Grief of Relationships Ending
Lately, I have been hearing a lot about endings. Not just romantic breakups, although there have been plenty of those. I am hearing from clients and friends about friendships that have quietly fizzled out, relationships that ended unexpectedly, and long-term connections that seemed solid until, suddenly, they weren't. Sometimes the ending is dramatic and obvious. Other times, there is no clear ending at all. A friendship simply becomes less frequent, the texts become fewer, invitations stop coming, and eventually you realize that someone who was once woven into the fabric of your life is no longer really in it. There are also the relationships where, in retrospect, the ending makes sense. You can see the signs now, but at the time you were busy living your life. You didn't know the other person was unhappy or pulling away. You didn't realize they had been questioning the relationship for months or even years. You were still standing inside something that, from your perspective, was still intact.
That kind of ending can be particularly difficult because you are grieving while also trying to understand what happened. You may find yourself going back through conversations and memories, wondering what you missed.
Spiraling...trying to find the connections.
Was there something you should have seen?
Was the other person trying to tell you something?
Were you too busy?
Had your values changed without you realizing it?
Had the relationship simply become less important to one or both of you?
Was there a lack of commitment to the relationship, or had life itself become so full that there wasn't enough attention left to sustain it?
We want to find the answer because an answer gives us the illusion that we can prevent it from happening again. If we can figure out exactly what went wrong, maybe we can make sure we never experience this kind of loss again.
I think this is part of what makes relationship endings so painful. We want our lives to be stable and predictable. We want things to be figure-out-able. We want to know where we stand with the people we love. We want to believe that if we invest in a relationship, show up, communicate, work hard, and care deeply enough, we can count on it. We want to get to the place where we can say, "This is my person," or "This is my friend," and know that the relationship will remain there.
But relationships are living things, and living things change. People change. Our values change, our priorities change, our beliefs change, our capacity changes, and our understanding of ourselves changes. Sometimes two people grow together, and sometimes they grow in different directions. Sometimes a relationship ends because someone made a choice that was hurtful or because something happened that cannot be repaired. And sometimes there isn't a villain or a single moment that explains it. Two people simply became different people.
That is hard for those of us who want life to make sense. I know this because I am one of those people. I like to understand things. I want to know what happened, why it happened, what I could have done differently, and what I am supposed to learn from it. But relationships do not always give us a satisfying explanation. Sometimes we have to live with not knowing. I wrote about this in my book, Cracked Open: A Journey to a Resilient and Independent Mindset, because one of the hardest things we can learn to tolerate is uncertainty. We want answers because we believe answers will make the discomfort go away. But sometimes there is no answer that will make us feel better. Sometimes the work is learning to live with the unanswered questions.
There is a question I come back to when I think about the risk of relationships:
If we knew from the beginning that a relationship would eventually end, would we still choose it?
If you knew that a friendship would last for ten years but eventually drift apart, would you still want those ten years?
If you knew that a romantic relationship would end after fifteen years, would you still choose the love, the experiences, the family, the laughter, the growth, and everything else that happened along the way?
I think most of us would say yes. And yet, when something ends, we can look backward and decide that because it didn't last forever, perhaps it wasn't what we thought it was. We can convince ourselves that we made a mistake by loving, trusting, or investing in the relationship. But an ending does not erase the meaning of what came before it. Something does not have to be permanent to be real.
I have had to learn this myself, and I certainly have not mastered it. I am still sad when things that started very well come to an end. I am still angry about relationships that seemed to promise one thing and ultimately became something very different. I can look back at times when I was overly optimistic, when I moved quickly into a relationship because I believed the other person was there for my good, only to discover that their intentions were not what I thought they were. There is a particular kind of pain in realizing that someone you trusted did not hold the relationship in the same way you did. It can make you question your judgment and even question yourself. But I have learned that I don't need to shame the woman I was for not knowing what I know now. At that time in my life, I made decisions based on what I knew, what I believed, what I hoped, and what I could see. Now I know differently, and because I know differently, I can act differently.
That doesn't mean I skip over the anger. I let myself be angry. I let myself be sad. I let myself feel betrayed when betrayal is what happened. I allow myself to grieve what I thought the relationship would be. And sometimes I have to release the same thing over and over again. I used to think that if I had really accepted something, I wouldn't still feel sad about it. I know better now. Acceptance is not necessarily a single moment when you finally close the door and never look back. Sometimes you accept something and then, weeks or months later, something reminds you of it and you have to accept it again. You can know intellectually that something is over and still feel the loss emotionally. That isn't failure. It is grief.
I think we sometimes make grief harder because we expect ourselves to choose one emotion at a time. We think we should either be angry or grateful, hurt or relieved, sad or accepting. But human beings are capable of holding many emotions at once. I can miss someone and know that I am better off without the relationship. I can love someone and know that I don't want them in my life anymore. I can be grateful for what a friendship gave me and still be deeply sad that it no longer exists. I can understand why a relationship ended and still wish it hadn't. This ability to hold complexity is something I think becomes increasingly important as we move through midlife. Emotional flexibility is not about becoming less emotional. It is about becoming more capable of making room for the whole truth.
