Culture Study Podcast - August 28, 2026


BONUS EPISODE： Let's Talk About Friend Breakups [preview]

Topics
friend breakups friendship breakups
The Politics of White Women's Hair Why Are So Many Men Unraveling？

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

164.69

Word count

1,809

Sentence count

72

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 Hi, everyone. This is the Culture Study Podcast. This is a special bonus episode. We're doing
00:00:06.340 these every month, and the topics are very broad. Sometimes it's a particular piece of
00:00:12.260 pop culture that we want to go very deep on, and sometimes it's a broader social phenomenon
00:00:17.440 that is worth more of our time. Our consistent co-host and guest is Margaret Willison. Margaret,
00:00:25.080 Hi. Hi, Annie. Great to be chatting with you. What are we talking about today?
00:00:30.500 We are talking about friend breakups. Because shortly after I joined the team, you had a
00:00:37.860 listener thread, just an open thread talking about friend breakups. And I was like inundated
00:00:44.580 with the responses. And I feel like I read a ton of them. And I was like, wow, this is
00:00:47.880 a meaty topic and one i think that deserves more attention yes i always like for some reason
00:00:58.060 hesitated to do an entire thread on this topic i think just because it felt like
00:01:02.900 we're going to open up a lot of vulnerability and but people also really wanted it because
00:01:10.260 they wanted a place to process this vulnerability yeah um and i think i also just like was not yet
00:01:18.240 quite in the space where i wanted to talk more publicly about some of my friend breakups and i
00:01:24.300 like i haven't even had any friend breakups in a long ass time so these are old news um but it's
00:01:30.840 still i think like i knew that i had processed a friend breakup when i stopped dreaming about it
00:01:37.120 like 15 18 years later right right like they stick with us they can really do a number on you
00:01:46.280 so our format loose format for the show also a reminder this is a very the bonus episodes are
00:01:52.640 very loose we do not do as much editing as we usually do so that it makes life a little bit
00:01:57.660 easier for melody and we're just kind of going off in different directions but we're going to
00:02:02.480 talk a little bit about why we don't talk about friendship breakups, how they're represented
00:02:09.180 or not represented, how friendship is represented in the text around us. And then we're going
00:02:13.800 to get into what we think of as some buckets of friend breakup and how each one functions
00:02:19.860 differently. And then also some strategies for how to process or understand a friend
00:02:25.680 breakup. Does that sound good?
00:02:27.460 That sounds great.
00:02:28.420 Okay. So maybe we should, you know, oftentimes we start with a little positionality. How many friend breakups have you had, Margaret?
00:02:36.660 that's a great question um i went through like a few jarring ones between like seventh and
00:02:46.980 11th grade uh which for me was all at one school um and that feels like the period where most of
00:02:55.360 them are contained and then i had one really bad one or really i guess painful one when i was like
00:03:04.840 28 um but the thing that was haunting me as i was reading through the thread again to prep for
00:03:11.520 today's episode is wondering if there are people who think i've broken up with them right because
00:03:19.120 i'm very socially slutty like i'm friendly with a lot a lot a lot of people and um and i wonder
00:03:29.880 if there are people where like i've really let them down and i'll just never even know
00:03:33.620 Yeah. Yes. Good point. We're going to get to that later, too. Like when how it's almost like a Rashomon perspective, how some people think like, oh, I guess I don't really talk to that person anymore. Right. And another person feels like incredibly injured.
00:03:47.600 One of the striking things about the thread was reading through and being like, some of these could like some of these could be two sides of the same different friend breakup. Totally. Not being described in here. And I'm sympathetic to everyone. Yeah.
00:04:03.080 The other thing that I should say, just positionality-wise, is I don't think that there's anything wrong with friend breakups.
00:04:09.220 No, they're important.
00:04:11.160 They're important.
00:04:11.980 And we become different people as we move through our lives, right?
00:04:16.460 And our friendships serve different functions.
00:04:19.380 Sometimes they can be done, I think, in more injurious ways than others.
00:04:23.680 And we will talk a little bit about that when we get to buckets.
00:04:27.320 Melody, have you had friend breakups?
00:04:29.320 How many?
00:04:29.800 More than Margaret?
00:04:30.380 um i had like a real gosh i don't know i've had a handful but like both of you i i'm also
00:04:39.700 wondering how many people think that i've dumped them i do know of one friendship breakup where
00:04:45.500 this person came at me super hard because she thought i had dumped her and i was like oh i
00:04:50.060 just like wasn't even thinking any thoughts at all right so then she was like well you can't
00:04:55.300 dump me, I dump you first. I'm like, okay. So yeah. Yeah. You're like, have it. Yeah, fine.
00:05:03.760 I had like the kind of normal junior high, high school, like transitioning best friends,
