The other day a colleague was mourning a friendship. Not dramatically. Not throw-things-into-the-sea mourning. Just that quiet, disoriented grief that happens when someone who used to live in your daily orbit becomes… peripheral.

So naturally, like the emotionally well-adjusted person I am, I pulled up the theme song from Veronica Mars  “We Used to Be Friends by The Dandy Warhols”  and played it for her.

She had never heard it.

Never. Heard. It.

Meanwhile, that song is embedded in my psyche like emotional wallpaper. It lives in the same mental drawer as AIM away messages, late-night diner conversations, and friendships that felt like they’d outlast climate change.

I’ve mourned a lot of friendships.

Some ended with fireworks , dramatic, operatic, we should probably never speak again endings. Others just thinned out. Like soup stretched too far with water.

No fight. No betrayal.
Just time, distance, mismatched priorities, or the slow realization that one of you is still narrating the friendship while the other has moved on to a new season.

And here’s the thing I wonder about now. Do people still mourn friendships the way we used to?

Because today, friendships don’t always end.  They just dissolve into the background noise of social media.

Nobody storms out. Nobody writes a long email. Nobody even unfriends you dramatically anymore.

You just stop texting. They stop replying. The algorithm quietly files you both under “People You May Know.”

And suddenly the only time they reappear is once a year when Facebook reminds you it’s their birthday and suggests you care.

“Write on their timeline!” it chirps, like an overly cheerful grief counselor.

What do you even write?

Happy birthday to someone who once knew my deepest fears, my favorite pizza order, and the story of that one humiliating middle school incident I swore never to tell anyone else?

There’s a strange emotional limbo to modern friendship endings.
Not quite loss. Not quite choice.
More like social evaporation.

And psychologically, that’s a weird place to land.

Humans are wired for narrative closure. We like beginnings, middles, and endings. We like knowing why something mattered and why it stopped.

But ghosting doesn’t give you that.
Ignoring doesn’t give you that.
Drifting definitely doesn’t.

Instead, you’re left with a relationship that exists in a kind of emotional Schrödinger’s box. Not alive, not dead, just archived.

Maybe that’s why that song still hits so hard.

Because it acknowledges something we don’t always say out loud. Friendship loss is real grief.

Not as socially sanctioned as divorce. Not as ritualized as death.
But still a loss of shared language, shared memories, shared versions of ourselves.

And maybe that’s the quiet tragedy of our hyperconnected world.
We have more ways than ever to keep tabs on each other,
and fewer ways to meaningfully say goodbye.

So sometimes all you can do is play the song, nod knowingly, and let someone sit in that strange, unceremonious heartbreak.

Because once upon a time, you used to be friends.

And that mattered.