Why Is It so Hard to End a Friendship?

We both know it’s over, but somehow we’re still here

Photo by Obie Fernandez on Unsplash

One weird thing about the pandemic and its year of various tiers of badly-managed lockdowns is that some of the friends who once lurked in the background of Facebook suddenly became very much front-and-center. Did you notice?

One minute they existed only peripherally, burbling on every few days about how badly their babies were sleeping that week or getting excited about the latest flash sale on Body Shop fruit-scented shower gels. You might almost forget they existed until you collided with them at a school bake sale or in the queue at a parents’ evening.

Then all of a sudden Covid-19 became all-encompassing, and so did the social media presence of these previously placid fringe folk. People I exchanged polite greetings with every few weeks were suddenly people with strong opinions, and not always the opinions I’d expect.

My friend Gemma is one of these individuals. We met at book club and bonded over a shared love of Gone Girl (the book, not the film, please — Ben Affleck was not right in that role and frankly, Amy was not as cool as she should’ve been) and of cheesy nachos with as much jalapeno sauce as possible. We’re exactly the same age. We had some of the same schoolteachers. We like the same tacky cocktails…