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7 Ways People Actually End Friendships, According to Psychology

Research suggests most friendships end through slow pullbacks, excuses, or fading contact rather than one dramatic breakup conversation.

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The decline of a friendship is a strange thing to go through. You keep making plans because you’ve known each other forever and things are “fine” between you, but every time you leave, you wonder why the hell you’re even doing this. 

People find this harder to deal with than an actual fight because friendships come with very little ceremony. There’s no accepted equivalent of “we need to talk,” and friendship coach Danielle Bayard Jackson, author of Fighting for Our Friendships, says that uncertainty is part of what makes ending one so awkward. “The very blurry nature of starting and ending friendships makes it hard to navigate to the end — because when is it the end?” she told TED Ideas.

Psychologist Menelaos Apostolou of the University of Nicosia studied what people........

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