Why friends disappear when you need them most

Some friendships do not end in a fight. They end when somebody stops appearing, and nobody tells you it has happened.

The replies get slower. Plans stop having a place and a time, then stop having a month. We must get a date in the diary.

And one afternoon, years later, you work out that you have been waiting for somebody who was never coming.

You do not think about it often. But their name comes up and something moves. You still know the birthday. You have told the story of what happened twice, to two different people, and heard yourself sounding petty both times.

It has never been called a loss, because it would be embarrassing to call it that about a friend.

You were told they did not know what to say.

It is the kindest sentence in the language and it is almost never the reason.

A man who said it out loud

When Richard E. Grant’s wife died in September 2021, some of his friends did exactly this. No falling out. Nobody said anything. They stopped appearing.

Asked about them in August, whether he would ever forgive them, he reached for medieval siege architecture. “There are people that have been edited out of my life and I will never see them again.” Then: “no, portcullis down... Goodbye.”

His friends will have had the same defence, and I reached for it on their behalf before I had finished reading. Nobody wants to believe their friends left. It is much easier to believe they were struggling.

But it turns the whole thing into a problem of vocabulary, as if there were a right sentence and nobody could find it. Nobody was waiting for the right sentence. They could have said almost anything, or nothing at all, and stayed.

It was not hard to find words. It was hard to stand next to a death that was not supposed to happen yet, and next to the man it had happened to. That is frightening, and it is the part nobody says.

The envelope on the hall table

It is easier to see with an envelope.

One arrives, you know roughly what is in it, and you do not open it. Nobody is frightened of an envelope. You walk past it eleven times in four days and you never once decide not to open it. You are simply, reasonably, always on your way somewhere else.

Nothing is wrong with the envelope. The feeling is yours. But you feel it when you look at the envelope, so the envelope is what you stop looking at.

In analysis this is called a flight from unbearable feeling, which makes it sound more dramatic than it is. The feeling is rarely huge. It is just more than the moment seems to call for, and that surplus is the whole tell. Mostly it feels like being busy.

It is not only grief

People work the same way. We go quiet on the ones whose lives make us feel something we would rather not feel, and the list is much longer than grief. Illness, divorce, money trouble, a parent who has started to need things, the friend made redundant twice, the couple two years into trying.

Then the opposite, which nobody admits to. Somebody else’s new love, new house, new body, new life. Joy is every bit as exposing as loss, and it empties a diary just as efficiently.

In my work as a psychoanalytic therapist, I have watched people describe this without once using the word leaving. Contact got difficult. Visits got rarer. Something changed and they could not say what.

The reason turns up later, and it is always about the other person. She got demanding. He only ever talks about the one thing. There was nothing anyone could do.

That thought almost never arrives on its own. It arrives to explain a distance that is already there.

Why it never quite closes

When somebody dies there is a date, a certificate, a room full of people on a Thursday. Here the other person is alive, there was no last conversation, and they might ring in the spring.

You cannot establish that you have lost anything, so you never get to properly mind.

So it gets settled privately instead, and the mind will go in either direction to do it. Downwards: she was selfish, she was never much of a friend, I am better off.

Or upwards, which is the one almost everybody picks. He has had a terrible few years. She is hopeless at messages, always was. We are still close, really.

The upward story is the more comfortable of the two and it costs far more, because it keeps the friendship technically open.

You cannot mourn somebody you are still defending.

And this is the same move the friend made when they went. They put the trouble in you, and you have put it somewhere it cannot be looked at either.

And nobody else is going to close it. You have to decide it is over, on your own, about somebody who is still alive and might yet ring. Grant did his out loud, which is rare, and probably why it upset people.