Food for thought: Are friendships ever fully broken?

Hello to all of my lovely readers, and, thank you from the bottom of my heart for your continued support. I recently did a poll on my Instagram asking you guys what you want to read more of. A large majority voted for more of my personal thoughts and reflections.

I cannot, honestly, believe I have such amazing people reading my words each week. And, it’s even harder to believe that they want to hear my own personal thoughts and experiences. It is an incredibly humbling feeling, but also, insanely nerve-racking. The pressure to think up content is on!

Let me know in the comments, or respond directly to this email, if you have future topic suggestions, requests, or stories you wish to share with me.

Nevertheless, here we go. to

I was recently talking to two ex-best friends who just became best friends again, and, it is not the first time it has happened to them.

The thing that is interesting to me, though, is the pattern I have seen and heard about when it comes to falling in and out of friendships. It seems, to me at least, that the majority of “friend breakups” usually include a third-party getting in the way of the two friends.

Think about it.

Sure, there are friendships that we simply grow out of due to maturing, moving or just a differing of interests. But, how many people do you know that have lost or ended a friendship because of the other person’s significant other?

It is weird to me how common this situation is, yet, nobody seems to ever stop and talk about it. So, let’s do it.

Kierstyn Taylor, 22, and Samantha Yuhas, 21, met in their 10th grade Spanish class and quickly became friends over a mutual distaste for their teacher.

“She turned to me one day and said, ‘I’m so sick of her shit,’” Kierstyn said, laughing. “I knew we’d be friends then.”

The girls exchange laughs and stories with one another like no time has ever passed between them. Though, the opposite is true.

During the summer of 2019, Kierstyn came out to her friends and family while also starting to date her first girlfriend. The new relationship, naturally, impacted the amount of time Kierstyn was spending with Sam, who had recently married her high school boyfriend—he left for Japan four days after their wedding due to military duties.

Throughout the course of Kierstyn’s year-and-a-half long relationship, she and Sam did not speak much.

“My girlfriend truly isolated me from just about everyone in my life and I was too blind to see it,” she said.

The girls reconnected during the summer of 2020 after Kierstyn and her girlfriend broke up, and she spontaneously reached out to Sam during a mental-health crisis.

“She called me and started crying,” Sam said. “I wasn’t sure what was going on, if someone died, if she was hurt—I just told her to come over.”

The two reconnected as if no time passed, they said. Kierstyn walked into Sam’s mother’s house and was welcomed with open arms and warm hugs.

A few more ups and downs, due to relationships, unfolded during 2021 and into the current year, but as of March 2022, the two are determined to be inseparable. So much so, that they proudly sport matching tattoos on their upper hips.

There is something to be said for a person who knows you well enough that, even when you have not spoken in months or years, they come to mind as a source of comfort—familiarity.

Perhaps, that is why romantic breakups affect us for longer amounts of time—you spend endless hours and days learning someone, them learning you, and then suddenly, it disappears. It becomes more complicated reaching out to that person, rekindling, being friends.

What Kierstyn and Sam have, though, and perhaps, each of you have with a friend that you have not spoken to in a while, is an unconditional understanding and forgiveness of one another.

I hope that by reading this, someone will be inspired to check in on a loved one they may have lost contact with, or renew an old friendship that did not deserve to be fizzled out.

That’s some food for thought this Friday—a new trend you can expect on The Learning Curve.

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