Nina: [00:00:00] Welcome to Dear Nina: Conversations About Friendship. I am your host, Nina Badzin. I am coming at you this week with a solo episode. I haven’t done a solo episode in a long time. It won’t be too long, ’cause I do think that when it’s just me, the audience can only take so much.

This will be a shorter one. It’s something that’s been bothering me for a while, which is usually what the solo episodes are. It’s just something I’ve been burning to talk about, and I don’t want to wait for the right guest for it. And then I remember, wait, I’m a guest on a podcast often. I can be my own guest sometimes.

On to what we are talking about today, the thing that has been annoying me out there in the world. I keep seeing online whenever somebody describes a friendship that ended badly, or they are talking about a friend who disappointed them, inevitably somebody will say in the comments, “She was never your friend.

That friendship wasn’t real.” every time I see that, I think, “Really? How could you possibly know that about this [00:01:00] friendship?”

I understand the impulse It’s almost like you’re explaining, oh, they shouldn’t be hurt really because that wasn’t even a real friendship.

But that is not helpful. Because think about somebody who is grieving either a long friendship, 10, 20 years, even five years. You’re encouraging them to question every good memory they had, every act of kindness that that friend did, every moment when they felt close to that person, it’s encouraging your friend or this stranger that you’re advising to question if any of that was real.

maybe they’re wondering, was I completely wrong to consider this person a friend? Oftentimes, that person of course was their friend. And this could be with a newer friendship too where somebody was really into the friendship, excited about it, and then it turns the wrong way. And by saying, “Oh, they were never really your friend,” okay, well, in that case, sure, maybe they were never your close friend, but your friend or this stranger you’re advising was probably not completely wrong to at least pursue the friendship and see where it goes

you can grieve the end of a friendship, [00:02:00] you can decide that a friendship you are somewhat newly pursuing is not worth continuing pursuing without putting the entire connection that you had on trial. Just because something ended doesn’t mean it wasn’t good while it was in its prime, and just because someone disappointed you doesn’t mean they never cared about you in the first place.

It doesn’t call into question all the times that they were there for you

As you know, if you have been here a long time, I have been writing and talking about friendship for many years, studying it, and one thing I have come to believe is that we are often too quick to make definitive judgments about our friendships and other people’s friendships.

And I think the way we talk about other people’s friendships colors how we think of our own friendships, too. We wanna know very quickly, was this person a good friend or a bad friend? Was the friendship real or fake? But those aren’t always helpful questions when you are grieving or transitioning from the end of a friendship, [00:03:00] or when you are trying to learn from a past friendship

So let’s talk about this piece of it a bit longer, that just because a friendship didn’t last, it doesn’t mean it didn’t matter to you. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t an essential part of your life. And I want to say, I should have said it earlier, I have done this in my own life too.

I have definitely, when a friendship is no longer a part of my life wondered, did I waste my time? Did I misread cues? Was the whole friendship a waste? There may be truth to some of those things. It may be that I let things go longer than they should have.

There’s something to learn there. It may be that I missed some cues, and there’s something to learn there. But it doesn’t call the whole friendship into question, and that’s what I’m trying to encourage people not to do to themselves, and not to say to your friends when they come to you, or strangers online.

When they come to you with this example of someone who left them out or someone who disappointed them, the answer, “Oh, that person’s not a real friend,” or, “That person was never your real friend,” is not often the answer. Think of some of the friendships that were formed through [00:04:00] shared circumstances. So there’s people that you sat with at kids’ sporting events.

There’s the coworker that you had lunch with every day There’s friends from a particular neighborhood or school or stage of life, and sometimes those relationships were incredibly meaningful at that time. It got you through that time. You got that friend through that time. It was mutual in that way. You laughed, you supported each other, you remembered details about each other’s lives.

just because the circumstance changed then the friendship faded, which is very natural, it doesn’t mean that that friendship wasn’t important in that time of your life. So I just want people to have a softer view of that. In episode 214 with Melissa Radke, that episode was titled, Are We Giving Up On Our Friends Too Quickly?,

we discussed friendships that develop through shared circumstances specifically, and don’t necessarily continue once those circumstances disappear. And something I said in that episode, I said, “I wish people would appreciate that those friendships had their place and they got you through a [00:05:00] time.” And Melissa appreciated that, uh, as my guest.

