These Women Share Experiences of Friendship Heartbreaks

Ask people what the word heartbreak signifies and an image of two romantic partners may be what comes to mind first.

However, heartbreak and loss of communication can occur across family members, siblings and friendships too.

Due to how romantic heartbreaks are given a lot more priority in popular media, not everyone has the tools to navigate these other forms of heartbreak and pain.

In our latest listicle, Urban Woman Magazine asked some women to share their experiences of friendship heartbreak, how it affected them and how they have navigated life after.

Read their responses below.

OC

I have a story that still breaks my heart anytime I remember it.

I had this male friend I’ve known since secondary school. He is a few years older, but we grew up in the same neighborhood, so we were always close, and it never felt weird.

At some point, we even tried dating. Honestly, it was more like me agreeing out of pity because he wouldn’t stop talking about it. It didn’t work out, so we just stayed casual friends after that.

Fast forward about 6 – 8 years later, I was married, but we were still in touch. We talked from time to time and were on good terms. He had also moved close to the area where I was living with my ex, so we would occasionally run into each other.

When things started falling apart in my marriage, and I decided I was leaving, I reached out to him. To me, he was one of my oldest friends who lived nearby, and staying with him meant I could still commute to work. I explained everything and asked if I could stay at his place briefly while I sorted out accommodation, because Lagos agents were showing me shege.

This bastard told me I couldn’t stay with him unless I was going to sleep with him.

He knew everything that was going on cos I had been talking to him as my friend. He knew about my marriage issues, he knew I was leaving, and he had been my friend through all of it. But in that moment, he chose to turn my vulnerability into an opportunity to demand sex.

I was completely heartbroken. I ended up staying with my sister and her husband until I got a place.

After that, I blocked him everywhere. He still tries to reach out sometimes through random numbers or mutuals to apologize, but I’ve made it clear there is no friendship left. Not in this lifetime or any to be honest.

About how it affected me, I suck terribly at friendships now. 

Initially, it was because I had suffered enough heartbreak and didn’t even have it in me to put in any effort, but I’ve come to realise that even when I’m actually trying to put in that effort, I just can’t find it in me. 

I mean, you can’t get hurt if you don’t even start the friendship at all.

I know this is a form of PTSD, adding the fact that I’m normally a very reserved person, the result is a loner who struggles to let anyone in, and is constantly on her own, by choice though.

EK

I think at this point in my life I accept I never learnt how to be good friends to people especially babes. 

And it’s not like I’m a good friend to men too like that.

I just always feel as though I never had something fundamental that a human was supposed to have in learning how to keep people around. 

I could talk about how those friendships ended but I choose to talk about how some of these people affected me.

What hurt me most about the end was how I felt changed by them and how I felt I knew I won’t be the same and I didn’t feel of that same importance as they really didn’t want me anymore.

Made me feel like I chose humiliation.

Like I wasn’t smart enough to know the difference between someone that will hurt me and someone that won’t.

Like loving them at all was doing too much.

AAN

Can’t even talk about mine because just recalling it makes me want to throw up from said heartbreak. 

It’s painful af (and this is even an understatement).

And I think the worst part is coming to terms with the fact that you both can’t continue as friends because the difference between your ideals, beliefs, etc is now so fucking wide. 

You’ll survive it oo (I think).

But at first, it’ll be like you want to die. You might even die inside. 

But you will eventually survive. 

One thing I’ll say that it taught me is to know when to be confrontational or non-confrontational. Don’t do either or both of them to the point it becomes a major issue or worsens the situation. 

Know when to do one or both. 

And sometimes that knowledge can come from asking the other person(s) what they need in that moment. Hopefully they’re honest enough to tell you the truth. 

Emphasis on HOPEFULLY😐.

Also, know when to acknowledge your own faults. The honesty really goes both ways. Know when to acknowledge what you did wrong and try to do better. There’s no manual for this thing really. I think honest communication on both parts is key. Because only one party can’t be honest and it’ll still work. It has to be from both/all sides.

