all at once, to avoid this one. At the time, I read a lot about friend breakups, and found nothing comforting. Most articles I read were written for the person who had to do the dumping, not the person being dumped. In theory, I agreed that sometimes you need to draw a firm boundary with someone, no matter how much you loved them. But the reasons listed tended to be about how the soon-to-be-dumped person might be toxic, abusive, harmful. Was I toxic? Abusive? Harmful? In the early era of the breakup, I listened to “For Good” in my car and had to pull over from crying at least once a week.

But here’s what I know. Relationships will always change. Sometimes, they end. I’m personally fonder of the semicolon than the period, but all punctuation marks are used when love is involved. Loving someone is signing up for pain. It hurts exactly as much as it is worth.

There are complex and varied reasons. Romantic comedies imply that, “It’s not you, it’s me” is a cop-out line; unfair because it’s untrue. But maybe it feels unfair because it is true, and we all want to be main characters of our own stories. How crushing, to spend energy on a relationship only to find that there was really nothing you could have done to save it. The other person needed to write you out, for their own reasons.

When someone is mean to you, it’s so rarely about you. This should be more comforting than it is.

Maybe Adele broke up with me because she had to break up with me. It was about her journey, not about our journey. The day she brought up the possibility that our relationship wasn’t reciprocal, she needed to be met with curiosity — because she was examining possibilities about her own life and patterns, not judgements about mine. I could theoretically have said, “Hmmm! What makes you say that? When have you noticed that?” Instead, I crumpled into soup, incapable of coming out of my own narrative. Maybe Adele realized that she had to become the main character. It wasn’t necessarily that I wasn’t letting her; it could have been that she didn’t know how to come into herself around me.

Since my breakup with Adele, I’ve kept even my closest friends at a slight distance. I used to say to my newest best friend Bethany, “even if you end up not wanting to be my friend, I’ll be OK,” as a caveat to a lot of things. Eventually, Bethany snapped. “Could you stop saying that? I don’t want to not be friends with you. And I don’t want it to ‘be OK’ for me to leave you.” This reaction made sense. I hadn’t been saying it to Bethany. I’d been saying it for myself. No matter how much I said it, it was a lie. Losing Bethany would be soul-crushing, full stop.

And yet. We lose each other. We lose ourselves. We find ways to let people earn our trust; we find ways to earn it back.

I’m not one of those people who doesn’t believe in regrets, and I harbor plenty. There’s not much I regret, though, about loving Adele. She taught me how to give my heart to other people; she taught me that while telling the whole, scary truth isn’t necessarily safe, it is nevertheless worthwhile. True, true: there’s so much you might lose. True, too: without risking the loss, you won’t glimpse the scope of what you might gain.

Good luck out there, bravely facing all that breaks your heart.

Love,

Sophie

Where Does That Come From?

I love and have always loved the turn-of-phrase “carry a torch.” From everything I can find online, it comes from Greek and Roman weddings! There was a tradition where the bride would light a torch at the wedding, and then bring the torch into her new home with her husband to light the fire there. There are other old connections between fire and love: Eros is depicted in mythology as using a torch to create a flame between between potential lovers; and there’s more speculation about flames and lovers and gods throughout historical literature. The phrase “carry a torch” took off in the 1700s. I found this usage chart on Grammarist:

Via grammarist.

Is For Good a torch song? I guess technically no. But also kinda… yes?

It well may be
That we will never meet again in this lifetime.
So, let me say before we part:

So much of me
Is made of what I learned from you.
You'll be with me like a handprint on my heart.

And now whatever way our stories end
I know you have rewritten mine by being my friend.

Luke says this is overwritten. WHATEVER IT’S PERFECT I’M CRYING.

Housekeeping

• Sara Petersen
  mentioned my Instagram account in her amazing Substack this week. I’m a big fan of Sara’s and always have been, so it’s so nice to see this. Her Substack,
  In Pursuit of Clean Countertops
  , is imminently binge-able. (Like, you can binge-read it. You will lose a day. You’ve been warned.)

• Cara Gormally
  ,
  Nora Hickey
  , and
  Amaris Ketcham
  mentioned this newsletter in their roundup of newsletters that are by cartoonists but not necessarily about comics. The whole roundup is really great. A terrific resource; beautiful work.

Loose Thoughts:

• What do you think is the funniest word? I think it’s boot.

• I didn’t know we were living through the web comedy renaissance when we were living through it, and I have to admit, I miss it. Maybe that’s a good indicator that certain humor is due for a comeback? Idk.

• My favorite shape is egg and my favorite word is egg but my favorite food is not egg.

• I feel humanly incapable of keeping my eyeliner on all day, and I wonder about people who seem to not rub their eyes for the entire day. Is this really possible? To not rub your eyes? EVER?

• I was going to do a top ten Flower Things a few weeks ago but T got sick, so I missed it. Here they were:

  • Seeds for growing edible flowers.

  • I was going to teach you how to paint a flower. Now you’ll have to learn on your own.

  • Download the app Seek.

  • Buying paper flowers (I love them.)

  • How to embroider some flowers.

  • Little snack bowls with floral patterns inside.

  • A timelapse of a dandelion.

  • Nine and ten are no longer relevant.

1. I guess it’s tied with having a child.