What Did I Do Wrong? : What to Do When You Don't Know Why the Friendship Is over

It happens without warning, and it devastates you: Your closest girlfriend cuts you off completely. No more late-night phone calls and emails, no more catch-up lunches and dinners. She has decided for whatever reason to move on with her life and has left you to try to make sense of what happened. The experience can be as painful as the death of a loved one and as confusing as an unexpected breakup with a significant other. You replay scenes from the friendship and wonder what you did wrong. You’ve lost a loved one and you don’t know what to do.

Now, What Did I Do Wrong? gives voice to this painful, common, yet rarely discussed phenomenon and provides a resource—and some answers—that you can rely on. Relationship expert Liz Pryor has had a number of these breakups herself, and so she set out to discover why they were happening in order to help herself—and others—get through the pain and prevent it from happening again. Through personal interviews and her popular website, lizpryor.com, Pryor collected hundreds of stories of friendships gone wrong. She draws on those stories to explore the dynamics of friendship breakups in a candid, intimate way, revealing the patterns, the warning signs, and some ways to put a friendship right or help it change so that it meets your friend’s and your changing lives. She also explains how to end a friendship—if you find that you need to do so—in ways that honor both parties’ feelings and your history together.

Like the best kind of girlfriend—one who really will stay friends forever—Pryor blends plain, old-fashioned, feminine good sense and good humor with genuine empathy for the thousands of women who live with the confusion and anxiety that linger after the sting of an ended friendship. What Did I Do Wrong? will validate your feelings and inspire you to be more forthright and compassionate with new and old friends. You will be moved and uplifted by the many stories of strong friendships, broken friendships, and renewed friendships that make this book a treasure of women’s wisdom and experiences.