Relationships: The trouble with girlfriends

One of my good friends, Kara*, was married last year, beginning one of those whirlwind years of weddings and engagements where almost every summer weekend is devoted to nuptials and every other update to your Facebook feed is news of a promise to wed. After Kara and her betrothed exchanged vows and returned from their honeymoon, I finally caught up with my old friend, a musician who lives in Vancouver. After I made the usual inquiries into the progress of married life, Kara told me that the wedding had nearly marked the end of her longest friendship. She and Megan*, whom she has known since childhood, argued frequently after she announced her engagement, and Megan almost didn’t come to the ceremony.

The subjects of their arguments— conducted exclusively over the phone—were vague at best and about everything from the guest list to their opinions on adultery. Kara felt like Megan was picking fights for the sake of it. She even intimated to me that she had considered letting the friendship go, but in the end she begged Megan to attend. Megan did, grudgingly, and now Kara foresees a long fight to reclaim the relationship— one she isn’t sure she wants to bother with. I told her that I was having the same problem with one of my girlfriends. Our troubles started when she met her husband, a wonderful man who I think suits her perfectly. Even so, his arrival marked the end of our closeness. Perhaps Megan and I both intuited what studies reveal to be true: that when people get married, longtime friendships often start to fade. “It’s funny, isn’t it?” I said. “We used to get together and talk about our boyfriend dramas and now that we’re all settled down, we have girlfriend dramas.”

Kara and I are definitely not alone. The loss of friendships when couples wed or start families is so common in the Western world that the phenomenon even has a fancy name: dyadic withdrawal. “We only have so much time in our daily lives to spend with friends, family and spouses,” explains Daniel Hruschka, an assistant professor of anthropology at Arizona State University and the author of Friendship: Development, Ecology, and Evolution of a Relationship. “As we increasingly devote time and effort to making a life with our partner, that usually takes time that we might have spent with other loved ones.”

How women deal with losing a friend on the next page...