The Ghosts of Friendships Past

“Friendship plants itself as a small unobtrusive seed; over time, it grows thick roots that wrap around your heart. When a love affair ends, the tree is torn out quickly, the operation painful but clean. Friendship withers quietly, there is always hope of revival. Only after time has passed do you recognise that it is dead, and you are left, for years afterwards, pulling dry brown fibres from your chest.”

— Anna Lyndsey

In this salon, Vidhika Bansal invites you to share your experiences with the darker side of friendship: the friends we’ve loved and lost, bonds burning out and fading away, and navigating the painful realities of friendships past.

Friend breakups are never easy.

Losing a friend — especially one you feel deeply connected and close with — can be discombobulating, jarring, and downright heart-wrenching.  Whether a friendship ends because of a serious betrayal or a more gradual drifting away, the effects can be intense and lingering.

And yet, there’s no playbook for how we should act or feel in the wake of these endings. We spend a good bit of time talking and hearing about the end of romantic relationships (and rightfully so), but there aren’t lots of songs on the radio or books on Amazon about how rough it can be to cope with the loss of a dear friend.

So let’s come together — as a group of blossoming friends — to share our stories, our feelings, our questions, and even our lessons. This will be a safe space to reflect on challenging friendships you’ve had in the past, what made them so, and where we go from here.

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Suggested reading:

Have you ever had a friendship breakup? (Cup of Jo)

Breaking points (Harper’s Magazine)

Why ending a friendship can be worse than a breakup (TIME)

On the ending of a friendship (The Conversation)

How to get over a friendship breakup (TED)

It was so much more than a “friend breakup” (Vogue)

It’s your friends who break your heart (The Atlantic)

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Hope to see you there!

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