The Science of Friendship Breakups: Why Most Friendships End in Silence

Key findings

1. 1984

   Young adults' close friendships ended mainly through four routes — physical separation, replacement by new friends, growing dislike, and interference from dating or marriage. Physical separation weighed more in men's endings; dating and marriage interfered more with women's friendships. ↗

2. 1986

   With Felicisima Serafica, Rose showed that people hold different implicit rules for casual, close and best friendships: closer friendships were expected to require more effort and affection to maintain, and were seen as more able to survive physical separation than casual ones. ↗

Key findings

1. 1989

   Disenfranchised grief is the grief experienced after a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported — including losses of relationships that lack recognized status, losses not recognized as losses, and grievers society excludes. ↗

2. 1999

   Every society has 'grieving rules' that define who is entitled to mourn, for whom, how, and for how long — and grief that falls outside those rules is cut off from the social support and rituals that normally help people process loss. ↗

Key findings

1. 2009

   Re-interviewing over 600 Dutch adults seven years after a first survey, Mollenhorst found network size stayed roughly stable while only about half of the original network members remained — and friendships depended heavily on the social contexts (work, school, clubs, neighborhoods) where people kept meeting. ↗

2. 2014

   With Völker and Flap, he showed in Social Networks that about seventy percent of the confidants and practical helpers people named were no longer named seven years later, and that where a relationship is embedded — its social context — shapes whether it survives or is discontinued. ↗

Key findings

1. 2021

   In emerging adults' accounts of ended friendships, dissolution was overwhelmingly gradual — declining contact and closeness rather than a discrete breakup event — and frequently unannounced, so the ending itself often had to be inferred from silence. ↗

2. 2025

   With Santucci and Lydon, she reviewed friendship dissolution from childhood through young adulthood, integrating the scattered literature on why friendships end and how people experience those endings across development. ↗