One of the most difficult relationship losses can be a long-term friendship that simply drifts away. There may be no dramatic fight or obvious betrayal. Sometimes it is distance. Sometimes it is different political or religious beliefs, different values, different lifestyles, or simply different priorities. Sometimes you realize that you have both become people who would not necessarily choose each other today, even though you once chose each other over and over again. That realization can be heartbreaking. There is something uniquely sad about sharing so much history with another person and then discovering that they are no longer the person you call first. You remember who you were together. You remember the things you survived, the things you celebrated, the secrets only the two of you knew. You remember a version of yourself that existed inside that friendship. And then you realize that the person who knew that version of you so well is no longer really part of your everyday life.
I have had to learn that this, too, can be normal. Not every relationship is meant to accompany us through every chapter of our lives. Some people belong to a particular season, and the fact that the season ended does not mean it wasn't important. We can treasure what a relationship brought into our lives without demanding that it continue forever. We can be grateful for the person we were with them, the experiences we shared, and the ways the relationship shaped us, while also acknowledging that we have changed. Sometimes the kindest thing we can do is stop trying to make an old relationship fit into the life we are living now.
And then, of course, there are the losses that come with aging. Many of us in midlife are watching our parents change, and that grief can be profound and loud. We may still have our parents, but the relationship itself is changing. The parent who once drove you places now needs you to drive them. The person who taught you how to manage a household now needs help managing their own. The person who was independent now needs help bathing, getting dressed, taking medications, cooking, or making decisions. There is grief in watching someone lose the abilities that once seemed so ordinary. You can be deeply grateful that your parent is still here and simultaneously grieve the person they used to be. You can love them and be exhausted. You can want more time and also wish the difficult season would end. Again, more than one thing can be true.
So what do we actually do with grief? I think the first thing is to stop treating it as something that needs to be eliminated. Grief is information. It tells us that something mattered. It tells us that we were attached, that we had hope, that we invested something of ourselves.
Rather than immediately asking,
"How do I get over this?"
it may be more useful to ask,
"What is this grief telling me?"
What exactly am I grieving?
The person?
The relationship?
The future I imagined?
The history?
The feeling of being chosen?
The certainty I thought I had?
The version of myself that existed inside that relationship?
The possibility that things might eventually become what I hoped they would be?
Sometimes grief reveals something important about what we value. Sometimes it shows us where we need a stronger boundary. Sometimes it reveals how much we are capable of loving. Sometimes it asks us to acknowledge that we stayed too long or trusted someone who had not earned our trust. Sometimes it asks us to forgive ourselves for what we didn't know. And sometimes it doesn't seem to be telling us anything particularly profound. Sometimes we are simply sad because we lost someone or something that mattered.
I think there is wisdom in allowing that sadness to be there without immediately trying to turn it into a lesson. We don't always have to make our pain productive. We don't have to find the silver lining before we are ready. We can let grief be our companion for a while. We can listen to it without allowing it to define the rest of our lives. Over time, it may become less like an open wound and more like a tender place we know how to care for.
Perhaps that is part of what growing older really asks of us. We become increasingly aware that change is not an interruption to life. Change is life. Our children grow up. Our parents age. Our bodies change. Our careers evolve. Our friendships shift. Our beliefs mature. Our relationships deepen or end. We become people we could not have imagined becoming twenty years ago. Sometimes the people we love change alongside us, and sometimes they don't.
The work is not to prevent change. The work is to become flexible enough to live well inside it.
I wish I could tell you that I have mastered this. I haven't. I am still learning how to let people go without rewriting the entire history of the relationship. I am still learning how to be angry without becoming consumed by anger, how to be sad without believing I will always be sad, and how to accept that something ended without deciding that it should never have begun. I am still learning to look back at the choices I made with kindness rather than judgment and remind myself that I did the best I could with the information, awareness, and emotional capacity I had at the time.
And maybe that is the message grief ultimately gives us. Not that we should stop loving. Not that we should protect ourselves so carefully that we never risk being hurt. Not that every relationship needs to last forever to have been worthwhile. Instead, grief reminds us that we cared. It reminds us that we participated in our own lives. We loved, trusted, hoped, committed, and allowed another person to matter to us.
There is risk in that. There has to be. If we knew every relationship would end, perhaps we would be less willing to begin. But we don't know. So we begin. We trust. We love. We build friendships and families and communities. We share our lives with other people. And sometimes those relationships end.
*An Important Distinction: Not Every Ending Means Walking Away
There is an important distinction I want to make here. When I talk about relationships ending, I am not talking about ghosting someone because there is conflict, discomfort, or something difficult to work through. Conflict is a different ball game, and it deserves its own conversation, which I will explore in a future newsletter. Relationships are going to have conflict. People disappoint each other. We misunderstand, hurt, disagree, and sometimes fail each other. None of that automatically means the relationship needs to end.
In fact, some of the most meaningful relationships in our lives become stronger because we are willing to stay present through the hard conversations. There is a difference between recognizing that a relationship has genuinely changed or reached its natural end and simply leaving because being uncomfortable feels too difficult. There is a difference between honoring your own boundaries and avoiding the vulnerability required to repair something.
Sometimes the work is to say,
"This hurt me"
"I don't understand what happened between us"
"I want to see if we can find our way back to each other"
Sometimes the most courageous thing we can do is stay in the conversation long enough to find out what is actually true.
I don't want the message of accepting endings to become another way of avoiding relationship. We need each other. We need the courage to have hard conversations, to repair when repair is possible, to apologize when we have caused harm, and to give other people the opportunity to tell us what is true for them. We also need the wisdom to recognize when something has genuinely come to an end.
Knowing the difference is part of the work.
