Soft-Launch Breakups, Hard-Launch Friendship Breakups

From bridesmaid to blocked🚫

We soft-launch breakups like they are PR campaigns. A strategically cropped dinner pic, a playlist update that screams he’s gone, a ‘focusing on myself’ post that’s practically a press release. There is an entire culture around leaving a romantic partner: self-help books, step-by-step guides, carefully curated ways to grieve ‘correctly.’

But friendship breakups? No one teaches you how to do those.

There is no How to Lose a Friend in 10 Days. No friend-breakup text template. No guide on how to mourn someone who’s still alive but no longer in your life.

And yet, when a friendship truly ends, it is louder than any breakup. It’s a hard launch. No sugar-coating, no slow-burn separation. Just sudden, irreversible silence.

Why friendship breakups hit harder

When a relationship ends, people expect you to fall apart. They check in. They offer comforting words. They take you out to distract you.

But when a friendship dies? There is no script. You are simply expected to just move on. No mourning period, no dramatic confessional, just an unsettling kind of absence.

Because friendship, at its best, is a love story in its own right. You build a world together: shared wardrobes, inside jokes, whispered secrets about the future. And when that world collapses, it is just as disorienting as any heartbreak.

You see them in a coffee shop and hesitate…do you say hi, or pretend you didn’t see them? You hear a song and instinctively go to send it—before remembering there is no longer a space for you in their inbox.

Unlike romantic breakups, there’s no clear moment of finality. No big fight, no dramatic exit. Just a slow unravelling.

The ones we lose without a war

Not every friendship ends in betrayal. Sometimes, you simply become different people. And there’s a strange heartbreak in mourning someone who still exists but isn’t the version of themselves you once loved. You hope, deep down, that they’re still in there somewhere. But sometimes, they’re not.

The ‘drift’ in young adult friendships is like no other. The same girl you once pictured as your bridesmaid, your future neighbour, the one whose children would be best friends with yours—now just an old contact in your phone. Kept for emergencies, I say. But really? Just another reminder of who I used to be.

One of the hardest realities I had to face after secondary school was realising that the ‘friends’ I had weren’t really the friends I deserved. I learned that not every conversation should revolve around men. Not every friendship should feel like a transaction. That worrying about your friend’s whereabouts at 3am, after a hundred missed calls and radio silence, was not normal.

Sometimes, a friendship ends, but the person lingers in your life in strange ways. You pass a café you always went to. Their name pops up in conversation. You hear their laugh in a stranger’s voice. They become a ghost of your past, one you’re not sure whether to miss or forget.

The ‘friends’ you’re better off without

We talk so much about the worst types of boyfriends, but no one tells you how to spot a bad friend. And often, we don’t realise how toxic they were until the friendship ends.

The Competitor / Copier

She does not just admire you—she becomes you. The same perfume, the same hobbies, even the same phrases. And at first, it’s flattering. But then, you realise: she’s not copying out of admiration. She’s copying you because she wants to be you. And she is never truly happy when you succeed, because, in her mind, your success is a loss for her.

The Transactional Friend

She never does more than you have done for her. Every favour, every kind gesture, it is all a calculation. A friendship ledger where nothing can be freely given only traded. The moment you need more than she is willing to give, you realise: she was never really in your corner to begin with.

The Boy-Crazy Friend

Every conversation somehow leads back to him. The guy she met last week. The guy she’s “kind of” talking to. The guy she hasn’t seen since 2019 but is convinced still thinks about her. You could be crying about your worst day, and she’ll pivot it back to how he hasn’t texted in two hours. And worse? With every new boyfriend, she forgets her best friends exist. Until, of course, the breakup happens. And suddenly, she’s ‘back.’

Blocking as a love language

Among my friends, I am known as the brutal one, the cold friend. I don’t do slow fades or quiet exits. There are no lingering comments, half-hearted likes, or mutuals keeping me in the loop. I do not believe in keeping ghosts on my feed. When a friendship ends, I let it end.

I never understood the need to treat social media like an antique shop, cluttered with remnants of people we have outgrown. Why keep someone in your orbit just to watch their life play out like a film you were once cast in? Nostalgia is never a good enough reason to stay subscribed.

No, I didn’t dye my hair after every friendship breakup, but much like a relationship ending, I always rebranded. A new haircut, a new mantra, a new literary obsession. If you ever see me deep in a Bell Hooks phase, know that I am, once again, rebuilding.

A love letter to the ones who stayed💌

But for every loss, there is also a gain.

My mum always told me that the friends you meet later in life are the ones who stick. She would tell teenage me this as I sobbed over the girl I thought would be my maid of honour, mourning her like a breakup. And she was right.

Because then, I entered university. And whether you believe in fate or not, I know I was meant to meet them.

Toni and Amna. The ones who saved me. The ones who taught me what true, selfless friendship looked like. The ones who proved that friendship wasn’t supposed to be selfish, transactional, or conditional. They cared for me in a way no one else had. They showed me that what I used to accept from ‘friends’ growing up wasn’t normal. And I can say, without hesitation, that I would not be here today without them.

Then, there is Jasmine—the girliest of them all, and the sweetest. The Blair to my Serena (minus the toxicity). Pink sleepovers, ballet, yoga, baking—we do it all. She makes me feel at peace and teaches me to be kinder to myself. And she is proof that friendship doesn’t have to be competitive. We don’t copy. We simply match.

And then there’s El. More like a sister than a friend. The girl who has seen every phase, every version of me, and stayed through it all. When anything happened—and I mean anything—from being stranded in the middle of nowhere to being broken up with over text, even when she was on the other side of the world, I knew El was there.

And everyone, I truly believe, needs friends like these.

The End, or just a new beginning?

Not every friendship lasts forever. But I have realised that is okay. People come and go, but the ones who matter—the ones who truly love you—find a way to stay.

And if there is one thing I know now, it’s this: the right friendships don’t need a soft launch. They don’t need to be rebranded or repaired. They just are.