EEE

I lost a truly loved one and a close friend never checked on me. I spent months grieving openly online and someone who we used to text literally everyday didn’t hear from me all that time and she didn’t check up on me. I was so hurt. 

After two months, I reached out to find out if she was also going through stuff. She wasn’t. I made sure. And then I deleted her number. The end. 

Now, I realise that not everyone is your friend. There are tiers. You’ll get hurt if you treat an acquaintance as a friend.

Or was it the friend who knew said loved one, and then was calling to ask me to help her pick out her birthday outfit the very same fucking week that he died?

I was so mentally out of it my office told me to take the time off. I had Mentally Aware on speed dial. I called this friend crying on Sunday, and the next week, when I travelled for the funeral, she was sending me outfits to pick for her.

OT

I lost my male best friend in 2024. We just grew apart.

I realised I was the one pushing to have conversations and reaching out all the time. 

Come December, an end of the year epistle came in and he said we might not be besties anymore but I’ll always hold you dear and that broke my heart.

For context we had been friends since SSS1 best friends by SSS3 even though we went to completely different single sex schools

He was a border and I wasn’t. So we only had the holiday period to talk; he went to Landmark and no phones so again back to holiday period but after graduation it was still the same: being aired for months even though I’m seeing you active on social media, posting and stuff.

We went from talking 24/7 when he was at home telling each other everything to being total strangers.

It broke me and still hurts till today cause I didn’t imagine I’ll go through life without him at my back. He would have been my chief bridesman at my wedding.

I’m mostly over it and will continue to cheer him from the corner.

AJ

All I can say is: fuck all of them 🙂‍↔️😂😂

Mtchewwwwwwwww 😂🤣🤣.

DK

The first friendship breakup I had was because of envy and man; my friend then liked attention a lot so if someone else was getting attention and she wasn’t it pissed her off. She had a boyfriend then but if any guy she liked was giving me attention she gets angry. 

Mind you I was so oblivious to the extent of envy and male centeredness until my then boyfriend told me she asked him why he chose me instead of her. I asked her about it and she said “I met him first”.

It was so funny because the guy was my neighbour. Anyways the friendship ended when she threatened to attack me in my lodge.  

This made me quite paranoid when approaching friendships, especially when someone is trying to be a friend , not vice versa. So I decided my next friend would be my pick but little did I know the next one would shatter me.

I made the next friend later on and I was so happy because she was a feminist, she wasn’t over religious and I was so ecstatic. She was a bossgirl type of feminist, she believed all women needed to work and fend for themselves to be respected in the society and I didn’t see anything wrong with that ideology at that point.

I loved her because she wore nose rings and lots of chains to class (mind you we were in medical school so it wasn’t allowed). 

She would spend at least an hour before class to do her makeup for class but she was a first class student. She was still doing her business and excelling at it, she was cool af. She was wild and unapologetically herself. 

However, she was very insecure and that was the nexus of our problems. So she met one stupid boy in school church one day and everything changed. She stopped wearing makeup and nose rings, she became a shadow of herself, she started going to church often, she would use her money to cook and sometimes buy food for him and he didn’t do the same for her. 

I always told her I didn’t like her bf every chance I got but she started distancing herself from me slowly till they had issues and she came back crying to me.

We got to 300 level and she had to repeat because of how she missed some classes because of that stupid boy. So I moved to the next level without her. She really started distancing herself. I was so hurt but I tried to understand the fact that her repeating was hurting her more so I tried all I could to be there for her. 

Anyways the stupid boy broke up with her because he was in love with his childhood bestie. A new guy came into the picture and she started to drown me with “not all men, they are still some good men”.

I just knew at that point I had lost that babe. She started distancing herself because of the new guy. We had a quarrel one day and she said: “I have it all”. I ended the friendship when I realised she would drop me anytime a new guy came along and she was secretly envious of me even though all I felt towards her was love.

The breakup made me so reluctant and scared to make a new close friend.

