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In this month’s anonymous letter, a reader (and listener!) is trying to figure out how to move forward after the end of a 35-year friendship. The complication is that her former best friend is also her husband’s cousin, lives in the same small town, and overlaps with nearly every family and social circle in her life.
Dear Nina,
I have listened and enjoyed many of your podcasts over the last year or so. I began researching the topic about friendships after a very difficult and complex friendship breakup after 35 years of friendship.
Ours has been a complex friendship because my best girlfriend of 35 years is also my husband’s first cousin. So she is family AND we both live in a very small town. Being friends for so long and also family, and in a small town means you have almost all overlapping friendship circles and some of those circles are mutual family members.
I haven’t heard anything on your podcast yet about when your friendships includes cousins. Not quite as easy to take a break, step back, or even end the friendship altogether. This has been extremely painful to go through yet I feel this has to be common in small rural towns.
Thanks, Meg
Dear Meg,
I usually stay in the friendship lane rather than family relationships because there are some important differences and it’s not the area I’ve been studying for all these years. But this situation has so much overlap that I decided to make it this month’s letter.
In the full paid answer, I unpack what I think is happening and what I’d do next. Paid subscribers also get access to the growing Dear Nina Library of Friendship Dilemmas.
Photo I took of a little bridge near my house that felt fitting for this week’s theme of “bridging” to a new mindset as I approach 50.
Plenty of friendships fade without an argument or even a hint of conflict. There’s not always a clear-cut explanation for why you talk less often, spend less time together, text less, or even connect on social media less frequently.
You can probably think of friends from all of your “eras” who are no longer a significant part of your life. In some cases, you might have let the “friendship rope” go. In other cases, your friend let it go. And sometimes it was a mutual fading out.
And because many of us struggle with ambiguity, we might turn the drifting of that friendship into a story where someone wronged us. Or we were foolish for wanting the friendship more than the other person did. It’s tempting to make someone the villain despite how easily we can explain why our own drifts away from certain friends were a natural outcome. (I drifted away from friend X for totally understandable reasons but friend Y abandonded me and is a jerk.)
I understand the impulse to make it someone’s fault. When a friendship that once mattered becomes less close, it feels hurtful or even embarrassing. It can make us question whether we misread the whole relationship from the get go.
The free newsletter gives you the big friendship ideas. The paid version is where I answer the vulnerable anonymous friendship dilemmas with detailed responses. Get access to the growing Dear Nina Friendship Dilemma Archive. Join us there for the full conversation.
In this week’s episode of Dear Nina, I spoke with one of my best friends, Rebecca Kotok, about a softer way to think about friendships that faded.
Rebecca was first on the podcast years ago to talk about our own friendship breakup in our 20s and eventual reconciliation. This week’s conversation was different. It was less about repairing one specific friendship where there was an actual rift and more about what age, grief, and life experience can do to the way we carry old friendship stories.
Rebecca said something that stayed with me: “I now attribute perceived slights much less to someone’s character and much more to what that person may have been carrying.”
Sometimes a friendship faded because kids changed schools, someone moved, one person’s job became consuming, one person was overwhelmed with aging parents or their kids’ needs (or both at the same time), one person had less capacity than anyone realized, or it was simply that the friendship belonged to a certain time and place (college, sports team, work, the kids were friends for a while, and so on).
That does not mean every hurtful thing gets excused. It does not mean you have to call an old friend, get coffee, or restart the friendship with your new understanding. It means there may be peace, as Rebecca said, “in not prosecuting the case forever in your mind.”
A friendship that drifted doesn’t mean the friendship didn’t matter. I think that is the piece people often miss. We assume that if a friendship didn’t last, it must have failed or it was mistake to have spent those years together. But lots of friendships were real and meaningful even if they were not permanent. There are friends who gave us comfort, fun, companionship, or a sense of belonging for a while, and when life changed, the relationship changed too.
A softer way to carry an old friendship story might sound like this: I don’t need to pretend it didn’t hurt or disappoint me to lose this friendship. I also don’t need to make her the villain. It’s a hard point-of-view to maintain right in the middle of a friendship that’s fading. Neither Rebecca nor I are suggesting that’s possible. What we discussed is the way you view the situation later so you can diminish the shame or anger you carry around about it. For your own good!
LISTENING: The Good Parts: A Novel by Evann Normandin. It’s an interesting premise about taking a pill that makes you forget everyone you know so that you’re starting a fresh in all of your relationships. I’m only 15% in though so I can’t really report on it yet.
TV: I’m loving ELLE on Amazon Prime! It’s the perfect summer show.
RECIPE: My daughter made this Kale and Cashew Salad from Emily Maxson’s fabulous book, Real Food. Every Day. I liked it so much, I made it a few days later. I found the recipe online to share here. (Linked in the name of the recipe.) If you liked it, you will LOVE Emily’s two cookbooks.
Two Anonymous Letters You Might Have Missed (July’s question is coming next week so make sure you’re a paying subscriber!)
Let’s connect outside of this newsletter: You can find me most often in the Facebook group, Dear Nina: The Group. All the social media links are below. I know I need to get rid of some them! Instagram | TikTok | YouTube | LinkedIn | My Website
The anonymous letters (and my answers!) come from the rawest places of friendship uncertainty. They deserve the most sensitive readers who are not going to roll their eyes, leave troll-ish comments, or make the letter-writer feel foolish for asking. If you’re willing to upgrade to this part of the newsletter, I know you’re there with the best intentions to be part of a community that’s not afraid to ask the tough questions and who will read the answers with an open heart. If that’s you, I’d love to see on the other side. :)
