I don't like my best friend anymore. What do I do?

With advice from Jane Austen and Elena Ferrante

Female intimacy: the true drama at the heart of Austen’s Emma

Dear Emma,

I have this friend that I realize I have nothing in common with anymore. We were college friends then roommates. We’ve known each other for more than ten years now. We only stopped being roommates in 2021 after I went to live with my boyfriend after a long lockdown separation. I realized the only thing we had in common was living and figuring ourselves out during our early 20s. Now that we have lives of our own, there’s nothing really substantial we talk about it anymore. I realized this 2-3 years ago. I also realized that I became a people pleaser because of her. She’s pretty, had already good taste in clothes, and knows the right makeup and skincare. She knew how to deal with people and was sure of her career. I, on the other hand, was a late bloomer and didn’t know what style was. And so, I would happily be guided along with whatever she said and do to me. Eventually before I do or decide anything I would first think on what she would think. If it will please or not. Much like Harriet to Emma. That whole thing.

Now, I don’t hang out with her anymore but she still keeps on inviting and I am running out of excuses. Another thing is that I enjoy staying at home and I never go out. She knows this but still attempts to invite me out. I can say no to her invites now but I feel guilty mostly because what if she really needed me emotionally that time but I wasn’t available for her. Also It’s not like I’m her only friend. However, when I see her with her other friends I get jealous. But am I really? I still don’t like to see her. I also get anxious on what our other friends would think. We are part of a bigger friend group scattered all over the country and we are the only ones living in the same city. I get anxious that if my other friends will know this I may be kicked out of our group. I love our group and she’s better at keeping up with the friend group than me. I don’t talk to any of my friends about this because I am ashamed of the hold that friend had on me. I definitely don’t want to talk to her about my feelings. I think I did a pretty good job of distancing myself from her but how do I get away from these feelings of guilt and shame.

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Here’s something interesting I can tell you after nearly a year of being an agony aunt: far more people write in to me with questions about friendship than about romance. Actually, I don’t find this surprising. It’s really hard to navigate platonic relationships, because they are so diverse in nature; their crisis points so unscripted; our expectations for them so wildly varying. We don’t have an established code of conduct or set of go-to phrases (‘it’s not you, it’s me’) to turn to during confrontation, the way we do with romantic partners. All this is to say that you should feel no shame at all for struggling to navigate shifting feelings toward a friend. It’s a tricky and near-universal experience, and particularly a feature of your late twenties, a time in which everyone is reevaluating their priorities (at 31, I delight in referring to my twenties as if they happened in a previous century).

However - if you, like me, are a reader of pop-psychology books, a watcher of therapists-on-Instagram, and a listener of podcasts-about-feelings, you’ll know that efforts have been made lately to map the uncharted waters of Friendship Navigation, so I think I know what the trending self-help guru’s answer to your question would be. It would revolve around leaning into your power, asserting your boundaries, and accepting that personal growth often means leaving people behind. As for the implications this rift will have on your wider friendship circle, the imaginary guru would tell you that anyone who truly respects you will respect your need to live authentically.

But I am not a trending self-help guru, and I am here to tell you what I really think, which is that life is full of tricky compromises, and sometimes a degree of irresolution is something we learn to live alongside in service of a greater good. In this instance, the greater good is your friendship circle, because yes, admittedly, until I got to that part of your letter, I was thinking that my advice would be - albeit couched in sympathetic and comforting language - ‘bin it off’. You don’t enjoy your friend’s company, you feel you have nothing in common, and you don’t sound invested in rekindling the spark. Those are three very good reasons to cut ties irrevocably. And yet - I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I do think it is possible that a hard break between you and your friend will lead to wider shifts in your friendship circle. So before making any decisions, think about whether you’d be okay only being invited half the time to hang-outs with your best friends. I can already feel the heat emanating off my Gen Z audience as I preach this extremely vanilla sermon of bitter-pill-swallowing, and I don’t want you to be a doormat, I really don’t. If the dynamic you’d described was clearly one of cruelty, deceit, or emotional abuse, I promise I’d tell you to walk away. But because the drift between you and your friend feels more ambiguous than that, I think there’s an argument to be made for allowing the relationship - on some level - to continue, and seeing if you can learn to live alongside her while also letting go of guilt and shame.

Because here’s the thing. I’ve read your letter many times over, and there are two distinctly different ways I see your problem; like the different patterns that emerge when you turn a kaleidoscope one quarter to the right. From one angle, your friend took advantage of you when you were young and naive, using you as a prop to further her own vanity. When you sought her opinion before buying a new ra-ra skirt and chunky bead necklace (ah, the noughties), she felt clever, superior and worldly, so she encouraged the behaviour and delighted in being queen.

If this is the case, it would certainly make your dynamic similar to the bond between ‘handsome, clever, and rich’ Emma Woodhouse and her easily influenced, ‘artlessly impressed’ friend Harriet in Austen’s Emma, as you pointed out yourself. In Austen’s novel, as I’m sure you know, the privileged and self-assured Emma takes a young woman of inferior origin under her wing, with disastrous consequences. Emma’s desire to improve her new friend is, if not cruel exactly, certainly patronising - here, in Austen’s signature free-indirect style, we get to hear Emma’s private thoughts about Harriet delivered in the third person:

She would notice her; she would improve her; she would detach her from her bad acquaintance, and introduce her into good society; she would form her opinions and her manners. It would be an interesting, and certainly a very kind undertaking; highly becoming her own situation in life, her leisure, and powers.

