The cruel reality of breaking up with your best friend.

As I have grown older, I have come to understand that there are many kinds of love—a love for a parent, a sibling, a partner and a love for a friend. Each kind of love brings its own light and darkness—and heartbreak.

I met my best friend when I was sixteen. She became like a sister to me; she was my person.

While in some ways we were incredibly similar, the differences between us were vast. 

She lived life with just what she needed, never to excess or for show. She was the type of person who would make you a birthday card rather than buy one because cards and words were what mattered most to her. Photographs mattered, too. She would obsessively document each and every moment with her petite Nikon J5 camera (the same as my own), and was always running out of storage on her ageing Mac as a result. She had a bottomless stomach—perhaps the most wonderful quality in a friend that the feeder in me could have asked for. 

Watch: Best friends: Translated. Story continues after video.

She was vegetarian but hated zucchini. She relished routine. She loved to walk everywhere. She was never on time. Her fingers and wrists were laden with the silver jewellery she had collected throughout her travels over the years. It jingled when she walked so you would always know when she was approaching. She loved beer but wasn’t fond of bubbles and she only drank in moderation. She was always in control. She was worldly and wise and kind. She was always present—in every conversation, in every interaction.

She had known my husband since they were children, their mothers being incredibly close friends—both had migrated to Australia from Colombia. Her heart, and soul, belonged in London and, until Covid forced her return, she had lived there on and off for the past five years.

She had access to parts of me that nobody else had ever had. I considered her to be one of my greatest loves. And when we found ourselves in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, watching the sun set over the Agafay Desert, I told her as much: ‘You are the greatest love of my life,’ I said. I could tell she was taken aback by my declaration. 

I had said something she could not say back, something that I could not take back, something that she didn’t quite understand. But she was someone whom I knew I could trust implicitly, who would love me unconditionally, no matter what. That was what I did: I told her everything.

I stripped bare and spilled out of my skin, my stories and my thinking overflowing. But she would never open up to me in the same way, she’d never divulge the intimacies of her relationship, she would never undress in front of me. Nor should she have had to, but I say this to show that as far as I was concerned there were no boundaries; they were a code I could not yet decipher. I am my mother’s daughter. 

For my mother, the only boundary in life is a tangible object, like a fence or a line on the road. There is no other kind. A boundary as an abstract concept, between people, governing behaviour, with lines never to be crossed, is a foreign concept to her. No such line has ever constrained or contained my mother. 

For her, everything is for sharing—no matter the audience, no matter the subject. There is no filter.

Over time, years, my best friend began to withdraw. I sensed the distances between us, but still I ran full pelt towards her—I needed her to let me in. But she held firm and kept me at arm’s length. It was exhausting, for both of us. I realise now that this was her way of establishing and reinforcing healthy, measured boundaries, something that I lacked the ability to do. I had thought that for a connection to be built, you had to omit boundaries. 

Yet my best friend was still the one I went to when I needed someone in my corner, needed someone who could tell me that some broken things are not for mending, needed someone who would simply sit with me, in stillness, until I knew I’d be okay. And she was the person I went to, perhaps unfairly, when I was making the decision to end my marriage. 

There were many moments when I was a significant and unreasonable drain on her limited resources, but on a sweaty and stiflingly humid day in late February she was there for me. We met in the courtyard of the Lord Gladstone Hotel in Chippendale. I gently rocked myself and begged her to tell me what to do—and she told me that I already knew. 

‘I think you have been trying with incredible bravery to navigate a really complex situation. I have never known someone to so readily face their deepest challenges, and to be so open to being thrashed around by life in the process of the spirit of growing.’ 

I could imagine leaving my husband, but I couldn’t imagine my life without her. But the life I could and could not imagine is the life I now live. I no longer have either of them.

Listen to No Filter, where Charlotte Ree speaks to Mia Freedman about the breakdown of the relationship that had consumed her whole adult life and how she learned to love herself again. Post continues below.