She was like, “Yes, that’s right,” because there’s a lot of sometimes it feels like unnecessary sadness about those friendships not continuing. My feeling is, if you want those friendships to continue outside of the circumstance, they can, But somebody has to make a move, and if you listen to even two of my episodes, you will probably know I’m going to say that person should be you.

Why you? Why does it have to be you? Because you can’t control anyone else, of course. it has to be you. If you really loved sitting next to somebody on the bleachers for five years, and then your kid is no longer on that team or your kid graduated, if you want to see that person, if you really like that person so much and you want to continue the friendship, you’re going to have to do something, text, call, make a plan, in order for that to happen so that the friendship can survive outside the context.

That said, really the point of this episode is that even if it doesn’t, even if it never leaves that context, you only just have memories with that friend, that person still [00:06:00] was a part of your life in a time when you needed a friend in that moment, and it doesn’t make the friendship fake. It doesn’t make the memories wrong.

There’s no reason to question whether they were a real friend. They were a real friend for that context, and you have the power to take it out of that context or at least try to. I mean, you cannot control if that person’s interested or has time or interest, but if you have time and interest, then you can try.

And if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean that the time that you spent talking to that person on the bleachers was a waste of your time. A friendship can have been exactly what you needed at a certain time in your life, even if it’s not what you need now or it’s not what that person needs now. ‘Cause it does take two, right? It takes two people to decide to continue being friends Outside of whatever work or activity or certain stage of life you met in.

Now let’s move on to a harder piece of this, because it’s relatively easy ’cause it’s less emotional. You can really understand why you stop being friends with somebody when you no longer work together, you no longer sit next to each [00:07:00] other at an activity, whether it’s your own activity or the kids’ activities.

That’s less emotional. It can be a little harder when it was a friendship that was beyond just the time and place, that you were friends at a deeper level in ways that crossed more parts of your life, and then someone disappointed you, or you disappointed that person, and now there’s tension, and one of you is taking space from each other, and over time, perhaps the friendship fades.

I couldn’t even possibly name all the reasons that could happen. We’ve all been there. We have all been in friendships that did not make it out of some disappointing thing that happened between you I want to express here that how someone behaves at the end of a friendship doesn’t automatically tell us how they felt about the entire relationship.

Most of us don’t act that great at the end. I have an episode coming up about how to have ends of friendship be a little more graceful, although that’s very much in an ideal world, and I think we can move towards that ideal world, which is what that episode will be about

But let’s say, as it [00:08:00] happens in most cases, that the end of a friendship isn’t always great, even if it’s a fade. I don’t mean that you had a big confrontation. Oftentimes there is not a confrontation. I’d say most times it is a fading out, and that can be hurtful because it’s that someone stops calling, someone stops texting, someone stops responding to your calls or texts.

. Maybe you felt excluded from something too many times and you’re feeling bitter about it, and you’re just done trying You can be genuinely upset about those things and the way a friendship faded out without deciding that everything that came before it was a lie or fake.

People do change. Their priorities change. Their capacity for a friendship can change, and there also might be something that’s going on that you don’t know about in their life, and there may be a way that you’ve been acting towards them that you don’t realize is the reason that they are creating space.

There’s so many possibilities. It is hard to capture them all. All of those things could be true, and you can still have good memories and good thoughts of that friend. Doesn’t make it less painful. In fact, sometimes having those good memories of that friendship is what makes [00:09:00] it painful. You do remember that they were a good friend.

Again, the point of this episode is to try not to give other people advice that those friendships were fake just because they ended

Something my own friend Rebecca Kotak and I spoke about in episode 201 that was titled A Softer Way to Think About Friendships That Faded. So that’s a good episode to go along with this one if you wanna hear more, we talked about it for more like 45 minutes.

A slightly different angle than this one, one thing we said there is , someone could have been a wonderful friend to you for years and not be a good friend to you anymore. Both things can be true. That’s the feeling I want people to be able to hold onto, those two truths. They were a good friend, and now they’re not. But it doesn’t erase the first part

One important caveat This is not meant to excuse mistreatment. Of course, sometimes a friendship ends and we do look back on some of what we had tolerated with a new understanding. Sometimes we do recognize that there was a pattern [00:10:00] of dishonesty, disrespect,

maybe we overlooked things because we wanted so badly for the friendship to work. So I’m not trying to argue that every friendship was wonderful, and that everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt indefinitely, and that you should always work to keep those friendships. I actually don’t think you should work to keep every friendship, even if it was a good one.

