There are a lot of reasons you might want to end a friendship. These can range from obviously inexcusable behaviors—lying, stealing, emotional abuse—to problems that can be much harder to define, like feeling as though you’re always giving a friend more than they offer you in return, whether that’s attention, care, or something more tangible, like gifts or time.
Even when you can easily identify why a friend has rubbed you the wrong way, knowing where to draw the line and decide that enough is enough can be another difficult hurdle to cross. Because unlike romantic breakups, which are constantly discussed in TV shows, on social media, and in the celebrity news cycle, we’re often left in the dark when it comes to figuring out whether a friendship should end. And not only are issues between friends uniquely difficult to navigate, they can also be hard to talk about and, as a result, get advice on. “The word ‘friend’ is often synonymous with the word ‘fun’. We often think friendship has to be fun, so we don’t like talking about it when it’s not,” Hannah Korrel, PhD, neuropsychologist and author of How to Break up with Friends, tells SELF.
But, though friendship breakups can be tough to process and talk about, they can also be necessary, especially when dealing with toxic or manipulative people. To help you decide whether or not it’s time to dump a platonic connection, we’ve asked experts to share the questions you should ask yourself before making the call.
1. Does your friend know there’s an issue?
“The first question that always comes to mind when talking to people about friendship breakups is: Does this person know that it’s coming? Would they be shocked? Because I’ve seen a lot of people do this prematurely,” Danielle Bayard Jackson, friendship coach and host of the Friend Forward podcast, tells SELF.
In the same way a good manager would never fire an employee for performance issues without a warning, in most instances, it’s a good idea to give your friend a chance to change their behavior. According to Jackson, it’s easy to confuse the time you’ve spent ruminating on a friendship and talking about it with other people for communication with the one person who actually needs to hear it—and it’s a huge missed opportunity. “When it comes to differentiating between healthy and unhealthy conflict, the goal is to see these conversations as an opportunity to grow, to understand each other better, and to connect,” she says.
When someone in your life is behaving in an objectively terrible way, it’s easy to assume they know exactly what they’re doing. Even if a friend knows the mistake they’ve made (lost their temper, ruined your birthday, broken a promise), there’s no way for them to know exactly how these actions made you feel if you don’t share that. If you’re unsure how to frame these conversations, Jackson suggests viewing them as an invitation—for the friend to apologize, to change their behavior, to explain why a mistake was made—rather than an accusation, which is more likely to make them defensive and less likely to end in resolution. In practice, this might mean opening the conversation with a question like “Are you in the middle of a particularly busy season right now?” rather than a complaint like “You don’t have time for me anymore.”
2. Is a friendship breakup really the only solution?
If acknowledging something needs to change in a friendship is the first step toward a resolution, deciding exactly what that change looks like is the second. According to Jackson, friendship breakups don’t necessarily have to involve cutting someone out of your life completely. Instead, one solution could be shifting your expectations.