00:05:10.920 friend breakups, like nothing harsh, nothing like it was more just like we grew, I grew into
00:05:16.120 different friend groups or that sort of thing, or different friend groups grew away from me.
00:05:19.500 um and but then my close group of friends from high school I am no longer close with and that
00:05:27.240 was like it wasn't anything that they did uh there was some there was a a traumatic thing
00:05:34.480 that happened in my life and I think I used that as like they don't get it and like maybe it was
00:05:42.820 something that was very like needed to happen anyway like I was just headed in a different
00:05:47.080 direction in a lot of life ways than they were um but i use that kind of as an excuse like this is
00:05:54.840 why we're not friends anymore and i don't think they even knew that i like understood it that way
00:05:59.120 but because i didn't even entirely understand why i was wielding their reaction to that trauma that
00:06:06.140 way um so it's just like wrapped up in a lot of mid-20s grief stuff but i do like those are the
00:06:13.040 people that i like and tell like still actually i will like they'll show up in my dreams like they
00:06:18.420 were very foundational to who i was and i i send them so like i love them and i i love that they
00:06:24.000 seem to be living really wonderful lives um but yeah we're not that's also such an interesting
00:06:30.180 one because like you're a semi-public figure yeah right and and it's just intriguing like
00:06:36.660 one of the I've definitely found people who I've sort of had strange relationships with I've found
00:06:44.720 them like following me on Instagram or like subscribing to my newsletter and been like I
00:06:50.860 don't know yeah what to do about this because yeah I don't know if I want you here well and
00:06:58.000 also it is so harsh to say you can't be here totally totally right you know Sophie's been
00:07:05.240 able to talk me through uh some of those she's uh i run a newsletter with another woman um sophie
00:07:10.840 brookover and so like luckily there i didn't have to make the decision up by myself i could like
00:07:15.280 talk it through with her and she was like oh yeah we can block that person that's we that's fine we
00:07:20.400 can do that and i was like okay yeah it's just kind of like it's almost like the very a very
00:07:26.800 slight version of privacy right it's like someone who follows me on instagram and then i block them
00:07:33.140 from seeing my stories.
00:07:34.320 Do you ever do that?
00:07:35.320 Right.
00:07:35.680 Oh, absolutely.
00:07:36.820 Yeah.
00:07:37.780 Like not even I'm not even talking about like close friend stories.
00:07:40.380 I'm just like, I don't you don't need to know that much about my public life either.
00:07:44.660 Right.
00:07:45.360 I would rather not have you in this space.
00:07:47.640 And I think that that is kind of one of the things that makes all of this so shame drenched.
00:07:54.000 Yes.
00:07:54.400 Right? Is that, like, there doesn't feel like a way to put up a boundary or create distance or transition modes that isn't saying something really bad about the other person.
00:08:10.140 Right.
00:08:11.160 Right? And, like, there's no gentle, there's no normative gentle way to do this.
00:08:18.720 And it's easier with romantic breakups, right?
00:08:24.400 because like there's just this at least like the established narratives is like either you're all
00:08:31.040 in with this person right or then you're not you're no longer all in with that person and it
00:08:37.580 seems even though in real life it's so much sloppier all the time right but it does seem
00:08:43.060 like a clear delineation like i'm with this person or i'm not with this person and with friendships
00:08:48.400 it often doesn't work quite that way yeah with relationships there is an assumption that like
00:08:54.400 you're in one at a time and I'll say having been in a polyamorous relationship one time
00:09:02.200 trying to figure out like how to dissolve a thruple it's just right I felt like I had
00:09:08.800 really spent my whole life training well and I was still overwhelmed a lot of these friendship 1.00
00:09:15.000 breakups really hinge on something that happens in like a triad of friends yes or a larger group
00:09:21.680 of friends and the dynamics become really complicated the the group friend problems
00:09:27.200 is like one of the most prominent ones um the comment that for me like elucidated so much and
00:09:36.300 became kind of an organizing principle while i was thinking about this when i was revisiting
00:09:40.260 the thread earlier um was one that said um like we have no toolkits for friend breakups or even
00:09:50.660 friend dtrs like friend define the relationship yep and like the specifics of friend dtr that
00:09:58.900 just like opened up a whole framework for me for why this is so hard which is also like we all have
00:10:07.620 the same i shouldn't say we all the same i think there's a good common normative understanding
00:10:12.920 of what being a bad partner looks like yeah right like it'll vary from person to person
00:10:19.820 But there's a, there's much more coherent idea about that. Whereas I feel like there are so many different ways to have and be a friend that are all good. But if they are not matched, you are in for something incredibly painful.
00:10:41.760 okay we're going to pause here if you want to hear the rest of this bonus episode
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