How to break up with a friend

When famous friends Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie publicly parted ways last year, tabloids ate up the story with the same fervour reserved for a TomKat sighting. Sure, any celebrity feud is hot gossip, but this tale of a female friendship gone bad was particularly juicy. Why? Because we've all been there.

It's a fact: virtually every woman has dumped a friend at some point. And even though most of us don't have the details of our breakups splashed across the cover of a magazine, it's still an incredibly unpleasant experience - for the dumper and the dumpee. After all, cutting ties with a friend is the ultimate betrayal - it's mean, selfish and yet in some cases, completely necessary. Like it or not, some friendships aren't worth saving.

"We have millions of guides telling us how to deal with toxic friends, but none of them tell you that it's OK to do what's right for you and simply end the friendship," says Liz Pryor, the author of What Did I Do Wrong? When Women Don't Tell Each Other the Friendship Is Over (Simon & Schuster), published in April.

"There's a tremendous sense of shame and failure that comes with a failed friendship, and there really shouldn't be," she says. In her interviews with dozens of women, Pryor discovered that people have varying reasons for ending a friendship without warning or explanation, a phenomenon she aptly calls "icing." As it turns out, it doesn't always take a dramatic backstabbing or heinous betrayal for a woman to want to ditch a friend; in fact, the reasons can be as simple as "she's bugging me" or "I'm bored" - and they're all valid if they're making your life miserable.

If you're hanging on to a fizzling friendship, it may be time to end it. But instead of icing your friend, take the high road and tell her - tactfully - that it's time to part ways. "Women stay in bad friendships too long all the time because they don't know the difference between self-care and being self-centred. It's in our nature to soothe people and avoid hurting them," says Allison Wood, an Ottawa-based psychotherapist. "But sometimes you have to choose to let it go. It's hard to do, but you'll feel better in the long run." Here are some warning signs that it's over.

You're bored to tears
You know the scenario: the friendship is humming along and then suddenly you run out of things to say to each other. She doesn't laugh at your jokes, her stories ramble on forever (was she always this long-winded?) and spending time together is beginning to feel as fun as watching an infomercial rerun. "Sometimes we go through changes, and we expect everyone else to change along with us. All of a sudden we begin to see our friend's flaws," says Wood.

That's what happened to Paula Kim when she reunited with her hometown friends at a wedding in 2000. She quickly realized she had little in common with these so-called friends, who hadn't changed much in the last 10 years. "It's was a real eye-opener," says Kim, a Toronto resident, who finally decided there was no point in hanging on to stale friendships. "It dawned on me that we weren't really friends at all anymore, and that was fine by me."

After the wedding, Kim and her friends took the non-confrontational route to ending the friendship, purposefully losing touch by letting birthdays and anniversaries pass by unacknowledged. The feeling was obviously mutual - her friends made no effort to contact her either. But had the breakup been one-sided, Wood says a more straightforward approach to avoid hard feelings or unanswered questions would have been the way to go.