I have to work closely with an ex-friend who “broke up” with our whole friend group

A reader writes:

I started at my company about five years ago after being laid off from my previous company due to Covid. Once I started here, I was shocked to discover that one of my old friends (Susan) who I was very close to in college (which I had graduated from 10 years prior) worked at the same company in a different building on the company’s campus.

I reached out to her briefly on Teams just to say, “Oh wow, I had no idea you worked here. If you’re ever near my building, pop by and say hey and maybe we could grab a coffee.” She responded warmly and we had one brief conversation in my office, and that was the last time I saw her for months. We were in different departments with very little crossover, so we never had reason to interact in a work setting and we weren’t the kind of friends who were in constant communication so I didn’t think much of it.

Cut to a while later — maybe six months to a year — and I met up with the friendship group that had survived from our college years. Susan was invited but unable to attend, and during this gathering our mutual friend Carla said that Susan had decided she no longer wanted to be friends with the rest of us, only wanted to keep her friendship with Carla, and our over-a-decade-long friendship was essentially over. It wasn’t only me who got cut off by Susan, but I must admit that I took it quite personally, given that we worked at the same place. I wondered if the formal break-up through our mutual friend wasn’t specifically aimed at me because none of the rest of our friends would have had reason to run in to her, given that we were all very spread out geographically. I also felt like because the news was delivered via a mutual friend, I never got the chance to get closure or understanding of why the friendship ended.

For the past four years, this has been mostly a non-issue since we only run into each other maybe twice a year at work and none of our work crosses over. But recently a department that I work incredibly closely with was hiring. I was talking to my friend in that department and she told me that they had had an exciting internal applicant, and lo and behold it was Susan. I’m 100% sure that Susan will get this job; she is intelligent and hard-working, and I know they had been struggling with finding external candidates to fill this role.

I’m feeling anxious at the prospect of working closely with her. There was a time when we were really close friends and basically living in each other’s pockets. She was the first and only person at college who I told when my mother died and she helped me share that information with our other friends. Then we weren’t and I never got the chance to understand why. I just have no clue how to gauge my behaviour. Did we stop being friends because the friendship just fizzled over time? Did I do something to annoy her? Was the trigger me showing up at her place of work unexpectedly? Did she feel like I followed her there or was pressuring the relationship? I am autistic and social stuff can be very tough for me to navigate even at the best of times but this feels like a whole minefield. I am also having a lot of anxiety that if the friendship ended because she didn’t like me specifically or I unknowingly did something that upset her, that may still be true and may affect my working relationship with the people I am friends with in that department.

I know the first port of call is to behave professionally towards Susan and treat her like any other colleague, but should I be doing anything else proactively? It’s been a few years since the news that we were no longer friends was delivered, so bringing it up would be weird, I think. I did not say anything to my friend in the other department when she suggested that Susan might be getting the job, other than endorsing her candidacy because I truly feel like she would be a good fit for this role, and despite the awkward way our friendship ended I hold no ill will against her. We’re both still friends with Carla so I was considering reaching out to her to see if she had any sense of how Susan felt about me, but then indirect communication through Carla is also what spawned a lot of this anxiety in the first place.

Pay attention to that last sentence because I actually think Carla stirred up a lot of drama where there didn’t need to be any.

If Susan wanted to end her friendship with your friend group, she could have just … done that. Carla didn’t need to make a formal announcement. Susan could have talked to people herself or just done the natural fade/falling out of touch that happens frequently post-college. I’m side-eyeing Carla a bit for thinking it was her place to announce this to the rest of you (and I can’t tell if Susan asked her to, or if she took it upon herself — it sounds like maybe the latter). “She doesn’t want to be friends with any of you, only me” also makes me wonder if her announcement was self-serving in some way. Regardless, if Carla hadn’t said anything that day, you wouldn’t be feeling any of this anxiety now — so it’s worth noting that your fears right now are coming from Carla’s actions, not Susan’s.

As for what happened, I’d bet money that it’s not about anything you did at all, because she cut off your entire friend group. It’s far more likely that it’s something like feeling very different from her college self now, or even having bad memories of that time and avoiding people associated with it, or going through something now and not having the energy to keep up with older, more distant friendships, or … well, all sorts of other things that you wouldn’t know from the outside. I don’t think you need to wrack your brain trying to figure out if you caused this. (It’s also very unlikely that Susan felt like you deliberately followed her to her company. It’s a large company, people one knows might pop up, and it sounds like your approach to her was extremely normal and low-key.)

Your instincts to just treat Susan like any other colleague are absolutely right. You don’t need to do anything else proactively (like reaching out to her ahead of time), and actually I strongly think you shouldn’t. Just be low-key about the whole thing, which has the advantage of demonstrating for her that a low-key approach is perfectly workable and no one needs to feel tense or weird about the situation. Treat her the way you would someone else you didn’t have a history with — meaning pleasantly and with good will and with no real expectations beyond working together productively — and just assume that you and Susan will build a new relationship as colleagues that will be its own thing, rather than an extension of the old friendship.

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