The topic of friendship has been in my mind during recent days.
It got me to revisit some notes from a very interesting March 2022 Atlantic article, “It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart” (by Jennifer Senior).

Does it hurt more when a friend treats you badly or doesn’t live up to your expectation?

Selected notes/food for reflection from the article:
* You lose friends to marriage, to parenthood, to politics-even when you share the same politics. You lose friends to success, to failure, to flukish strokes of good or ill luck. (Envy, dear God—it’s the mother of all unspeakables in a friendship) These life changes and upheavals don’t just consume your friends’ time and attention. They often reveal unseemly characterological truths about the people you love most, behaviors and traits you previously hadn’t imagined possible.
* …still left out three of the most common and dramatic friendship disrupters: moving, divorce, and death. Though only the last is irremediable.
* The unhappy truth of the matter is that it is normal for friendships to fade, even under the best of circumstances. The real aberration is keeping them.
* One could argue that modern life conspires against friendship, even as it requires the bonds of friendship all the more.
* This is how most friendships die, according to the social psychologist Beverley Fehr: not in pyrotechnics, but a quiet, gray dissolve. It’s not that anything happens to either of you; it’s just that things stop happening between you. And so you drift.
* Failures of reciprocity are a huge theme in broken friendships.
* Psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad discovered in 2003, when she had the inspired idea to monitor her subjects’ blood pressure while in the presence of friends who generated conflicted feelings. It went up-even more than it did when her subjects were in the presence of people with whom they had “aversive” relationships. Didn’t matter if the conversation was pleasant or not.
* Practically everyone who studies friendship says this in some form or another: What makes friendship so fragile is also exactly what makes it so special. You have to continually opt in. That you choose it is what gives it its value.
* Friendship is the rare kind of relationship that remains forever available to us as we age. It’s a bulwark against stasis, a potential source of creativity and renewal in lives that otherwise narrow with time.
* What do you do with friendships that were, and aren’t any longer?
By a certain age, you find the optimal perspective on them, ideally, just as you do with so many of life’s other disappointments.
—

There also seems to be a neuroscience connection.

“Brain neuroimaging study revealed that the brain areas that are activated during the distress caused by social exclusion are also those activated during physical pain. Thus, we have an explanation for the feeling of physical pain that accompanies emotional loss-whether that be the loss of a loved one or rejection by one’s social group.”
– Neuroscience. Feeling the pain of social loss; Jaak Panksepp