It Was So Much More Than a ‘Friend Breakup’ - Vogue
To be clear, it wasn't a love triangle. How can I tell our story, as I remember it, without airing too much of theirs? I could say that I didn't believe he treated her right. I could say that she forgave him, but I didn't. Val and I tried to hang on to each other, but her relationship with him lasted, and our friendship didn't. Our rift wasn't just ours: The ties between Val and the rest of our group frayed and eventually severed too. Writing that sounds so sixth grade, except that this time, no one abruptly shunned Val—it was more complicated than that—and our reasons weren't arbitrary.
Some might call it a "friend breakup," an acknowledgment that friendships, like romances, can fracture. Personally the term makes me cringe. It equates Valerie with some guy I dated for three months in high school, driving around to nowhere in his parents' 4Runner. On the contrary, Val and I outlasted all of those trivial boys…until one wasn't so trivial anymore. That was the beauty of us. The only way I can describe it is: I lost her.
I lost a friend, and I'm fortunate that that is an anomaly for me. I have a group of lifelong friends, who had been Val's too. (Yes, some of those same cafeteria bitches remain my oldest and dearest—blame the drama on 12-year-old hormones.) Our sisterhood is a source of pride and wonder for us. That our love for one another has survived decades, distance, politics, sickness, and plenty of problematic men feels like an achievement. I treasure—and tend to even congratulate myself—on enduring bonds with college and mom friends, too, as if it's a virtue.
But if keeping a friend is an achievement, is losing a friend a failure? Valerie's, mine, or both of ours? (Did a man come between us, I wonder, or did we let him?) Romantic relationships are ephemeral, but friends aren't supposed to be. For years, if anyone asked, I would have held fast to my personal reasons for falling out with Val. For the most part, I still would, but age breeds empathy. Like Val, I have been stubbornly in love. I, too, have ignored the advice and the feelings of well-meaning friends and done precisely what I wanted to do. Shouldn't I have known, since the day she extended me an olive branch in sixth grade, that Valerie wasn't scared to break from the rest of the group, for better or for worse?
Valerie and I haven't been friends for a long time. We haven't known each other as women in our mid-20s, or mothers and wives in our 30s who are now nearing 40. I wonder if parts of her would still be knowable to me. Is that person still in there, the one with whom I meticulously trimmed my arm hair and nestled into bed at night? I never bump into her when I go home, but I know what I would say if I did: I'd tell her that I still sometimes scoop peanut butter into my ice cream, and it's delicious.
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