Ask Anahit: Student Friendship Edition

How do I deal with a friendship breakup?

I really admire how you’ve circumnavigated my tendency to philosophise by asking a very action-forward question. It’s going to shatter the illusion of me as the Central Belt’s foremost fount of wisdom but that’s not your problem. You want solutions, damnit! That's your right! Unfortunately, I don’t really have any for you! 

I went through several paradigm-shifting friendship breakups over the last few years and I did not deal with them very well At All. I did more drugs than I’ve ever done in my life, I developed weird agoraphobic and disordered eating habits, I almost adopted a dying cat. I didn’t really have a language for what was happening, except that my world had very abruptly changed and that I just had to be OK with it. If I had broken up with a partner, there would have been some kind of public narrative and acknowledgement of what had happened. As it was, there wasn’t. “I’m going to have to tell people from work,” I remember thinking blankly after it happened. Except, as it turned out, I didn’t. Because there just isn’t a script for these things in the way there is for romantic relationships. People don’t have to ask, and you don’t have to say.

We think of grief as a private process and it is, but many of the ways that we as a society deal with it is through acts of public mourning and ritual. Funerals, wakes, interminable brunches with your friends dissecting the moment your first boyfriend dumped you for good. It is how we understand and work through the pain of it – take that away, and the pain just kind of… lingers. So I guess if I had any concrete advice to give you, it would be to make the breakup public in some kind of way. I don’t mean you have to create a spectacle or badmouth them throughout the town. But more… can you give a language to how you feel? Can you let people around you know? Can you ask for help in managing the social fallout, the same way you would with a romantic relationship? Basically, can you treat it as important? I think that is the only way to deal with them, really. There’s nothing I can say for how to actually ease the sense of loss and confusion and hurt that you are feeling, but I can tell you to try and find a language for the pain. It’s the only way you’ll be able to eventually release it.

How can I make friends as a commuting student?

OK! The good news is this one I have more solutions for! Concrete solutions! Get your to-do list out! The UK has such a strong moving to a new city and living in uni halls with your pals student culture that I can only imagine how daunting it must feel to be outside of that, and wonder how you might fit in. The good news is you will all spend the rest of your lives making friends not in uni halls, so it is definitely possible and probably a good skill to develop early in life. 

So, solutions. I have two for you. Say yes to everything that doesn’t actively make you want to die and find somewhere to crash. The first: I know it’s very trendy in our current self-care culture to practise saying no. Stop that! You can do that when you are 30 and have too many friends making demands and just want to stay in with your cat! Right now, say yes to anything that doesn’t actively feel like it is putting you in danger/going against every one of your ethical codes. Learn to tell the difference between trepidation (going for a random coffee with this random person might be really awkward and you still won’t have a friend at the end) and actual fear (this random person seems to give all the signs of being a burgeoning neo-Nazi). If it’s the former you feel, say yes anyway. This is the time to be uncomfortable! Join societies even though organised fun is cringe. It is, but once you get past that initial group project feeling of a bunch of barely adults sitting in a room trying to bond over indie sleaze, you might find you actually have something in common and your friendship can move past the formalities of The Kooks' back catalogue and into something meaningful. 

And once you have these friends, prevail upon them to crash at their house semi-regularly. You’re not in school anymore but sleepovers are still a delight, and it means you don’t have to miss out on the late-night parties and pub nights and birthdays or rush for that final train. I can’t think of anything I would have loved more as a student than one of my friends hanging out in my house all the time. Be that friend!

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