Les clashs amicaux
127. Friendship Clashes
Have you been through friendship breakups that hurt you a lot, and you don’t know how to avoid that?
You’re single, and your friendships are your foundation, your secure base, and every friendship disappointment hits you harder than if you were in a relationship.
You feel like having friendships that work is just as complicated as having fulfilling romantic relationships.
Then this episode is for you.
The Different Types of Friendship Clashes
Friendship clashes mainly happen, in my view, when there’s a difference in expectations around friendship, which I listed in episode 126 how to make friends:
- Does the other person need friends? If the other person doesn’t really need new friends, and neither do you, the friendship clash will happen as soon as you ask to see them outside the typical interactions you’ve had so far, for example outside your coffee break together at work.
- Your life stage and your friend’s life stage. This is one of the cases that often happens with childhood friends, longtime friends: you evolve through different life stages, for example you go to university and your friends start working, or your friends get into relationships, get married and have children while you stay single. In this case the friendship clash happens not because you’re incompatible, but because your lifestyles become different, your challenges and issues diverge, and so the common ground shrinks.
- Circles or degrees of friendship. The last case is, for me, the hardest, because in your mind you really think this is a good friend for you, while for the other person you’re part of a much more distant friendship circle. In this case, you’ll notice the friendship clash in the lack of reciprocity of interest, in the difficulty of sharing your struggles, in the difficulty of being able to count on the other person when things are going badly for you.
❤️ Check out my webinar on how to finally find happiness in love!
Re-choose Your Level of Friendship
Having personally lived through two clashes that marked me, linked to my expectations, one way to solve these friendship clashes is to ask yourself whether it’s positive and satisfying for you to align your friendship to the other person’s level, for example:
- If the other person doesn’t necessarily need friends but is very happy to grab coffee with you at the work break, does that bring you satisfaction, does it still make you happy even if you stay at this level of interaction with this person?
- If you notice your friends are moving into a different life stage and are less available to see you, is their friendship important enough to you to keep seeing them even in a small dose and even without sharing the same issues? Would you want a friend to leave you if you were the one changing life stage instead? That was my case, for example, with two of my friends who settled down and had children well before I did. At first it was hard to accept because I always used to go out with them, we did lots of things together. But I had shared enough important things with them, they mattered enough to me that I wanted to keep the connection, and I also wanted to be happy for their happiness rather than let a positive change in their lives become the reason for a friendship breakup. I had to accept being less of a priority for them, to adapt more to keep the connection, and that I needed to make new friends to go out with.
- For the level of friendship or the friendship circle: how do you feel if you place this friendship at the same level as the other person does? Is there resentment on your side? Here your emotions will guide you on whether you’re able to accept this new positioning. To give you a personal example, at university I had a friend I traveled with on almost every vacation, we studied together, we went out together, I thought she was a very good friend, and she ended our friendship the moment she met her boyfriend, saying we were just uni classmates and that she wanted to invest more of her time in her close friends. Her proposal was to just stay in touch loosely; honestly, for me that was impossible, it was too painful to keep a superficial connection after everything we’d been through together. I preferred to end it because I needed to grieve.
For everything related to perceptions, just like in love, communication solves everything. I think you can communicate anything if you do it the right way. I explain this in episode 82 Communication: is it a substance or form problem?
Grieving Your Friendship
Grieving a friendship is identical to grieving a romantic relationship (except for phase 2, depending on the degree of friendship) and includes 5 phases:
- Handling the shock
- Weaning yourself off the other person’s absence
- Getting your anger out
- Going through the sadness phase well
- Accepting it and turning the page
I give you all my tools in episode 42 on how to grieve your relationship?
When you’re single, if you don’t have a very close-knit family nearby, this can be an emotionally difficult stage. Don’t judge yourself for needing connection, it’s normal, you’re just a human being.
What If Your Friendships Reflected Your Love Patterns?</
Often, what’s difficult for you to put in place in your romantic relationships is also difficult in your friendships, because it’s influenced by your unconscious vision of the relationship and of what you need to do to maintain it: over-adapting to the other person, easily slipping into a power struggle, controlling the other person, being disappointed by the other person…
Sometimes that’s not the case, because their relational patterns concern more the opposite sex, but in most cases there are similarities between how you handle your friendships and your love life.
For you
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In the program Opening up to Love I systematically invite my clients to put these relational behavior changes in place in their friendships too. It reassures them to be able to carry these changes over into their love lives.
Sandy Kaufmann
is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast “S’ouvrir à l’amour“, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.
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