Even that little italicised ‘she’ speaks volumes: for Emma, the joy of improving Harriet is that she will do it, demonstrating her excellent taste and superlative ability as a friend. But things do not work out as planned - Emma encourages Harriet to reject a suitor whose social standing she considers lowly, and instead throws her friend into the path of an upper-class man who wants nothing to do with her, humiliating Harriet and almost leading to the loss of the original relationship. Not good. But at least Emma realises the error of her ways, and takes accountability for her self-interested behaviour in the end. As far as I understand, your friend has never acknowledged your difficult past or apologised for her actions - so if this is how she treated you, we can judge her even more harshly than we might judge Austen’s creation.

But then there’s the other way I read your letter - one in which I’m not sure if your friend has done anything wrong at all. You describe her as pretty, well-dressed, good at bonding with people, and certain of her career choices. None of these things are sins. Some of them are actually pretty nice qualities. If you felt inferior to her, how much of this was really her fault? If people treated you as second-best, was this encouraged by her - or was it a product of the cruelty and shallowness of the teen world? If there really was a dynamic in which she always led and you followed, then - I’m sorry to say this - how much of it were you responsible for creating?

Now, I don’t think anyone needs to take responsibility for being treated badly, and it irritates me when people suggest as much. It’s a bit victim-blamey, you know? The fault lies with the person who was mean or selfish, not the person who got used. But what I’m talking about is something much more subtle than that. In my own romantic relationship, for example, I’m the emotional one, and my partner is the calm one, despite these labels being a pretty inaccurate reflection of our full identities. I think both of us are responsible for perpetuating this dynamic, and so both of us will be responsible for fixing it (one day). In a similar way, I wonder whether, as a teenager, it was easier for you to be the follower. And perhaps you don’t like hanging out with your friend as an adult because it reminds you of the person you used to be - or because you slip back into old, fawning ways of being. This sounds a bit woo-woo, but could you forgive your teenage self for doing what you needed to get by? And then, could you have a go at being your new, empowered self around your friend? If she doesn’t like it, that’ll be a black mark against her. But you can’t know until you try.

I also wonder if part of the reason you don’t like hanging out with your friend is because you don’t really believe she respects and loves you. In your head, she’s the user, who only ever wanted you around to pay tribute. But: what if she does love you? You seem irritated by the fact she keeps inviting you out, as if it’s manipulative. I just wonder if it’s possible that she’s inviting you out because she likes being your friend. If this was true, would it change how you felt in her company?

Another literary friendship came to mind as I was reading your letter: the bond between Elena and Lila in Elena Ferrante’s majestic novel, My Brilliant Friend. If you haven’t read it, no doubt you’ve at least seen it in bookshops. The novel (and its three sequels) are narrated by Elena, who is clever, studious and shy in comparison to her outgoing, rebellious and charismatic best friend. Lila seems to surpass Elena in every way: she’s beautiful, academically gifted and street-smart, with a confidence that Elena is both dazzled by and jealous of. Yet as the novel progresses, it’s Elena who looks as if she will be able to escape working-class life in Naples, by continuing her education into middle school and beyond, whereas Lila - whose parents will not support her further study - looks set to marry a local boy, at just sixteen. As Elena eventually helps Lila put her wedding dress on, Lila urges her friend to keep studying, no matter what obstacles are thrown in her path. Elena brushes it off - ‘Thanks, but at a certain point school is over’. But Lila is firm: ‘Not for you. You’re my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all.’

I still remember the first time I read that line, the way it took my breath away. For three hundred pages, we’ve lived in Elena’s head, understanding the dynamic between her and Lila as one of self-deprecating subordinate and glamorous iconoclast. It’s only in the final moments of the book that we’re reminded Elena’s perspective is all we’ve seen. For Lila, all along, Elena was the brilliant friend. It’s a gut punch of a moment - the kind of seismic reversal that only a novel can achieve.

Only you can fully understand what exists in the depths of your own decade-long friendship. And, you know, even when two people adore each other sometimes they still don’t have enough in common to be friends, or else there’s just too much water under the bridge to make it work. But if any of what I’ve said is making you rethink your dynamic, let me move into a practical sphere for a second, and suggest some ways you could move forward with a kind of comfortable but restrained good-will. It sounds like you’re anxious about being ‘called out’ by your wider group (or by her). So either address this head on, or have some simple lines ready in your back pocket. For example, if your friend group asks why the two of you don’t hang out despite living in the same city, you could just say: ‘Well, life is so busy, isn’t it? But when we do get together, it’s just like old times.’ Or you could even say, ‘X is such a party animal and it’s not really my speed anymore, so we don’t see each other much. I still love her to bits though.’ You could even say this directly to your friend, if you like: ‘I know we don’t see each other much anymore, because life gets in the way/ because I’m such a homebody. But know that I do love you and I’m always so excited to hang out when our group gets together.’

I wonder if saying something gentle but direct like this about what you want to offer right now might help you feel less guilty. At the same time, it doesn’t entirely shut down the possibility of reconnection further down the line. Because it might seem as if cutting her off entirely or actively rekindling the friendship is the solution to your conflicted feelings - but actually, you can also choose to accept the dynamic just as it is, and feel no shame at all.

I want to finish by reminding you that you are the best judge of this situation, and I trust you to do what’s right for your wellbeing, even if it means throwing everything I’ve said unceremoniously in the bin. But whatever you do next, just consider for a moment the idea that - in your friend’s eyes - you’re the brilliant one.