Friendship loss grief
I promised a newsletter about that particular grief of losing a close friend to a relationship, and I’ve been sitting on it because I don’t know how to write about this without being very gay about it. But I think this is something that resonates with folks regardless of orientation, because intimacy isn’t something that is innately sexual. Friendships that have no sexual undercurrent can be romances, too. There’s so much nuance I want to front-load here, but just know that I’m approaching this topic with the understanding that there is no one “soulmate” and that relationships and attraction of both sexual and emotional varieties are a spectrum. I think the reason I can’t write about this without queering this is that the cause for this new relationship energy (NRE) vacuum is inherently cis/heterosexual and erases asexuality and demisexuality and and and. Just another way heteronormativity harms everyone, yada yada.
There’s been so many moments in my life when this (a close, intimate friend disappearing into a new relationship and leaving a void in my life that triggers a kind of grief) has happened to me, and it’s been for lots of reasons something that I didn’t express my grief around for a long, long time. I didn’t feel like I had any right or standing to call attention to it, to do so would be to ask my friend to violate romantic societal norms, would emphasize how fragile my sense of trust appears to be, would make people wonder if I was gay (lol, yup). I also have pretty intense RSD, which I’m still learning about and coming to terms with. Loss of intimacy hits me in ways that feel “harder than normal” and make me feel like I’m overreacting. But I now am beginning to realize that this isn’t so strange, and that I may just be more sensitive to it than some folks, but it’s no less real for everyone else.
When it first started to happen, it was in church settings. Sometimes it was mean girl stuff with queer subtext (I now realize), when they’d find a new best friend and alienate me in their elation over bonding with this new person. NRE exists in so many more spaces than just dating, ha. And sometimes that was okay--I tend to hold onto people for a long, long time if I can, but I also have changed a lot over the years and some people just don’t carry into the next evolution of comfort with myself as a complex human. That, too, is a loss I grieve, but it’s more understandable because there’s a “reason” that is about me, that I can control. (Lol. As if. I can’t control this, but it feels like I can!)
Then, also in church settings, it would happen in new courtships--my friend would disappear into the new relationship, but it was intensely supervised and examined, and the period would be short-lived before a determination was made about the longevity of the relationship. (If you didn’t grow up with this fundie courtship nonsense, congrats. I’m too tired to explain.) There was a rhythm to it that felt natural--there was an end date, your friend would resurface. But sometimes, the sex was good or the sex was Very Bad and they wouldn’t resurface after the wedding right away. My friends and I used to joke that courting couples would disappear from your friendship for 18 months--six for the courtship, and 12 for the figuring-out-sex-&-playing-house bit. Then, they’d return, and you’d resume things as normal.
This was acceptable because I didn’t know anything different. It felt fixed, unmovable, fated. Then I left fundamentalism, and watched people date and maintain their regular circles of community while dating, watched them slowly acclimate the new person into their social life the longer they stayed around, watched the priorities balance out with long-lasting friendships first, dick second. I was delighted to discover that this was possible, that other people understood (like I did, as a newly divorced 24 year-old) that your most permanent community is not your partner or the guy of the month. Those things might fall apart, but your closest friends won’t flee when things get a little weird for a bit or you figure yourself out more and more (your partner also probably should not be fazed by these things if they’re solidly a good fit for you, but that’s another matter).
The thing that really kicked this grief off was watching friends who I loved deeply dive headlong into relationships that were very obviously harmful for them. I don’t mean I didn’t take a shine to their partner (Eve lifers can attest that I do not like ANYONE’S new person right away and only warm up to them checks watch as much as a decade later or as soon as a month later, depending). I mean that their partner made them less themself, less confident, less attuned to their desires and needs, less willing to invest in a future that depended on betting on their own worth first and foremost. This is an ungendered phenomenon, but tended to occur in friends who grew up with a narcissistic-traited parent, or who were deeply in denial about some part of their essential self and identity. If you really hate yourself, codependency is a fucking thrill ride of permission slips to like yourself because you are vital to someone else’s ability to thrive (or so it appears).