Slowly, over time and then with distance after she returned to London, our lives fell out of sync. We were no longer living out of each other’s pockets. There were missed calls that weren’t returned, rambling voice notes that weren’t replied to, lengthy texts that were read and then mislaid amongst the busyness of life. 

As much as she found her feelings at this time difficult to articulate, I couldn’t talk about how I was feeling either. I was made to feel as if I were making something larger than it really was. She just seemed defensive. I was defensive too. I would apologise, again. I would put my feelings to the side, again. I began to dread our time together. Maybe we both did. 

We all need to create an opportunity for our friendships to evolve. As Natasha Lunn writes in her book Conversations on Love, ‘to sustain friendships—old and new—I think we have to learn to accept distance, and when to fight to repair it’. But after my divorce I found I had little to no fight left in me. I was worn out, I was tired. 

As with my husband, my shared past with my best friend could be both incredibly beautiful and ridiculously frustrating. We struggled to allow each other space to develop and grow, clinging instead to the old versions of who we once were. As I continued to process my break-up, I needed her and my other friends to understand that I was not the same person I was last month, or last year. But it was an unrealistic and unfair expectation. It was up to me to tell her exactly who I was and what I needed from her. It’s just that I was desperately afraid to—I was terrified of losing her.

Then one day she didn’t answer another one of my calls, so I sent a text asking her how she was, and she replied saying that she’d had our friendship on her mind a lot recently, so she was sending an email with some thoughts. In her email she said she felt as though I wasn’t telling her the truth anymore. That ‘this feeling of not being able to be our true selves with each other is at odds with the label of best friend’. 

She wrote that for some ‘that might just be a word, a term of endearment used pretty liberally’, but that it was something she had always struggled with because she felt it implied ‘all other friendships are less significant, but also because it puts pressure on a friendship to meet certain expectations’. 

It’s easy to feel pressured to remain a certain version of ourselves with friends we have known for substantial parts of our lives. I suppose that, as a result, I wasn’t entirely honest with her. After my marriage breakdown, in re-establishing my independence I had created a separate person to love—myself. 

I was in the thick of developing my sense of self, someone I could value, maintain and live with. I was no longer telling her every little thing I was thinking and feeling, as I had in the past, but that didn’t necessarily mean I was withholding. Rather, it was a way of holding on to what little sense of self I did have. I had established a boundary, a healthy and measured boundary. And yes, the irony of her wanting me to reveal more of myself was not lost on me.

Our friendship faded. It wasn’t as desperate or as terrifying as I had feared it would be. In fact, I felt . . . relief .

I removed the photos of her taken on our travels together from my walls. I boxed up the handmade cards and notes and gifts, along with those from my husband. The most brutal part of our friendship break-up were the notifications I received telling me that she had removed herself from our group chats, and then I realised she had not only unfollowed me but blocked me from her social media too. Her profile remains private, and I only hear occasional fragments about what she is up to from mutual friends.

When I look after others to my detriment, I fade. I disappear. She forced me to look at the kind of friend I am and the kind I want to be. She taught me to keep my sense of self, even when I want to be swept away by someone else’s. 

My psychologist told me that failure to fit in at an early age teaches us to develop a resilience that can ultimately help us flourish, and perhaps that is why I find I am now able to enter almost any sort of social setting with relative ease. But I wish I had known a decade ago, two decades ago even, that friends—real friends—love you for who you are, not only because you give them something. 

Nobody ever really talks about the break-up of a friendship like they do a break-up with a partner, but it too is an immeasurable sorrow. Like my husband, my best friend has left an indelible mark on my life. She is embedded in so many of my memories. I often think of us in Paris, absorbing croissant after croissant, our cheeks full of remnants of butter. I think of us getting matching tattoos, indelible ink, of that flaky layered pastry—hers on her right arm and mine behind my left ear. Only now, I wish that I had not hidden mine away from myself. I wish I were able to see it—to think of her, to remember us.

My husband and my best friend were the heart and soul of my twenties, but I now found myself navigating my thirties without either of them.

This is an edited extract from Heartbake: A bittersweet memoir by Charlotte Ree, RRP $39.99 

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