5 Types of Friendship Breakups & How to Get Through Them
Soul Gum
by Victoria Hutchins
4.9 • 561 Ratings
🗓️ 26 January 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Friend breakups hit different. They’re messy, heartbreaking, and rarely come with closure. In today’s episode, we’re breaking down five of the most common types of friendship breakups, why they happen, and how to survive them without losing your mind (or your faith in humanity). If you’ve ever mourned a friendship like it was a death, this one’s for you.
EPISODE OUTLINE:
00:00 Intro
03:21 1. The Mutual Drift
04:18 Aristotle’s utility, pleasure and virtue friendships
06:46 Dunbar’s number: how many friendships can we maintain at once?
08:25 Carl Jung & making friends while wearing a mask
09:40 Mollenhorst’s social pruning study
10:06 Getting through a mutual drift
11:51 Break - with a surprise!
15:23 2. The One-Sided Slow Fade
17:00 How to get through it on the receiving end
19:09 What if you’re the one who’s fading away from a friend?
21:22 3. The Formal Breakup
23:38 How to break up with a friend ethically
24:47 Getting through a friend breaking up with you
25:34 4. The Blow Up
26:42 Sartre & conflict as a mirror of the self
27:44 Getting through a friendship blowing up
28:21 Hegel & conflict as an engine for growth
29:26 5. The Sudden Ghost
30:23 Getting through being ghosted by a friend
32:06 Lightning round recap
32:39 The peak-end rule
34:02 Journaling prompts for processing a friendship breakup
34:33 Poem: To Strangers I Used to Know
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you are navigating a friendship breakup, you're not alone, you're not a bad person, and you are |
| 0:05.7 | going to be okay. But I know it probably doesn't feel that way. Let's talk about it. |
| 0:12.6 | Sogum. Welcome back to SoulGum, the self-development podcast with philosophical, psychological, |
| 0:18.5 | and literary flair. I'm your host, Victoria Hutchins. My goal is to give |
| 0:23.6 | your soul something to chew on. And today, we are talking about friendship breakups. Friendship breakups |
| 0:30.7 | are the wild, wild west of interpersonal conflict. I think friendship breakups often are worse than romantic breakups. We know and |
| 0:39.9 | accept that when we date someone, there's a good chance we won't end up spending the rest of our |
| 0:44.4 | lives with them. But somehow we don't hold that same awareness when it comes to our friends. |
| 0:50.4 | Most of our friendships will end at some point. That's the cold, hard truth. And yet, we have no |
| 0:57.8 | cultural scripts for how to get through that. And when you experience a friendship breakup, |
| 1:04.3 | there's less societal validation of the pain, even though friendship breakups are so painful. If you have a breakup with someone |
| 1:13.4 | you dated for a month, there's more social recognition of that pain than a friendship |
| 1:19.1 | breakup with a really long-term friend because we have language for it. I just got dumped. I just |
| 1:25.5 | went through a breakup. We don't have that with the ending of friendships. |
| 1:29.2 | You have read the script of how to get over a romantic heartbreak a thousand times. That doesn't |
| 1:35.6 | mean it's easy to do. It's not at all. But it's talked about a lot. In media and culture and |
| 1:41.1 | movies and books, we have heard that story. But there is no roadmap for getting over |
| 1:47.5 | a friendship breakup. So today, we're going to try to unravel that ball a little bit. I want to talk about |
| 1:54.1 | five different types of friendship breakups and how to get through them. And since this is SoulGum, |
| 1:59.3 | we will weave some philosophy and psychology |
| 2:02.2 | in as we go. Two quick things before we dive in. Number one, if you hear revving of engines, |
| 2:07.5 | you might know I'm in Bali, it's very loud here. Sorry about that. Number two, SoulGum hit 10,000 |
... |
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