OY

My own is that I’m on the verge of losing my best friend. Idk if it’s all in my head.

She’s a medical student and I work round the clock.

Last week I wanted to talk to her, I called but no response, and she didn’t call back, she only replied with “miss me?”.

These days the only time she needs me is when she wants to ask some questions like if it’s possible for her to wash her clothes with her nails fixed or asking how much it cost to waybill stuff from Lagos to PH. I’ve been watching her stories, she’s having FUN.

I miss her, but I don’t know if it’s the same for her, plus I don’t want to bore her with all of that.

But it feels like we’re slipping away and it hurts lol.

I didn’t even feel this way when I broke up with my boyfriend 🤣🤣🤣

AD

This is my story. I wanna stay anonymous in the article. BUCKLE UP PLEASE, it’s going to be a long read and my brain is all over the place, please don’t mind my punctuations and stuff. 

Happened to me this year, early this year. Wish I could send a voice note but anyway, me and her, we have been friends, best friends since 2013. She was my corner sister in the hostel, and her older sister was my school mom. We went to different universities, I ended up in the same uni as her older sister and bc I was kinda people shy, I didn’t make friends easily and she was a familiar face. 

So we picked up our school mom/daughter relationship and became friends. Close friends since we were in the same place. 

Now I kept trying to fill the gap, stay in touch with my best friend cos I could feel the gap, the drift, I thought it was distance. 

Until this year in January or so, when I had to spend the night at their house due to a reason. 

Now I admit I was wrong for talking to her sister and saying oh I am coming over and all, and as soon I stepped into the room, I felt bad. Not an excuse, but I just got used to her older sister being the one close. She didn’t really talk to me, she was angry and didn’t bother hiding it. 

I left early the next morning cos I was uncomfortable and later that day, she reached out saying oh, I was not her friend, I was her sister’s friend, saying this wasn’t the first time her sister found a way of getting into her relationship with her friends, and she just lets them go bc she doesn’t have energy to fight. And oh, she’s sure I always wondered why we were drifting even if I kept trying, that’s part of the reason and it has been like that for a longgg time. She was just letting me know bc I deserved it but hey, let’s keep being friends. 

Me, I sha told her I didn’t want to be friends with her anymore, or her sister. Bc if she was uncomfortable with the way I got close to her sister, she could have told me even as a joke but she didn’t. And then she said I was trying to make it her fault and I apologized. 

I told her to talk to her sister about it and she said no, she doesn’t blame her sister because her sister loves people and people love her too. 

So anyway, I told her I didn’t want to get in the middle of whatever drama they have going on because her and her sister would be fine and I’d just be the wicked person who came between them or tried. Lmao. 

I haven’t spoken to her since January, she is not blocked but I have deleted her number from my phone. I have cut back on my friendship with her sister as well, we only talk once in a blue moon which will also stop soon and I am never ever going to their house again. Ever again. 

Maybe it’s a bit extreme, maybe I am not giving my friend grace, maybe it’s actually my fault. I miss her a lot of times, I mean, 13 years is gone just like that? At the same time, I am very hurt and feel like a fool. So all this time, I kept reaching out, texting, calling, in the name of making our friendship stay alive and whole time, she was thinking “naaah, you’re not my friend girl, you’re my sister’s friend. Lmaooo jokerrr 🤡”.

I want to add that her sister’s older than her with 2+ years so they’re really close and kinda know the same people, same circle and all.

MZ

In 2022, my then best friend left the country without telling me.

For context, this is someone I’ve known my entire life. We were born in the same place, just two months apart. Our houses were right next to each other, literally separated by a wall with a hole we used to crawl through. She was my first friend.

In 2012, my family left Maiduguri, and we lost consistent contact for a few years. Then in 2016, we reconnected and went right back to being very close. Our families were still close too, so every time I visited Maiduguri, I would see her. She would also visit us during holidays. We stayed in each other’s lives like that.

In 2021, I noticed we weren’t talking as consistently, so we created a routine. We would check in during the week and have a proper catch-up call every Sunday. It worked for a while.

