‘I Reconnected With an Old Friend. Now I Regret It.’

Dear Emily,

Thirteen years ago, I broke up with my best friend. Now she’s back in my life, and I’m unhappy about it.

Some background: When I was 7, I started at a new school and became best friends with the girl in the assigned seat next to mine. We were inseparable until we were about 18, which is when I started to panic about my future. We were from a bad neighborhood, went to bad schools, and some of our friends had already started having kids. Whenever I described the life I wanted, she would roll her eyes at me (along with my other friends, my sibling, and my parents). I felt like if we remained friends, I would never get the life I wanted.

It took another two years to get the courage to break off the friendship, and an additional few years of fights and tearful conversations until we finally stopped talking. We were probably 22.

We’re in our mid-30s now, and I’ve since moved to a different city. A few years ago, she found my mom on Facebook and sent her a message, saying she wanted to talk to me. I assumed her mother had died or something equally terrible, and I got in contact with her. It turned out she just wanted to talk. She had made a lot of life changes at the time. I think she assumed that I had pulled away because she had been acting selfish, and she wanted to apologize to me and tell me she’d changed.

We’ve since met up twice and chatted a few times over the phone. I didn’t mind chitchatting, but she has started to confide in me like I am a close friend. Which is a problem, because after all this time it turns out that I do not like her.

I could run down a list of petty grievances, but honestly, I just don’t like her. I don’t find her intelligent or interesting. Honestly, I think she’s an obnoxious boor. She makes a bunch of assumptions about my life when we talk, as though there aren’t 13 years that are unaccounted for. And I have no desire to correct her. I am always, always annoyed after talking with her, and I wish she would leave me alone for good!

Can you give me any advice? I should talk with her, of course. But what do I say that doesn’t hurt her feelings but also makes it clear that I do not want her to contact me again in another 13 years? How do you tell someone who clearly feels very attached to you that you would really rather not be in their life?

— Can’t We Just Be “Friends”?

Dear Can’t We Just Be “Friends,”

There are so many social connections that have outlived their expiration date that we maintain out of an obscure sense of duty. A lot of these are acquaintance-level relationships mediated via social media that tend to feel like they add up to something more than they really do in our day-to-day lives. But we also keep up friendships out of a sense that our oldest relationships have a value that newer ones don’t. Sometimes, as in your case, this assumption can be mistaken.

My friend Brittany had a similar experience to yours with a childhood friend. They’d stayed in touch over the years, but the friendship was often turbulent; they fought when the friend briefly took up with one of Brittany’s mean high-school exes in college, for example. Brittany thought about breaking off the connection many times, but felt she owed something to what they once had. Years passed and they remained connected on social media and even saw each other in person occasionally. But then, during the Black Lives Matter protests, Brittany’s friend started posting MAGA-leaning content that Brittany found abhorrent. Finally, she was forced to realize that whatever they’d once had in common, it was no longer enough to withstand something so blatantly opposed to her values. That’s when Brittany blocked her. After she noticed she’d been blocked, Brittany’s friend texted her about it. Brittany stood firm. “I explained that I really didn’t want to see her posts and that I still love her as a person but very much disagreed with her feelings.” She blocked her back, and they haven’t talked since.

Your childhood friend found your mom on Facebook, and on a whim decided to come back into your life. You responded to her based on your long-standing earlier relationship, and your assumption that whatever you shared back in your hometown had some kind of logical continuity in your present lives. That has turned out not to be true, and you have absolute clarity about that. So, what do you do now?

You’re probably tempted to do a slow fade — plans to hang out that keep getting pushed into a nonexistent future, thumbs-up emojis on long texts she sends, et cetera. You might even want to just ghost her. But I think, in the interest of having complete closure here and being true to yourself, you should talk to her. Set up a time via text, and tell her you need to have a serious conversation.

You will probably end up hurting her feelings — there’s no way around that. But keep in mind that you have no obligation to keep this person, or any person who you don’t like, in your life. First, think through what you want to say to her carefully and compose the most heartfelt and forthright version of it in your mind — maybe even write it down. You need to emphasize how important she was to you earlier in your life, and how you will always remember what you shared back then. But then you need to be honest with her about how and why things have changed for you, and that you can’t be the kind of friend she needs you to be now. Don’t dwell on her failings, but rather on what you know to be your differences. She probably knows them on some level too, and even if you’re met with resistance, being clear about why you’re not feeling the same way about her that you did when you were both kids will ultimately help her to understand why you can’t continue to be a part of her life. See if it’s possible to end on a positive note — you will always have the relationship you shared when you were younger, but you were both different then and have grown in different directions. Before you hang up the phone, she needs to know that this is the end of your relationship, even though what you once shared will always be important to you both.

This is going to be a difficult conversation, but you’ve already been avoiding it for too long. My hope for you is that you can get through it and any subsequent follow-ups (I have a feeling she’ll try to keep being in touch) with a sense of resoluteness about your decision. Life is too short and your energy is too finite to spend it on people who are relics of a past you’re no longer living in. This situation is a tough one! But I can tell from reading your letter that you already know deep down what you have to do. The person you are now — the person who found the courage to leave behind other people’s expectations of you, move away from your hometown, and seek out the things you find truly important — will have the guts to move forward even though it’s hard.

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