Defriending is like a miniature divorce
Pruning a person from your life, even if it’s necessary, can play out like a miniature divorce
When Jeryl Brunner, a writer in Manhattan, was in her 20s, she had a friend who was just the sort of acquaintance people scoop up in their social net when they are young and trying to carve out a life in a new city. The friend was fun, outgoing and stylish, and always up for a night of dancing at Area, or a weekend jaunt to a Neiman Marcus outlet in New Jersey.
But as Brunner neared 40, the reasons for their spending time together became less clear. “It’s almost like we were in different movies,” said Brunner, now 46.
“We didn’t connect on this fundamental view of what was important. I don’t obsess about material things. I’m the kind of person, if I had $100, I’d see a play; I’d have an experience. Her sense of joy came from owning a Gucci bag.”
She decided it was time to let her friend go. So Brunner took the “bad-boyfriend approach” and just stopped calling. After the friend made a few spurned overtures — and after some awkward conversations about why Brunner was always too busy to get together — the friend got the hint. Years later, however, the breakup still feels unresolved.
“I wish I would have handled it differently,” Brunner said. “I think you owe it to that person, rather than keeping them guessing.”
Is there a right way to tell a friend it is time to go?
Thanks to Facebook, the concept of “defriending” has become part of the online culture. With a click of a mouse, you can remove someone from your friends roster and never again see an annoying status update or another vacation photo from a person you want out of your life.
Not so in the real world. Even though research shows that it is natural, and perhaps inevitable, for people to prune the weeds from their social groups as they move through adulthood, those who actually attempt to defriend in real life find that it often plays out like a divorce in miniature — a tangle of awkward exchanges, made-up excuses, hurt feelings and lingering ill will.
Even the most omnivorous collectors of friends acknowledge that sometimes it is necessary to cross out some names from their little black book. Roger Horchow is the Broadway producer made famous in Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point as a pre-eminent “connector,” a social web-spinner whose hidden expertise is maintaining a vast network of friends. But even for him, some must fall by the wayside.
People start “dropping ‘starter friends’ from the early bachelor days, or early work associates, or early couples with little children like yours,” said Horchow, who wrote The Art of Friendship: 70 Simple Rules for Making Meaningful Connections (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), with his daughter, Sally.
Psychologists consider it an inevitable life stage, a point where people achieve enough self-awareness to know who they are and what they want out of their remaining years, and have a degree of clarity about which friends deserve full attention and which are a drain. It is time, in other words, to shed people they collected in their youth, when they were still trying on friends for size.
The winnowing process even has a clinical name: socioemotional selectivity theory, a term coined by Laura Carstensen, a psychology professor who is the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity in California. Carstensen’s data show that the number of interactions with acquaintances starts to decline after age 17 (presumably after the socially aggressive world of high school) and then picks up again between 30 and 40 before starting to decline sharply from 40 to 50.
“When time horizons are long, as they typically are in youth, we’re collectors, we’re explorers, we’re interested in all sorts of things that are novel,” Carstensen said. “You might go to a party that you don’t want to go to, but know you should — and it’s there you meet your future spouse.”
People approaching 30 — many of them dealing with life changes like marriage and a first child — often tend to feel overwhelmed with responsibility, so they lose patience with less meaningful friends, said Dr. Carol Landau, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University’s medical school.
The process does not always have to be painful. Annie Cardi, a 27-yearold author of children’s books in Boston, recently discovered that an old college friend and she were defriending each other simultaneously at a University of Virginia reunion when they were chatting with mutual friends and awkwardly discovered that neither had invited the other to her coming wedding.
“It wasn’t anything personal; we had just grown apart,” Cardi said. “It was actually a relief to have that conversation. It completely cleared the air, and neither of us left with bad feelings.
“I know that when I see pictures of her wedding posted on Facebook, I’ll be happy for her.”
But when the impulse is not mutual, it helps to undertake it with careful consideration.
“The first step before you defriend a friendship is to consider, very
carefully and seriously, if you want to end a particular friendship or if you just want to wind it down,” said Jan Yager, a friendship coach and author of When Friendship Hurts: How to Deal With Friends Who Be
tray, Abandon, or Wound You (Simon & Schuster, 2002). “It will usually be a lot more pleasant to just pull away, and stop sharing as much privileged information.”
Indeed, honesty may not be the best policy, Landau of Brown said: “Remember that white lies are OK in the service of not hurting feelings.”
Which raises this question: Is a friendship ever really over?
More than a decade before social networking websites introduced “defriending” into the vernacular, Scott Laing, a strength and conditioning coach in Toronto, attempted it in real life. He had enjoyed going to bars and pool halls with a certain friend when he was in his 20s, but now thought he and the man were growing apart. As an endgame tactic, Laing, now 46, seized on an extended trip to Europe as an opportunity to put both physical and emotional distance between the two of them. He sent a couple of postcards over the course of three months, then nothing. It was over, he thought.
Last spring, however, he was surprised to find that the friend was reaching out, for the first time in 15 years. He friended him on Facebook.