Then things started changing.

The first time I called, she said she was with a man. The next time, she said she would call back but didn’t. After that, it became a pattern of excuses and unavailability.

After about two months of this, we had a fight. During the argument, she said I had moved on, that I now had friends in Abuja, and that she was no longer the center of my life.

That hurt, especially because she knew about my life and the people in it.

After that fight, communication dropped completely. By April, I didn’t hear from her at all. She didn’t call me on my birthday, which was unusual. I stopped seeing her online, but I assumed she just wasn’t posting.

I kept trying to reach her. Her number wasn’t going through, but I didn’t think too much of it at first. I would occasionally ask her brother how she was doing, and he would just say she was fine.

After a while, I got worried and called her sister. I explained that we had fought and that I hadn’t heard from her in months. Her sister told me that the situation wasn’t my fault and that she had been acting differently for a while.

Then she told me something else.

She said my friend had left the country in April.

No one told me.

It took me about two years to process that. It was my first major friendship breakup, and it changed how I relate to people.

That’s it.

NW

Omo a girl that I grew up being friends with and have always supported, didn’t invite me to her wedding till the last minute. And was like ohhh you should come. And we’re family friends.

I just told her babe if I find out you have a child on the internet, I will never speak to you again. And I kept it pushing.

BM

So I was a really troubled teenager who gained admission to uni when I was 15+, the only person I knew from back home was in a different department so we hardly ever see. I dealt with a lot of self esteem issues that made me keep to myself a lot. 

There was this babe in my department that always also kept to herself a lot as well because people made jest of her cos she was an albino. I felt really bad and decided to get close to her, over time we became best of friends that our parents even got to know each other.

We were literally sisters, she lived in the school hostel while I lived off campus so we would stay in each other’s place a lot, at a point my housemates will insult me for bringing her and say terrible things about her yet all those side talks never mattered to me, I really loved her and we had a lot of memories.

Long story short, after our final exams I found out I was pregnant. I was scared and ashamed, I had to tell my mom and she came to pack my things before they released our results so I went home and couldn’t even attend our convocation. Mind you, I had become school gist and everybody was saying a lot . 

She and her mum called me once and that was it, my friend never reached out after that. I was confused and started looking for her, I left her a lot of messages on Facebook, I was convinced she was in danger or lost her phone. I cried a lot.

Because I was going through a lot by myself, I had to let it go at a point, but at 6 months intervals, I would randomly send a Facebook message cos I missed her plus also demand an explanation until I found out she had blocked me one time then I got the message. That was my first experience with ghosting.

Until one random day, it was my son’s birthday, I posted him and she commented “happy birthday our baby” I wan craze. I saw she had unblocked me. Took everything in me to not go to her inbox or reply.

When she saw that I didn’t reply, she sent me a long ass message about how she was equally ashamed and people were saying we were both ashewos that’s why I got pregnant and she didn’t want such labels also she traveled bla bla bla. I never replied that message till date and now I don’t have any friends, only my sister. To make new friends is very hard.

CK

It is a heartbreak that took me a bit of time to get over. So this young lady, her name is Nneoma*. Nneoma and I became friends in undergrad because we lived in the same hostel; she lived like five or six rooms away from mine. Due to us being in the same department, it was very easy to connect because I shared things in common with her. I was much of a recluse in university and my life was pretty much school and church.

I’ll have to talk about the breakup sequentially over the years because when things end I mull over them. I have the unhealthy habit of wallowing and even drawing like tree diagrams on paper to figure at what point things went wrong and where I missed it. 

She had a habit of getting angry at me. One time, she gave me a dress. Her cousin had given her a dress which was two to three sizes too small for her because she’s on the big side and is very tall. There was no way the dress was going to be her size. She told me I could have the dress because it looked better on me. 

So I went to a party with the dress in 2019 and I came back to the hostel. The next morning, she was in the room with my roommate and they were having a back and forth over indirect rule. She kept saying that another term for indirect rule is the policy of assimilation and I kept trying to explain to her that indirect rule was very different from the policy of assimilation and that another term for indirect rule as I was taught was the policy of association. 