Sometimes things have their time and place But there really is a difference between recognizing that a friendship was never healthy and assuming it was not real because it ended. You don’t have to stay friends with somebody who has consistently hurt you. You don’t have to reconcile with every friend

ultimately, the advice I want you to take away from this quick episode is if you are grieving a friendship, try to look at the friendship as a whole, not just the way it ended. What did that friendship bring to your life? Were there years that you genuinely enjoyed that person’s company? Did that person show up for you in important moments?

Maybe you can think about what changed in a softer way, like I talked about a lot with Rebecca in episode 201. I love the word softer. That was her word. She brought that to the episode, [00:11:00] and it is a nice reframe on how to think about these kinds of friendships. . I like that word because I would hope, and I’m sure a lot of you would hope, that old friends we have in our life that we are not as close to now for who knows what reason, we would hope that people think of us in a softer way.

We would hope that people don’t erase every good memory of us because we’re in a different stage of life right now. I would encourage people to try not to make the other person in your memory entirely bad or entirely good. If it’s a friendship you miss and you’re sad about, they probably weren’t perfect all the time either.

You don’t get to have the whole friendship back, all the good stuff without some of the negative stuff too

and then back to where we started, if you’re comforting somebody else whose friendship has ended, I would just be careful with sweeping statements like, “She was never your friend,” “He was fake,” any of that. Remember that you probably don’t know the entire history of that relationship,

And it’s possible that the person who is presenting this friendship to you is also rewriting it [00:12:00] as they tell it to you. And so not only do you not have the full story, you’re not necessarily getting the truth on the half of the story that you’re receiving.

Another thing to remember is you can validate someone’s pain without claiming that the person that they’re talking about was terrible all the time and a villain, I think we would help each other out more if we had more nuance and shades of gray in the way that we talk about other people and listen to stories about other people Instead of saying, “That person wasn’t a real friend,” you can say, “I’m so sorry that you were treated that way,” or, “That sounds like a really painful way for a friendship to end,” or, “It sounds like you miss her.”

sometimes we can just reflect back what the person is saying to us without analyzing the friendship ourselves

and finally, I think it’s a helpful practice for you, whether it’s thinking about your own friendships or helping friends or strangers talk about their friendships, to be grateful for what the friendship once was.

It’s a good practice to get into looking for that, looking for what can I be grateful for, for [00:13:00] what the friendship was? Also, yes, it is totally okay to be disappointed in how it turned out. Oftentimes, we invest in these friendships not for it to just fade.

It is okay and normal to be disappointed that that’s what happened. And then we may need to accept that it is over, even if we’re disappointed, even if we’re grateful for what was before. All those things are true. You don’t have to decide, you know, one way or the other.

But most importantly, I don’t think it’s helpful to convince yourself or convince your friend when you’re giving advice that the friendship wasn’t real just because you’re not friends anymore

I hope this is helpful. It’s just something I’ve been noticing, something that’s been bugging me a bit. If you’re aware of the way social media works, many of you are, I know not everyone is on it as much as I am, whether it’s Instagram or TikTok, it shows you stuff you’re already interested in.

So I see an inordinate amount of friendship stuff on Threads too. Threads especially. I feel like I have seen it even more on Threads recently, people giving each other advice, and really there it’s [00:14:00] strangers giving each other advice more than any other platform it seems like. Well, I guess that’s not fair, it’s strangers on TikTok too, and, and probably Instagram. that’s the advice I keep seeing people give They were not a real friend. They were not a real friend. I’m going to wrap it up here. I’m starting to lose my voice just slightly, And I am moderating a really big event on Sunday in Minneapolis, so I am basically on voice rest the rest of the week.

Sort of self-induced voice rest. Not complete voice rest, but that’s something I have found that I have to do now before a bigger event. I’ve been recording a lot lately. I have a lot of great episodes coming up with guests where you don’t have to listen to my voice the entire time. I’m excited for you to hear them

And come back next week when our friendships are going well. We are happier all around. Join us in the Facebook group at Dear Nina: The Group to discuss this episode and more. And join me on Instagram and TikTok at DearNinaFriendship. See you next week. Bye. [00:15:00]