I Can’t Get Over My Queer Friendship Breakup. What Went Wrong?

dear mfers,

I know we’ve been silent for a few months here, and I want to say I am sorry!!! Amalie, Logan, and I have had some changes to our roles at Teen Vogue and Allure—exciting ones, but we’re still getting our sea legs. That said, mixed feelings is not dead (!!!) but please bear with us as we navigate these changes. We’re still figuring out a publishing cadence that makes sense for mixed feelings, and have been brainstorming new ways we can explore print. We’ll keep you updated as things develop on our end and thank you from the bottom of our hearts for being part of the mf community. — Mi-Anne

mixed feelings’ multi-voiced advice column features a mental health expert or writer who responds to your most pressing existential conundrums. Use our anonymous form to be considered for a future newsletter. This month, author of Old Enough Haley Jakobson explores the blurred lines between ‘like’ and ‘love’ in co-dependent queer friendships.

Hi mf,

I’m a current junior in college. Last semester, my partner and I (WLW) went on a break at the same time as I was joining a seemingly happy, new, quirky friend group which included a special manic pixie dream person.

They dug their way into my heart — which I thought was healthily guarded — then ripped it out and spat on it in about 2 months. We went from joining new clubs together and texting and hanging out multiple times a week to radio silence within a week. I told them about my life, mental health, personal struggles — even self harming — in detail. I don’t know what I wanted from them, seeing that I was still technically in a relationship. Ashamed to admit it, I wanted a co-dependent best friend.

When my partner and I got back together, they pulled back. I thought it was just the normal ebb and flow of a friendship, that we would eventually go back to our “normal” behaviors. I was wrong and they ended up in their own relationship a couple weeks after. I felt myself becoming incredibly jealous even though I was in my own happy relationship. I still can’t determine what I really wanted from them — did I want a stand-in partner or a best friend?

The self-doubt and guilt from these questions eats me alive to this day. Was I the problem for wanting that companionship, or were they playing with my feelings while I was in a vulnerable state? — helpme911, she/her, 20

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Haley Jakobson (she/her) is an author and playwright living in Brooklyn, NY. In her work she explores queerness, girlhood, brains, and bodies. Haley’s debut novel OLD ENOUGH is a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a Lambda Literary Award finalist for best bisexual fiction, and is described by Vogue as being “full of winsome bisexual chaos.” Her sophomore novel, CAVEGIRL, is forthcoming from Penguin Random House x Dutton Books. Haley is a gemini apologist and an absolutely killer follow on instagram.

Dear helpme911,

I just watched the movie Roommates on Netflix last night, about a freshman-year roommate dynamic between two women that goes catastrophically wrong. One of the women, Devon, has long yearned for a best friend, and gets to college with fierce hope that she’ll finally find one. In walks Celeste, a fiery and dynamic rule-breaker, and the two fall into the manic high of early BFF-dom. In all their excitement and relief of finding each other, they fail to set any boundaries, and because of this the relationship slowly starts to come apart at the seams.

While the movie takes a REALLY wild and explosive turn, the nuance of their blurry relationship catapulted me right back to college and my own yearning to be chosen and find my other half. After watching it, I found myself recounting to my partner stories of the proclamations of “best friends forever” I made in college, how incredible it felt to find my people, and how absolutely gutting it was when those friendships didn’t work out. That coupled with being closeted and unaware that my relationships with other women tended to blur the lines between platonic and romantic was a recipe for a lot of heartbreak.

So often in the early days of these friendships, I’d focus on all the ways we were the same, and how good it felt for someone to really get me, that I never really gave a thought to the importance of recognizing and naming our differences. Calling attention to that almost felt offensive, dangerous — like it could threaten the friendship to identify where we bumped up against each other. I told myself they couldn’t be my other half if our pieces didn’t fit together.

I’m saying this next bit directly, but tenderly: Welcome to the club. You are, unfortunately, right on schedule for the IFBE (inaugural friendship breakup experience). For so many of us, college is when we start plastering together a life of our own. For the first time we’re afforded a kind of autonomy and freedom we’ve never had before, allowing us to shape our time, what we do with it, and who we spend it with. Everyone is breaking out of their hometown cocoons and ready to stretch their wings. What actually happens is that you’re suddenly cramped together with thousands of other frenetic and horny butterflies. It’s an explosion of bright colors, big hopes, and high chances for head-on collision.

