I recently had a falling out with two of my closest friends. As someone who avoids conflict like it’s an infectious disease, and relies heavily on a small, close-knit friendship group, our confrontation threw me totally off balance. It felt like a shattering of the careful equilibrium we had preserved for so long, and a freefall into uncertain territory that I didn’t know how to navigate, and wasn’t sure we could come back from.

After almost ten years of friendship, this was our first ‘fight’. Over the years, we’ve managed to avoid any direct conflict, preferring instead the subtlety of passive aggressive WhatsApp messages and the quiet hostility of slow building resentment. Not the healthiest of dynamics, perhaps. But it worked. Until it didn’t.

Thankfully, with the help of several long evenings spent hashing it out over red wine and a lot of tears, we’ve emerged from this closer, and with a renewed commitment to communicate more honestly with one another going forwards.

But I’ve since found myself wondering why I found the experience so destabilising. As a training psychotherapist, with experience running support groups with fairly complex dynamics, how did a small argument with my friends manage to floor me so profoundly? In my romantic life, I’ve had my fair share of relationship breakdowns. But this felt different: messier, more deeply rooted, and somehow more painful.

I’ve realised that we simply don’t have social scripts for friendship breakdowns. Thanks to a childhood diet of romantic comedies, and a new wave of Instagram therapists telling me how to communicate in love, I have a clear, socially prescribed template for my romantic encounters. There is a rough guide for which conversations ought to be had when, labels that dictate the bounds of our commitment to one another, and metrics against which to judge our expectations. But in friendship, there is none of this. The ground feels shakier; the stakes, higher.

In her latest episode of Happy Place, Fearne Cotton talks to Little Mix’s Perrie Edwards about the breakdown of her relationship with ex-band member, Jesy Nelson. “When you’ve been in that person’s life for years”, Edwards explains, “and they’ve had your back, and you’ve been through highs, lows, all these experiences, and it’s a wild ride but you’re in it together, and then they’re out of your life – that is hard to deal with. I struggled a lot with that.”

She’s even written a song about it (the not yet released, “Same Place, Different View”), hoping to give voice to a different form of heartbreak to the kind we conventionally see on our TV screens and Spotify playlists. “When it’s a friend”, she says, “you don’t hear much about it in music, so I was like, ‘I am going to write something about it because it’s just as heartbreaking. If not worse’.”

Like all relationships, friendships take work. And while from an early age we idealise the concept of ‘friends forever’, it doesn’t always work out that way. We change and grow, and not all friendships can accommodate our new configurations. While I’m fortunate not to have gone through any dramatic friendship breakups, I have lost friends over the years, usually in the form of a slow and natural fizzle, as our lives evolved in different directions. These endings are par for the course of growing older. But they can still be deeply painful: a pain that we often don’t have words for. As Fearne Cotton points out in her podcast, when it comes to friendship breakdowns, we simply “don’t have the language”.

When I think about friendship, my mind goes straight to Sex and the City, perhaps the most iconic portrayal of the highs and lows of female friendship. While the show’s romantic interests come and go, its beating heart is the platonic love affair between its four central women. The show provides a compelling (if on some accounts unrealistic) insight into the passionate, deeply loyal, and often unconditional intimacy of long-standing friendship. Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Kim support one another through the ups and downs of their thirties, but also work through their own fierce conflicts.

While arguments with the characters’ romantic partners tend to run along fairly trivial lines (‘why didn’t he text me back’, ‘will he still want me if I don’t do anal’, etc.), conflict between the women in SATC seems more fully fleshed out and deep-rooted, often stemming from a place of deep care and respect. They get frustrated when their friends don’t value themselves enough in romantic relationships (like that classic fight between Miranda and Carrie in a thrift store), or upset when they don’t receive adequate support from one another. They have high expectations for each other, and hold their friends accountable when they self-sabotage or devalue themselves. 

The show also speaks to the challenge of accommodating changing values and identities in long-term friendships. As the series progress, Carrie and Miranda negotiate varying ideals of success and femininity: the kind of lives they want to live, and the kind of women they want to be. This feels increasingly relatable as I move into my thirties, and find myself balancing fierce, unwavering support for my friends with my own insecurities about reaching certain milestones and finding my place in the world.

For all its flaws (and in spite of Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall’s off-screen discord), Sex and the City’s vision of friendship feels at once relatable and aspirational. It reminds us that as with all great love affairs, our closest friendships will inevitably breed conflict. What matters is not whether conflict arises, but how we respond to and resolve it.

I am very lucky to have had my own long-standing friendships with women I have known and loved for decades, and hope to know and love for the rest of my life. While romantic partners have come and gone, my friends have been a constant, helping me pick up the pieces when I feel lost or broken, and holding me accountable when I am not fully valuing myself.

However awkward and uncomfortable, I see now that conflict is an important part of these relationships. Giving voice to our grievances can help us build a stronger and more honest foundation for our friendships, which are, after all, the longest and most reliable love affairs of our lives.