Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

| By: Committee for Children

My best friend broke up with me in sixth grade. She had started wearing a bra and putting just the tips of her fingers into her Lee corduroy pockets and jutting her hip to one side the way the popular girls did. She no longer joined me and our two undershirt-wearing friends at our lockers as we created silly writing “assignments” for each other (e.g., The Life History of an Ear). I always felt like she had rejected me, although there was never a fight or moment of truth between us. Clearly, I was just not cool enough for her.

This was the first, but not the last, time I would be dropped by a friend for cooler pastures. Each time it was as excruciating as any heartbreak. In fact, science backs this up: An article in Discover magazine describes how brain scans reveal that physical and social pain activate the same area of the brain in the same way. But because I had a pretty good self-perception (thanks, Mom and Dad and favorite teachers), I spent a lot of time wondering why on earth my friend couldn’t see that she could have her cake and eat it too. Couldn’t she hang out with her hip new crowd and still be friends with me?

Inevitably, one day I was on the other side of the friendship fence. I was in my 20s and my best friend and I were inseparable…until I started feeling like she was just too much. I was overwhelmed by our minute-by-minute dissections of every interaction with boyfriends, bosses, and family. I wanted out. And I got out the cowardly way I had learned from my earlier friendships.  I just slipped away, awkwardly, obviously, painfully. Never saying a word, just letting my actions (or inactions) speak for themselves. I took shelter in the friendship of others less demanding.

Ouch.

Future tripping

Since my children have started becoming their own little complete beings, I’ve wondered about how their friendships will go. When my daughter Etta recently celebrated her eighth birthday with her posse of friends, I basked in the sweetness of their mutual adoration. She loves! And she is loved! But most of her close friends are boys, so I worry about how that will eventually play out. Will they necessarily fall apart as one or the other feels a need to bond with others of their gender? It seems unlikely it will be Etta, since “girly-girls” irritate her, but is a shift inevitable? (Foreshadowing brought to you by Amos, below.) And, more importantly, can she handle the breakups in her future with more grit and honesty than I did?

Now you see her, now you don’t

Then there’s my ten-year-old, Amos. Boy friendships are a whole new world to me. I believe I will be learning more than I can teach in this case. Technically speaking, he’s already dumped and been dumped, both times by good friends who are girls, both times, I think, because of gender shifts that seemed to happen around third and fifth grades. Nothing dramatic, mind you; he was hanging out with the friend, then he wasn’t. It was clear to me that the first was a case of him moving on to more stereotypical boyish pursuits, the second a case of his friend moving on to tweener pastures. How has Amos experienced these losses? As far as I can tell, he’s barely noticed. Or maybe he has, and the feelings just went into that underground boy cave of his that I am rarely allowed to enter.

Breakups will happen. The best any of us can do—parents, teachers, friends—is let our children know they are loved and they are resourceful. I do wonder, though: What part of the brain is activated when we watch those we love get hurt?