I tried to explain this to her and to explain the error in her argument and she started screaming at me. She called me proud and sarcastic and said that I liked putting people down. 

She cited an instance during a group presentation when I asked the presenters a question and said that that was why I tried to put the young man down. After that conversation, I just looked at her and because I was sleep deprived I just went to bed. I thought it was a regular friendship disagreement which we would get over.

Well guess who shows up at my door very early the next morning to tell me that she wants the dress back? Of course I gave it back to her. I did not even care. Eventually she crawled back in because she has a habit of doing that. She will rant and rant and then ask if we were friends again. 

As at 2022, we graduated and our course advisor gave us a list of those who graduated with a first class and I did. I got a First Class in English and I was the only Literature major to graduate with a First Class in my set. Around the time that this news came, I was very happy and I told everybody. Then someone told me: “Be careful around Nneoma. She’s not exactly happy.”. I did not listen.

So I stayed on in the hostel for about a year. Within that period, there was a strike so I stayed on and was working remotely and trying to get my life together. She was there and we agreed to be accountability partners for courses. There was an eight week course we were taking together and I kept telling her: “Why not go home and get a laptop? That would be great because you have one at home”. 

She kept delaying and this was someone who kept whining to me about how her father would slutshame her and not let her do things around the house or go out. I had to tell her that the only way to free yourself was to earn an income and move away from your parents. It got to the third week of the program and she still wasn’t pulling her weight or concerned about getting the laptop so I let it go.

When she eventually got the laptop by the fourth week, there was a problem with the keyboard; it was in German and she could not use it. Now, I had an external keyboard which she asked me for but I could not give her because I had already promised it to someone else. She got pissed and angry at me and did not talk to me for a while. She came back a few months later trying to patch things up and I was willing. I did not have a lot of friends then. 

We started talking and she would go on and on about how she would go out with men and they would do horrible and disrespectful things to her. For instance, she once had to give a man a blowjob instead of sleeping with him so as to get out of the hotel room. 

My first reaction was: “Where do you meet these people?”. She once played me vns from one of these men and I was like why would you go out with someone like this? Maybe I was being innocent because I did not know nor understand that what she was doing was runs. I did not know at the time because I was very oblivious of stuff like that. I said what I said and she clammed up and did not talk to me ever again.

The conversation on the men happened in August. Then by September, I went to visit one of my friends in the same hostel and I was telling the person happily that I got accepted into a writing retreat. Nneoma was in the room and she started nudging this girl to send me out that I was making a lot of noise and distracting her from her studying. She kept doing this every time I visited the young lady because she was staying with her. 

She will say things like: “Tell CK to get out. I don’t want to see her in this room”. She kept doing this until March of the next year because I remember visiting the young lady and Nneoma was there and did the same thing.

I decided to cut her off completely because when people behave like this around you it’s in your best interest to not continue the friendship or whatever it is. So I did not speak to her or reach out to her.

Then last year, she reached out to me and I was surprised that I had not deleted her number. She asked how I was and I’ll never forget my response. I told her: “I have been well. Thank you very much”. Then she asked me for the phone number of a mutual acquaintance who I had not spoken to in like three to four years and I told her that I did not have it. She replied: Okay. I see.”

Now, this was someone I had not seen her Whatsapp status updates in years and somehow she posted a video of going to the airport and flying out. I think she got into an exchange program for those learning Mandarin. She went to China. 

So I saw the video and I’m like what the fuck is going on? You wouldn’t speak to me. You practically wanted to haze me the few times we met and then suddenly someone I haven’t spoken to for three to four years, somehow I have the ability to see your status. 

Why do I have to see this? Why is me seeing this so important to you? So it was then that I did the blocking, on Whatsapp and other socials because you can’t be playing in my face like this. 

It hurt me but reminded me that not everyone is cool with you winning. That is my own understanding of it.