Searches for “How to ghost a friend” jumped by 189 per cent last month, according to Google Trends. “How to break up with a friend” searches are up 136 per cent.
I’m fixating on this fact obsessively – you are not alone; you’re not a monster! – as I mull my own potential cull. It seems a horrible thing to even be contemplating: extracting myself from a friendship, or friendships (plural). But in all honesty, they don’t even feel like friendships anymore. More like an old, not particularly enjoyable, habit that we’ve both outgrown, like biting your finger skin or relentlessly picking at a scab.
Imagine asking your friend, “Where is this going?” or “What are we?”; you can’t really say to them that “it just isn’t working”, “we want different things”, or “the chemistry isn’t right”. But sometimes, wouldn’t it be nice if you could?
We have more language around this stuff than ever before when it comes to the messed-up world of modern dating. Take the word “situationship”, which describes that lacklustre, shrug-worthy (and usually irritating) in-between state – one where you’re seeing someone, but it’s not a relationship. You know it’s not going anywhere, but you keep it going anyway. Often, it’s a kind of lukewarm placeholder to kill some time before the real thing comes along.
Why couldn’t the same be said for platonic connections? Take the romance out, and we can still wind up in friendships via circumstance that really should have been allowed to fizzle out when they no longer made sense. Maybe it’s the woman from the NCT class who you trauma-bonded with when you were both delirious from sleep deprivation – but her last rambling Facebook update made you suspect she might have gone a bit “stop the boats”. Or that guy you used to work with who was very, very funny when in situ, slagging off your boss over coffees in the staff canteen – but with whom you have not one shred of overlap in your Venn diagram of interests.
Years after the initial “spark” has faded, we can still feel beholden – compelled to do the yearly or six-monthly mandated “catch-up” over dinner or drinks, not so much looked forward to as endured. Those connections that see us getting stuck hanging onto people for reasons we can no longer recall. All hail the rise of the friendship-situationship, or the clunkily compounded “frituationship”, if you like.
I seem to have done this a fair bit in my time. I’m not talking about core friends, that inner circle of ride-or-dies that usually numbers about five, or even the next tier, which friendship expert and University of Oxford professor of evolutionary psychology Robin Dunbar says adds up to about 15 people. I’m thinking more of those on the periphery, those outer layers of friends and acquaintances that come in and out of your orbit. You can pick these people up anywhere: the gym, your local coffee shop, the workplace, the school gates. There are seasons in life for these particular friendships to flourish, and seasons when we should really let them wilt and drift off again to pollinate somewhere afresh. But it’s easier said than done.
I’m not alone in this; new data from Dating.com suggests that the phenomenon is far more commonplace than we might think. In a survey of 1,000 adults, 39 per cent of those polled said they didn’t think they’d even be friends with their best mate if they met them today. Two-thirds (67 per cent) admitted to staying friends with someone mainly because of everything they’d been through together. Meanwhile, the act of moaning is what drives a depressingly high number of friendships. More than half (54 per cent) of respondents said they have a friendship largely based on complaining about work, exes, family drama or someone they both dislike.
This last statistic makes sense when combined with the idea of the “frituationship”. When you have very little of substance in common with somebody, one of the easiest ways to mimic intimacy is through shared hatred. Something like a reverse-engineered “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”, maybe? Either way, it works.
“Learning that you share a negative attitude has a stronger effect and facilitates liking more” than shared interests or being a fan of similar things, according to Jennifer Bosson, a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida who has been running experiments in this field since the early 2000s.
Officially ‘breaking up’ with someone you went to pilates with five years ago feels needlessly melodramatic
For example, one of her studies, “Interpersonal chemistry through negativity: Bonding by sharing negative attitudes about others”, found that bonding over a shared dislike of a person or topic generates a stronger sense of connection and trust than bonding over shared interests.
On the flip side, although complaining can be cathartic, “co-ruminating” – the process of engaging in repeated and usually unproductive discussion of personal problems – has a significant but moderate association with internalising problems, according to one scientific review, and a small to moderate association with depression and anxiety. This unsatisfying version of “friendship” is simply not particularly good for us.
Which brings me back to my frituationships – the ones that have made me consider my own online search for “how to ghost a friend”. While none of them is necessarily toxic or steeped in carping or griping, they no longer “spark joy”, to use the whimsical parlance of Japanese super organiser Marie Kondo.
It’s partly a mere matter of time. We only have 24 hours in a day, ensuring there’s a natural ceiling to how many friendships we can realistically maintain at any given moment. Dunbar has even put a cap on this based on his research called, for obvious reasons, “Dunbar’s Number”: he theorises that we naturally tap out at around the 150th friend.
It’s not necessarily that the guy I worked with on a project a decade ago or the woman I met on that ski trip is not truly a wonderful person. It’s just that, with a finite amount of resources – namely time – whenever I keep one of these things in rotation long after it feels natural or meaningful, it requires sacrificing something else. It could be seeing other, closer friends; nurturing a new friendship; spending the evening with my partner; or just spending the evening with myself, doing something that feels nourishing for the soul. As harsh as it might sound, these alternatives feel more worthwhile than the going-through-the-motions arbitrary check-in with a lingering connection when, quite clearly, we no longer bring much to each other’s lives.
Many modern daters feel arguably far too comfortable ghosting a romantic interest, leaving them on read and disappearing from their inbox forever with no explanation. Could you really use the same tactic to extricate yourself from a friendship, however tenuous? Somehow, it feels like a much worse crime to commit when the relationship is platonic. On the other end of the spectrum, officially “breaking up” with someone you went to Pilates with five years ago feels needlessly melodramatic, to put it mildly.
In the end, I take some more inspiration from the world of dating. Rightly or wrongly, I decide to channel my inner “flaky guy from a dating app who is clearly not ready to date yet”: say yes to meeting up sometime, but never actually send dates. Talk about how “crazy busy” and “up in the air” everything is right now without ever explaining why. Describe availability in the vaguest possible terms, “maybe in the next few months, when things have calmed down a bit, lol!!!”. Leave it long enough between replies that even the most patient person would roll their eyes and think, “Fine! I give up!”
Is it the best way to handle things? Possibly not. Is it effective? Most definitely.
Like I say, we don’t have enough language around this stuff. But life is short and time is precious. And if meeting up with your old personal trainer to spend two hours hearing him complain about his ex-wife is no longer serving you? I’d say it’s OK to cut your losses.