In relationships founded on sameness, it is so hard to add boundaries retroactively. This is especially hard to do at college because you know each other’s schedules, you’re in mega-close proximity, and it’s socially normalized to spend buckets of time with your friends simply because…you can! You and Manic Pixie Dream Person (who we’ll affectionately call MPDP) met during a particular season of your lives that very easily allowed you to glom onto each other in that delicious and dangerous way, and that’s completely normal. The thing that royally sucks is when a difference in wants and needs shows up and neither person is sure how to handle it.

It might be a hot take, but I fundamentally believe we’re hard wired for co-dependency. God forbid we want someone to lean on in this hellfire!!! As Taryn Rothstein, LMSW, shared with me via voice note, she often sees patterns of co-dependency, blurriness and intense attachment with young, queer AFAB people. “I’ve seen my queer clients specifically struggle with their sense of self and their belonging, and [they will] quickly attach themselves to another person because of that. I think these relationships become codependent because they’re meeting critical attachment needs for queer people who might otherwise feel unsafe existing in the world, especially in this political climate.” Serving up some well-deserved validation hot for you.

Rothstein also noted that the blurred lines of queer, co-dependent friendships often make it difficult to engage in a relationship that would be outright romantic or lead to a full-time partner. “You’re so focused on the friendship that you’re not able to spend as much time in romantic relationships. [These friendships] serve a really important function of making this person feel less alone, safe, and meeting a critical attachment need. I think sometimes with cis-het people a clearer line is drawn — they also have an added layer of privilege and safety and might not have a need for that kind of relationship.”

The issue, in my experience, inevitably becomes: when you realize that a relationship dynamic isn’t working (like blurry lines between a friendship and partnership, or co-dependency), do you have the tools to work through it? Nine times out of ten, especially when you’re having Adult Relationships™ for the first time, you’re not equipped to repair a rupture.

It’s completely understandable that you find yourself ruminating on who is to blame for the rupture, but I have found that friendship breakups are seldom black and white. Perhaps MPDP felt hurt when you got back together with your ex and felt like your co-dependency was breached and that made them seek their own romantic relationship. I can empathize with them, yet I can also feel your deep hurt and confusion at them ghosting you the way they did.

I also really get the feelings of jealousy you’re experiencing. I’m not someone who demonizes jealousy — I think it’s often just an indicator of an unmet need. I can especially understand why jealousy would show up in a friendship between two queer people. I see your relationship with MPDP as a friendship+. When there’s a floating question mark of whether or not you could “like” or love someone you feel close to, it can make it trickier to establish boundaries – especially when you’re both single. It also fast-tracks jealousy HARD when one person in the friendship+ does become coupled up, because that time and intimacy is slowly being allocated elsewhere. Having someone hit the brakes as fast as MPDP did, and then seeing them drive off with someone new, would make anyone feel jealous and really hurt.

I know in my bones how impossible it feels to not overanalyze everything that happened between you two. Anxiety and uncertainty makes you want to go over every interaction with a fine-tooth comb, but it is, ultimately, a fruitless pursuit for control that will only do one thing: make you spiral in self-blame.

This is because, in a scenario where you’re not sure where the other person stands, the only certainty you can come away with is the one where the onus is on you. The truth is, this was a relationship between two people and you both brought your histories and subsequent behaviors to the table – for better or worse. This created a dynamic that needed some tweaking. It sucks that you didn’t get a chance to do that. Maybe you will in the future, if you want, but that’s a conversation for a different day.

As much as we hear that college is the time to find our people, I believe college is actually the time to experience new relationship dynamics, mess them up biblically, and learn from them going forward. That’s exactly what you’re doing. Losing a friend is still an absolute fist to the heart, but a mantra that I keep close to me is: “You never know who is waiting around your corner”. Keep your eyes and heart open. I promise your people are coming.

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