This is where I grieved the most, because what I was losing wasn’t just the friendship, but the delight of having my friend’s whole self present and vibrant in my life and the lives of others. There would be a shadow self sapped and depleted of vitality that they shared with us, unaware that their neglect of themselves and a variety of support systems and environments was making them feel stale, a nonentity. (This is also where I get super judgy. Are you making my friend feel less alive and delighted to be their own goodhearted, talented, generous self? Fuck you, I don’t wanna get to know you. I want my friend back, someone needs to be nice to my friend!)
(I also get really vexed when people treat love like possessiveness is an innate quality of the emotion and experience. That is another story, but fuck that.)
And then there’s the mediocre soul-sucking experiences of NRE--the new person is fine, but you are so hungry to be loved that you’ll take anything, and you disappear into the tunnel and stop existing as a dynamic part of my community. This is hard to watch but also understandable--I’ve been that person, I’ve been starved, too. I’ll be here when you need, but I’m not going to chase you down that rabbit hole because I can’t meet that void of need.
A couple years ago, I had my two best friends both start dating new partners around the same time. Both of them are very intense water signs who are all-or-nothing about their inner circles and their attention. I was suddenly finding my calls declined (get it, babe, sex is important) and then our rare conversations were dominated with them processing their new partner’s ups and downs and daily needs. It was difficult for me to express this, because it felt so selfish, but eventually I talked to both of them and essentially said: this guy seems great, but if he doesn’t work I’ll still be here and I need you in my life because you’re my closest person. And I’m friends with you, not him, so I wanna hear about your stuff and talk about mine before we take his out and look at it with a fine toothed comb under bright lights. We can do that! Happy to help parse his bullshit and support you in being happy with this person, but not at the expense of letting what we have here going into atrophy. (Here is where I admit that I was experiencing a lot of strong emotions around asking for this at all because I had queer subtext feelings about one of these friends and not about the other, but having both happen simultaneously made me realize that asking for this wasn’t pushing my complex emotional needs on them--I needed the same level of consistency and maintenance work from both of them, equally.)
This conversation was really well-received by both of my friends, and both relationships eventually ended and they later (separately) commented that they were glad I’d said something, because what if they’d lost me in the fog of the NRE and then I was gone when it was over? This, I assured them, wasn’t my mode, but also: yes, we should be thinking about that. Who is going to be your person when your romantic partner evaporates? If they do, that is. It’s not just about having a backup plan, but there’s a certain level of social hygiene that calls for a multitude of intimacies of various sorts. How else can you trust yourself to know who you are, and who other people are? Varied intimacies are a source of emotional nutrition that protects us against change and loss so that we have people to support and be supported by in the various and weird things that come up in the course of a life.
I think about this from my background in a cult and in relationships with narcissistic abusers--the first thing that both of these types do is to isolate you, request secrecy over struggles in your relationship, demand a right of refusal for you telling your friends things about what the relationship dynamic is like, push your shame buttons until you feel like the only place you can talk about your relationship is in your relationship. NRE vacuum moments aren’t inherently of this quality, but if they are going to become an abusive dynamic, this period of isolating you from your people is vital to the efficacy of the abuse.
These are all reasonings, analysis, organized systems of understanding what I’ve seen and experienced. But also, you can make sense of everything and still be deeply hurt by the void a NRE vacuum creates in your life. This grief is hard and embarrassing to feel because it is a grief that requires recognizing non-heteronormative emotional bonds as significant and intimate. But these bonds are real, too, and the loss of them can be more destructive or destabilizing than the loss of a partner. It’s less expected than a breakup, and we don’t have a lot of social scripts around supporting someone through it (unlike with divorces or breakups). It’s intense and confusing, and that’s something we have to become comfortable with accepting if we’re going to metabolize the grief at all. The feeling must be acknowledged for it to pass through you (it’s like a vampire that way, you have to invite it in, but it’s still gonna be on your porch the next night if you ignore it).
Feelings are messy people are messy we are messy and grief really does just grab the steering wheel and refuse to let you redirect yourself until you acknowledge it and take it seriously. Grief really demands active participation in it, as an emotional process. Losing friends to new relationships can be hard, because it can confirm that someone isn’t as invested in you as you are in them (or other, similar, top 40 hits from your anxiety’s classic rock station in your brain). And understanding how and why it works does help, some. But ultimately there’s no amount of analysis that’s going to help more than crying it out until you’re exhausted.
[have some interspecial love for a breather]
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xo,
e