Break-ups are hard. They hurt to the core and have you wonder over and over what went wrong. Not to mention how difficult it is to unlearn someone’s presence in your life.
But you know what hurts more sometimes?
Losing a friend.
More often than not, that friend was there before all the lovers, the flings, the flirts, everything. That friend has been there through it all, seen you through everything, and stuck with you. And their presence is warm and welcome. Platonic relationships should never come second place to romantic ones. They’re equally important, even if some people forget.
And with that equal importance comes possible equal impact if you lose that friend.
A huge chunk of your life and the person you shared it with is gone. Someone you leaned on through heartbreak, family problems, school troubles, is suddenly missing from your life. Maybe it was an argument that couldn’t be resolved, maybe one of you did something to the other, maybe it was just a fizzling out. Whatever it was, it’s painful. It’s hard to imagine someone who has seen so much of you going away and just being a stranger.
And because the platonic doesn’t come second to the romantic, it can ache just as bad–or even worse.
A friend is someone you rely on, someone you trust and love, someone who sees you through the good and bad, sometimes more than a lover does. And to lose them means losing a deeply-forged connection–and it’s heartbreaking.
We need to address the fact that losing friendships sometimes hurts more than losing romantic relationships. Because friends see us through those romantic relationships, too, before and after, and everything in between. And they stay for it all. Until maybe they don’t. And it leaves a hollowness inside of you. Like something has been severed where it used to rest so comfortably, maybe even where we took it for granted.
To all the people who’ve lost friends out there, stay strong. You are loved. You will heal. Things will be okay.
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