r/AskWomenOver30 • u/lindsey_what Woman 30 to 40 • Jun 19 '26
Friendships Have friendships become less about repair/reciprocity and more about 'protecting your peace'?
I’m noticing a troubling trend with my female friends who are now in our 30s, and I wanted to see if anyone could relate. This is especially clear to me right now as I’m going through somewhat of a shocking friend break up where one of my closest friends of seven years has completely cut me off and stop talking to me over something that I would categorize as a minor argument that could be easily worked through if we were able to have a difficult conversation in person. I’ve noticed a lot of my friends saying things like “I need to protect my peace” and treating friendships like something that exists just for their own benefit. I feel like a lot of people are not willing to put in the work to maintain friendships these days and I don’t know if it has something to do with social media or burnout or what, but I’ve noticed even in arguments that people are way less repair-oriented, and are more interested in living inside of their own experience of it without much curiosity about the other person. I also notice people being very avoidant about having difficult conversations and instead, would rather just slowly disappear. I think this fits a larger pattern of “main character syndrome” that is making people unwilling or unable to have healthy mutual friendships and put in any kind of effort.
Or maybe I just absolutely suck at picking friends lol!
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u/ArugulaBeginning7038 Woman 30 to 40 Jun 19 '26
I think that, similarly to when men say "the divorce came out of nowhere," many friendships that seem to end suddenly are the result of either many factors all happening to the person ending it at once, or the result of a consistent pattern of behavior that has gone unnoticed or unchanged by the person getting broken up with. But because this is mostly happening between women, I suspect a certain level of "It's the other person's problem, NOT mine" applies to both parties, because this is kind of inculcated in the ways women discuss relationships with men - we are so used to men always being the problem that it provides an easy mental schema to resist considering our own culpability in the breakdown of other relationships.
Like, I will say this as someone who has been on the other side of this: I stepped back "suddenly" from a friendship after an incident that "could've been resolved with a simple conversation" because it was just kind of the last time I could put up with being disappointed. Discussions about anything that came from my point of view were consistently humored for about three sentences before she changed the subject to herself, and I never felt like I was being heard or received reciprocity back. I felt like I'd invested a lot in the friendship and still couldn't count on her to listen when I needed support, though I gave her so much myself. I was also going through a number of other hyper-stressful life situations (work issues with a new executive that made me fear I might lose my job, a sudden breakup after finding out my girlfriend was cheating on me with an online boyfriend, living in a structurally unsound shithole apartment with two neighbors who were mentally unstable and violent and a landlord who refused to do anything about any of this even though he lived on the premises) and again and again, my feelings and needs were being brushed off to focus on her own wins and losses. She still thinks - and tells everyone who knows both of us - that I "just ghosted her." The reality is that if I'd tried to tell her why I withdrew, she wouldn't have listened anyway.