Friendship Questions Without Clean AnswersWhy friendship dilemmas are rarely as simple as “move on” or “get over it”
A few days ago, I published “When a Friendship Ends But Your Lives Still Overlap,” which was the July letter from the growing Dear Nina Friendship Dilemma Library. And boy did it travel on that fickle “friend” we call Instagram. If that headline and graphic brought you here, welcome! It wasn’t false advertising. You will see complicated friendship situations here and many nuanced discussions about what to do with them. I’ve been writing about friendship since 2014 and podcasting about it at Dear Nina: Conversations About Friendship since 2021. I’ve covered a lot, and I have no plans to stop. Why did “Meg’s” letter hit so hard?“Meg” (I always change the names if one was provided) wrote to me about a 35-year friendship that ended, complicated by the fact that her former best friend is also her husband’s cousin, lives in the same small town, and shares many of the same family, friend, and community circles. Friendship breakups are common territory all over the internet. What made Meg’s letter different is that there’s no clean break for her. There’s no distance to let the pain fade. Her letter wasn’t only asking, “How do I move on?” It was asking, “How do I live with a situation I don’t like and don’t get to leave (or control)?” That is a harder question, and I think it’s what people recognized in their own lives when they saved the post on Instagram, sent it to friends, and found their way here.
This week’s episode of Dear Nina is about a different kind of difficult friendship situation: the sting of finding out about plans you weren’t included in. At first glance, this sounds like a kid/teen problem. I promise you, it is not. I have 14 years of letters in the Dear Nina inbox—and my own adult life experience—to tell you otherwise. Even as adults, yes, there’s the group chat you didn’t know existed, the trip you found out about after the fact, the mahj group that formed without you, and so on. For the episode, I spoke with fantastic friendship educator, Danielle Bayard Jackson, about why this hurts even when we know, intellectually, that not every gathering can include every person every time. We also covered an uncomfortable question: whether some of our own patterns make us harder to include. Some examples: you (often) cancel, you rarely respond when people are trying to make plans, you have beef with half of the people who are coming along, you scroll on your phone most of the time. This is the kind of stuff we do here—discuss the gray areas. Maybe the friendship is over like in Meg’s letter. Maybe it’s just different and we don’t know how to accept it. (Like in many of the letters). Maybe you were left out for no reason other than plans were made on the spot, or because people desired a small hangout, and/or because friends ARE ALLOWED to get together without us. Still, some of these things hurt, even when we understand it all intellectually. If you’re new, I’m glad you found your way here. If you’ve been here for a while, thank you for helping make this a place where friendship gets taken seriously. Read “the Meg letter” here. Listen to episode #202 on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and anywhere you get your podcasts!
Links About Friendship I Liked RecentlyI was invited to write the summer Perspectives column for KidSpirit Magazine. They titled it perfectly: “Notes From a Friendship Enthusiast.” These are good ideas from Martha Stewart Magazine on “9 Social Hobbies for New Skills—and New Friends”
Books, Shows, and Other Finds
Two (old) Anonymous Letters You Might Have Missed
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. Instagram | TikTok | YouTube | LinkedIn | My Website
You’re a free subscriber to Dear Nina: Conversations About Friendship. Curious about those once-a-month emails behind the paywall? 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. :)
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