Friend Breakups Will Stick With You Forever

Under the Influence with Jo Piazza

Jo Piazza, Influence Inc.

Society & Culture, Parenting, Kids & Family, Personal Journals, Technology

4.3 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 8 July 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We don’t have rituals for breaking up with friends. Romantic breakups come with scripts—we know how to mourn them, process them, even joke about them. But when a friendship falls apart, we’re left in a strange cultural vacuum. I still think about the women I’ve lost as friends more than the men I’ve dated. I still stop myself from texting them, still wonder if they think about me, still carry the unresolved ache of the loss. Their absence haunts me in a way that lovers never have. Why is this? Why don’t we talk about the grief of losing a close friend—especially another woman? Is it because we still undervalue platonic love, or because the intimacy of female friendship is too complicated and layered to fit into a clean narrative? And why do so many of us carry this particular heartbreak quietly, without naming it? Our guest today is Susan Shapiro Barash, author of Estranged. Inspired by the emotional undercurrent of my new novel Everyone Is Lying To You, this conversation dives deep into why friendship breakups hit harder than romantic ones, the red-flag friendships to look out for, and why it's time to admit that not all friendships are meant to last forever. Join our newsletter community here. Pre-order EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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1:03.6	Hey all, Joe here and you are listening to Under the Influence.
1:08.6	Everyone is lying to you comes out next week, and yes, it is the most
1:14.5	bananas, pulpy, fun murder mystery that you're going to read on the beach while you ignore your
1:19.7	children, but it is also about something else. And a lot of readers have told me that this
1:26.5	particular story in the book really punched them in the
1:29.8	gut even more than the murder mystery. Our main characters in the book, Lizzie and Bex,
1:36.9	were the best of friends in college. They were close as sisters. And for me, I've had so many of those friendships in my life. They've been
1:47.0	essentially the backbone of my life. But I've also had a couple of those friendships end. And I got to
1:55.0	say, that was more heartbreaking for me than pretty much all of my breakups in romantic relationships. So today we're
2:04.9	talking about that kind of heartbreak. It's the kind of heartbreak that doesn't come with a
2:09.6	soft rock playlist. Phil Collins hasn't written a song about it. And we don't really talk about
	...

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