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Auntie SparkNotes: I’m Super Angry at My Ex-Friend

Dear Auntie,

This is a story that could be long, but I’ll try to simplify. Basically, when I came to college I knew absolutely no one and was a bit nervous about making friends and completely re-starting my life in new part of the country. Luckily, I managed to find a group of wonderful people pretty quickly and the six of us have been friends ever since. That is until this past year, our junior year, when things got complicated.

Our friend (who I’ll call Mike) decided he’d found another group of people he’d rather spend his time with.There’s nothing inherently wrong about this of course—I want Mike to be happy, and if he feels like he’s happier with these friends I don’t want to force him to stick with us just because he used to. What makes me mad is the way he went about it. A couple weeks into the year Mike completely cut off contact with all of us. He stopped answering texts, stopped acknowledging our invitations to things, and never went out of his way to talk to us if he saw any of us around campus. After a few weeks of this I got tired of it, so I found him and told him that if he kept it up I would no longer consider him a friend. He was very apologetic and promised that being busy was the only reason, but I have never heard anything from him again and don’t imagine that I will at this point.

Most of my other friends have found a way to move on or stop being angry by now, but I feel like I just get angrier about it everyday. Mike and I were really close for two years and it bothers me that he didn’t even see our individual friendship as worth salvaging when he decided to start hanging out with other people. To me, the fact that he could cut me out of his life with so little difficulty means not only that we aren’t friends now, but that we were never friends at all. Auntie, please tell me if I’m being overdramatic about this and if there’s some way that I can find closure from a wound most of my friends seem to not even feel anymore.

I’ll be honest, Sparkler: While Auntie SparkNotes is normally a big fan of brevity, this is one of the few times when I’ve wished I had the non-expurgated version of the long story. Not just because it sounds like a fascinating drama, but also because I wonder if there’s some potentially vital piece of information being left out.

Specifically, here’s what I keep getting hung up on:

Your close, beloved friend of two years went full radio silence for no apparent reason—and your very first response, after weeks of non-contact, was to give him an angry ultimatum and then write him off as a worthless jerk?

I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest that you may have skipped a vital step or two in there, kiddo. Like, say, making an effort to find out what was behind Mike’s choice to suddenly switch social circles, expressing your desire to keep him in your life on an individual basis, or continuing to reach out to him so that you could rebuild a one-on-one relationship—which was bound to be weird for both of you, and require some mutual effort to make happen.

And look, maybe there was an intermediate step there that didn’t make it into the narrative, or maybe Mike’s behavior was egregiously rude in a personal way that your letter didn’t fully capture. But if that’s the case, you haven’t mentioned it. And if it’s not the case, then this is where a reasonable person might gently suggest that whatever happened here, it’s almost certainly not as simple as “We’re not friends anymore and so he was never really my friend at all.”

You ask if that’s an overdramatic reaction, and it certainly might be. But more than that, it just seems like an awfully hasty and ungenerous conclusion to draw without ever having had even one serious convo about what had happened. Sure, it’s possible that your friendship with Mike wasn’t as intimate as you’d thought; but what if he had a painful, secret falling-out with one of your other friends? What if your group dynamic was toxic for him in ways you didn’t realize, and that would make it difficult now for him to stay in touch with you, even if he wanted to? And what makes you think that he cut ties with you “with so little difficulty,” anyway? How would you know what’s going on inside his head?

To be clear, this is all speculation. But then again, so are the assumptions you’re making about your ex-friend’s state of mind—and all you’re accomplishing there is to villainize him while making yourself feel perpetually angry and slighted. So if you’d like to not feel that way, two suggestions: First, put your money where your mouth is with that whole “wanting him to be happy” thing, and allow yourself to actually imagine that Mike had valid reasons for choosing not to chill with your group anymore. (For extra credit, consider what it might mean that your group is comparatively unfazed by his departure, which is an interesting wrinkle. Is there any chance they know something about it that you don’t?)

And second, ask yourself what you think should have happened here, but didn’t, that you’re now so angry about. You clearly feel like you were owed something. What? An apology from Mike for distancing himself, or just for the manner in which he did it? A truthful explanation of his reasons, even if those reasons weren’t exactly flattering to you or your friends? A written resignation and an official breakup speech addressed to your group as a whole, complete with a minute-by-minute breakdown of all the complicated feelings he experienced during his decision to step away? Or just more effort on his part to continue your relationship—even though you weren’t exactly reaching out to him, either?

Fair warning, scratching the surface of your anger like this may not be the most comfortable exercise. For one, you may realize that you were expecting something that’s not particularly reasonable or realistic. But you might also find that you’ve been so angry because you’re trying to avoid another, more unpleasant emotion, like sadness or guilt. Whatever you uncover, though, it’ll be better to get it into the light, where you can look at it clearly, deal with it honestly, and move forward. And for what it’s worth, if what you realize is that you could have done more to hang onto this friendship—and if hanging onto it is something you still want, then maybe it’s not too late to do it now.

Got something to say? Tell us in the comments! And to get advice from Auntie, email her at advice@sparknotes.com.
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