A FRIENDSHIP BREAK UP:
It might sound weird, but breaking up a friendship is actually a real thing. It’s honestly more awful than breaking up in a relationship unless your boyfriend is your best friend…Good luck sis.
In high school, I had a best friend, we were inseparable and did literally everything together. This particular friend and I knew everything about each other, went on family vacations, concerts, lunch dates and all. When graduation rolled around it was a very weird time. I was going to college out of state and she planned to stay back home in Virginia, and although I knew I was going to be apart from my best friend I didn’t think it would change much…. Boy oh boy was I wrong.
Step 1: Distance
I knew it would be weird not being a five-minute ride down the street to her but I didn’t mind, I didn’t mind being far from at all actually. For the first two or three months into our college experience, we’d face time at some point in the day, I began to meet her college friends and she met mine. However; the more involved we got, the less we spoke, and it was weird but expected… We couldn’t be around each other all the time.
Step 2: Friend Groups
To keep it blunt… my best friend was white, white as they come really but when she went off to school I quickly realized a difference. All of her friends became black people, I mean all of them. I could quickly see the influence that black culture had on her. While I was glad she was embracing a culture that I could relate to, it made some changes to her that were very weird. Her dialect became super forced, the way she dressed changed, her music interest, and even the type of men she would begin to like… I didn’t think too much of this because I was sure that my HBCU experience was having an impact on the way I acted too.
Throughout freshman year and creeping into our sophomore year our everyday conversations turned into once a week, then it slowly turned into snapchats or a few days every month. My sophomore year I became overly involved with multiple organizations and so did she. We both believed it was an amazing highlight for ourselves, little did we know our friendship was about to take a dark turn.
Step 3: Envy
It was summer break and I decided to come visit her for a week since she was staying in her apartment at school that summer. A week that I thought would be filled with happy sisterly memories, turned into a week that would ultimately be the demise of our friendship. I was picked up by her and one of her guy friends that I knew pretty well because he was always there during our facetime chats. We went to her dorm and I got to meet the rest of her roommates who I immediately clicked with. I could tell they were very intrigued by HBCU life because they would ask me certain things on my Instagram like; Shimmy like a Nupe, the celebrities I’ve met in the AUC, and Atlanta Culture in general. I wish I had noticed the envy sooner, maybe I could’ve stopped it before it started, maybe we’d still be best friend had I never visited. Towards the end of the week, we went to a beautiful zen garden, we took all these pictures and her group of friends added me to a group chat to send me the photos but I stayed in it and it was hilarious. Later that night I laughed at something in the group chat and commented on it out loud, to which my friend simply replied “you’re in the group chat but they won’t add me in it?” and left. I was so confused, everyone got quiet but I could tell she was genuinely bothered so I went to check on her. She apologized for her rude demeanor and confessed she felt a little jealous because she felt her school friends liked hanging out with me more. I tried to inform her that I barely know them and I’m only here for the week, we hugged it out and I assumed everything was okay… wrong.
Step 4: The beginning of the end
It was time to leave my mini PWI vacation. I was going to miss the hibachi spot up the street, the rural area and the friends I made but, it was time to go back home. I didn’t notice it then, but now I realize that this was the beginning of our friendship ending. I realize how happy she was that I was leaving, or happy she was that her life was now going to resume back to normal. For the rest of the summer our conversations were minimal, they seemed dry and forced. I assumed it was just a phase and that she would eventually get over it but she never really did. The school year was about to start back up and our conversations were still very lackluster. It confused me more than anything that a girl I’ve known since my sophomore year of high school was acting like a genuine stranger. When Thanksgiving break had hit, I immediately hit her up to ask if she was home yet and she said she would be home for a few days, so I messaged her back and asked when we were gonna chill? She never answered. Christmas day had come and I told her Merry Christmas, to which she didn’t reply.
This was our friend break up.I wasn’t sure why it happened and I couldn’t believe it but I accepted it. I wasn’t going to continue trying to water a dead flower because I knew that sometimes friends grow apart, I just never thought that we would.
This past March of our junior year, I went on Instagram and saw that she had joined a sorority, I decided to congratulate her on this, she gave a dry thank you and unfollowed me later that day and life really went on. I’ll never really know what the cause of our friendships end was… Was it the envy? Was it just our time to grow? I have no idea but what I did learn is to accept things for what they are and move on happily. If something isn’t fueling your happiness or helping you grow, it is okay to move on and grow from it, it is life. There is no certain rule book to friendships or relationships if it’s not benefiting you both, it has run its course and sometimes that’s okay.