Friend, you're fired!

Breaking up is hard to do - especially
when you're ending it with a buddy

By JORDAN LITE

Women don't expect other women's rebuffs, says Liz Pryor.

We've all been there: the unreturned phone calls, the last-minute cancellations, the inexplicable fading of a relationship we thought would last forever.

No, this isn't the lame exit strategy of a cowardly boyfriend. It's the confounding behavior of your best girlfriend, who suddenly is just not that into you.

"We take friendship for granted because there's something implied about it that it's interchangeable - which is true to a degree," says Liz Pryor, author of the new book "What Did I Do Wrong? When Women Don't Tell Each Other the Friendship Is Over."

"We're conditioned that men will hurt us, blow us off and even cheat," Pryor says. "When it happens with a girlfriend, [we] do not expect it and are more hurt, more betrayed."

It's not surprising that women avoid confronting a pal, Pryor says.

Girls are taught not to hurt other people's feelings. As women, knowing all too well what rejection feels like, they rationalize that it's more merciful to spare a friend the truth than to give it to her straight.

Brooklyn author Elizabeth Strout, 50, gradually stopped returning the calls of a close college friend. The woman's increasing negativity was draining her, and now they haven't seen each other in five or six years.

"When she called, I'd think, 'Oh, here we go again,' and try to get off the phone. It was just so laborious to try and enter her state of reality," says Strout, who wrote of the breakup in "The Friend Who Got Away," a collection of essays by 20 women that was published last year.

"It would have been extremely painful for her to hear the truth," Strout says. "I was just too wimpy. It was a shortcoming on my part, definitely. I felt guilty, I felt terrible - I still feel terrible."

Not all women are as conflicted.

Aria Gee, 23, has no regrets about dropping a woman who was so caught up in her own issues that she was unable to be a friend. Three years into the relationship, the woman became a drag, complaining more and more about her problems without accepting anyone's advice or help, says Gee, who was recently visiting New York from Washington, D.C.

Cutting connections

"I'm a bleeding heart, but at that point I just stopped returning her calls. I just avoided answering the phone if it was her, and then she moved away. When she came back to visit, I didn't return her calls to hang out, either," she says.

"It took a couple of months before she stopped calling me," Gee adds. "I think it takes guys less time to get the message. Women tend to keep calling, and thinking, 'Oh, maybe she's just busy.' "

This kind of rejection is deeply painful for women, Pryor says, because usually they don't receive a satisfactory explanation about why the relationship has gone sour.

"It happens all the time, especially in New York," says Krista Amigone, a Brooklyn actress and choreographer, who says the scenario is especially chilly when women leave each other behind as they social-climb to advance their careers.

"It hurts," the 27-year-old says. "I think girls are crueler to each other than they are to men."

There really is no right way to end a friendship, Pryor says. But she found that women who wrote direct, noncritical letters to their friends felt more resolved about their decisions than women who gave the silent treatment.

Some women are even willing to have face-to-face conversations - with surprising results.

Rebecca, 34, recently planned to dump a friend who was acting paranoid and untrustworthy. But the woman apologized before the Manhattan teacher (who asked to be identified by her middle name) had an opportunity to cut the cord.

"Each person has to be willing to face their own stuff and face the other person's stuff, not only by bringing it up when it comes up, but then by being willing to work with it and forgive it if the other person is," Rebecca says.

"I want to continue our friendship, because if it's something she's working on as a friend, I'll do that with her. It's really nice."

With Jenny Clevstrom and Nicole Lyn Pesce
Originally published on March 30, 2006