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| HR meeting stock photo. Image source. |
So there was this tiktok video on how to break up with a friend. I saw this on twitter a while ago (the video is from 2023)- people very much disagreed with it. And, yeah, the twitter people are right, DO NOT DO THIS. This tiktok gives really weird and bad advice.
It's short, I'll just transcribe the whole video here:
Person A: I've noticed you've been withdrawn and haven't wanted to hang out recently. What's going on?
Person B: I've treasured our season of friendship, but we're moving in different directions in life. I don't have a capacity to invest in our friendship any longer.
Person A: Is it something I did? This feels really sudden.
Person B: I get that it might be hard to understand, but I've been reevaluating many areas of my life recently, including my ability to be a good friend to you. I just want to be honest and upfront so I don't disappoint your expectations. I'm sorry if this feels painful and confusing. I wish you all love and success.
I have to blog about this, because it's a really BAD IDEA, and I'm autistic and I can easily imagine that for some autistic people, it's not obvious why this is bad advice. So I want to walk through it and give a thorough explanation... Like, it scares me that this advice is out there in the world and some well-intentioned autistic person is going to come across it and then actually do this to their friends.
Naively, one might think, "I have this friend, Person A, and there's nothing wrong with them, but I just don't really have time to spend with them any more. It's not worth my time to maintain this friendship. And shouldn't I be honest with them about that?" and then do what this video says.
No! Don't do this!
Instead, here's what you should do: You can just not contact them, if you don't want to spend time with them. You don't have to sit them down and give them an explanation. Seriously, it is EXTREMELY NORMAL that someone just doesn't contact one of their friends for a long time because their life circumstances make it inconvenient. Everyone understands this; you don't need to act like it's something you have to explicitly explain to them. Or, if they ask you why you they haven't seen you recently, like the person in the video did, you say, "I've been really busy with [whatever is going on in your life]." That's it! Just "I've been really busy" and then tell them some interesting thing that's been going on in your life.
Don't tell them you made a deliberate decision not to "invest in our friendship" any more!!! That comes across as really hurtful. Frame it as more of a passive thing, like of course you wish you could spend more time with them, but your life is just too busy.
If we're being brutally honest, the truth is that there are other people in your life that you do spend time with- you care about Person A less than you care about these other people. If you really really cared about spending time with Person A, you would rearrange your life to make it happen. The truth is that you prioritize other things higher than your friendship with Person A.
But don't be brutally honest! Don't say "I care about you less than the other people in my life", don't say "I've decided it's not worth my time to maintain a friendship with you." Yeah these things are true, and anybody who thinks about it for a few seconds will be aware that that's the reality behind statements like "I've been too busy"- but you shouldn't actually say it explicitly. That's just mean.
Just go with "I've been really busy." This is the normal social script for telling someone it's not worth your time to hang out with them any more. Even if you haven't actually been that busy, you can still say it!
A lot of the criticism of this tiktok video was along the lines of "this sounds like the language you find in a mass-layoff email from HR." Yeah, it does.
Person B just informs Person A that's they're not going to be friends any more, and when Person A is upset and wants to know the reason, Person B doesn't give a real reason, and just expects Person A to be fine with that. This is really weird. Person A has feelings about it, and Person B simply tells them to just not. Person B is being "honest" and therefore everyone should be okay with this. Uh, that's not how it works. This is really weird.
Let me just say, if you do this, there's no going back. By having this conversation as shown in the tiktok video, you are destroying the friendship. Person A will always remember you as "that weirdo who informed me, out of the blue, that we're not going to be friends any more, even though I didn't do anything wrong, and never gave a reason why, just a bunch of therapy-speak." Let's say you're too busy to spend time with Person A now, but then a year later you want to contact them- ha, no. No, by having this conversation with them, you're destroying that possibility.
Whereas, the normal thing to do, the thing that people will understand and be fine with, is to just not talk to them for a while, maybe years, and then if your life circumstances are such that you decide you want to talk to them again, then you contact them again. And that's fine. I have friends that I haven't talked to in years, and I have no idea what's going on in their lives, but if I was visiting the area where they lived I would be happy to see them and catch up. And that's great. But if you do what the tiktok video says, you are destroying that.
(I guess there is also a chance that you come across so weird, and Person A is so baffled at what to even think, that they'll decide surely what you meant to say was that recently you've just been too busy, that's all. Maybe you'll get lucky and they'll interpret it that way.)So, in summary: If you don't want to spend time with one of your friends any more, don't frame it like "I decided not to be friends with you any more." Frame it like "my life circumstances are such that I don't really have time right now, but of course I still like you."
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