In June, I sent out a Friday Thread prompt that readers had been asking for, in one shape or another, for years: How do we talk about non-romantic breakups? Why do they sting SO MUCH? Why is the vocabulary around a friend breakup so paltry? I know many people found tremendous solace just reading through other people's stories and knowing that 1) friend breakups are part of life and 2) yes, as a culture, we are very bad at acknowledging them let alone grieving them.

For this month's subscriber-only bonus episode, Margaret and I decided to do a deep read of the thread — and a deep revisiting of our own friend histories — to talk about different "buckets" of friend breakups, how we process them in the moment and as we age, what facilitates them (bad communication!), and why they're sometimes necessary. Discussed therein: ghosting, sub-tweeting, sucky boyfriends, recurring dreams about long-ago friends, expectation mismatches, friendship promiscuity, the dearth of pop culture representations of (lasting, non-comedic) friend breakups, and more.

(And if you'd like access to this paid podcast-subscriber-only episode, you can upgrade your Culture Study subscription SO EASILY here. If you have any issues, just email me at annehelenpetersen @ gmail dot com)

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