When It’s Time to Break Up with a Friend

I’ve been of two minds whether to write this piece for a few weeks now. Writing about relationships of any kind is more Oprah’s purview, but a case may be made that all writing is about a relationship of one form or another. With that self-serving justification in hand, let me proceed.

What finally prompted me to examine the end of friendships—or even putting a friendship on indefinite hiatus; you can never be sure what might happen down the road no matter how final the termination feels—is a close friend of mine called it off with another close friend of his today. There have been epistolary battles via emails for some time now, a veritable bloodbath of character assassinations.