“Friends are the family we choose.”
We happily repeat this phrase.
But curiously, when a friendship breaks down, when two friends fall out, when someone drifts away without explanation or when a friend disappears from our lives, we sometimes find it much harder to acknowledge how painful what is happening can be.
We have an entire vocabulary for romantic breakups.
But what do we call the end of a friendship?
What do we do when we have fallen out with our best friend, when we argue all the time with a friend, when a relationship that was once extremely close becomes conflictual, or when someone who occupied a huge place in our life suddenly stops speaking to us?
We suffer.
But sometimes we are almost embarrassed by how much we suffer.
Philippe Besson put it particularly well when he observed that there is no bereavement leave for the death of a friend: our social organisation itself tends to treat this bond as secondary.
And yet, in recent years, something has begun to shift.
Perhaps we are finally beginning to ask whether friendship deserves to be considered one of the major relationships in a human life.
Friendship is not the little sister of romantic partnership
Culturally, we have built a strange hierarchy of relationships.
Romantic partnership occupies an enormous place.
Family does too.
Then come friends.
And yet we can share twenty, thirty or fifty years with someone without ever living with them, marrying them or sharing property.
That person may know our love stories, breakups, moves, enthusiasms, disasters, periods of doubt and the different versions of ourselves that have come and gone.
Legally, however, that relationship may barely exist.
It is precisely this hierarchy that philosopher and sociologist Geoffroy de Lagasnerie examines in 3. Une aspiration au dehors. Drawing on his relationship with Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis, he considers friendship not simply as a pleasant addition to family or couple life, but as a way of life in its own right, with its rituals, habits, rhythms and forms of solidarity. Geoffroy de Lagasnerie’s website
We can, of course, debate his critique of family-centred life or have no desire to organise our own lives as he does.
But the question he raises remains fascinating:
Why do we consider some relationships fundamental simply because they are familial or romantic, while treating others as secondary even though they may be just as decisive in a person’s life?
And now friendship has even entered the French National Assembly
The question became very concrete in September 2026.
French MP Clémence Guetté introduced a bill seeking to grant new rights based on “friendship and bonds of affection and mutual support”. In certain legal situations covered by the proposal, the text would extend to friendships possibilities that are currently largely organised around family or romantic partnership: supporting a sick friend, taking leave after the death of a friend, or helping a friend after the birth of a child. OpenCongress France
View the proposed legislation and its progress
This is a political proposal, not the law currently in force, and its parliamentary future remains open.
But regardless of what anyone thinks about the legal solutions being proposed, its existence reveals something interesting:
friendship is beginning to be examined as a genuine social bond, rather than merely a pleasant private matter.
In fact, in January 2026, a conference on the “politics of friendship” had already brought Clémence Guetté and Geoffroy de Lagasnerie together at the French National Assembly. Geoffroy de Lagasnerie’s website
Why are friendships so important to our wellbeing?
Because we are social beings.
And on this point, we now have far more than pretty quotations about friendship.
In 2025, the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection devoted an entire report to the consequences of loneliness and social isolation for health and wellbeing. The WHO even proposes considering social health alongside physical and mental health. World Health Organization
Scientific research on social relationships also finds associations between the quality of social ties and various indicators of health and wellbeing. A longitudinal study of nearly 13,000 adults over the age of 50, for example, associated stronger friendships with better outcomes across numerous psychosocial indicators. This obviously does not mean that “having friends cures everything”, but it reminds us that our relationships are not simply scenery around our lives. PubMed
Our relationships are part of our balance.
And their quality matters.
A friendship can also become a difficult relationship
Here is the much less Instagram-friendly side of friendship.
Loving someone does not automatically make us good at relationships.
We can be deeply attached to someone and still:
communicate badly, struggle to set boundaries, accumulate unspoken resentments, feel jealous, feel that we give more than the other person, feel abandoned when they meet someone, become less and less able to tolerate certain behaviours, feel used, struggle to say no, or eventually explode over something that looks completely insignificant from the outside.
“I argue with my best friend all the time.”
“My friend never listens to me.”
“I feel like I’m always the one making the effort.”
“Since he got into a relationship, our friendship has basically disappeared.”
“She hurt me and I can’t forgive her.”
“My best friend no longer speaks to me and I don’t understand why.”
These are genuine relationship problems.
And yet we quite readily consider therapy or coaching when our romantic relationship is struggling, but much less often when a friendship is causing us pain.
Why?
Relationship coaching is not just for couples
This is a distinction I care deeply about.
When I talk about relationship coaching, the first image that often comes to mind is a couple sitting opposite me.
But a relationship is not necessarily romantic.
We can work on a parent-child relationship, a relationship between two family members, between colleagues, business partners, friends, or even a relationship that deliberately sits outside the usual categories of couplehood.
We can also work not on one particular relationship, but on the way you relate to other people.
Why do I always end up in the same conflicts?
Why do I find it so difficult to set boundaries?
Why do I never dare to say when something has hurt me?
Why do my relationships become so enmeshed?
Why do I feel that I give a great deal and receive very little?
Why do I abruptly cut people off when I am disappointed?
Why do I find it difficult to make friends or maintain friendships over time?
At that point, we are no longer simply trying to repair an argument.
We are observing a relational pattern.
“I fell out with my best friend”: who needs to come?
Both of you, ideally, when both people want to work on the relationship.
But not necessarily.
As with couples coaching, it is possible to work on a relationship even when the other person is not present.
Because you can already explore your own position:
What actually happened?
What did you understand about the situation?
What did the other person probably understand?
What were you expecting without ever saying it?
What boundary was crossed?
What are you trying to obtain?
Do you want to repair this relationship, transform it, create some distance, or simply understand what is happening to you?
Sometimes the problem is not even a lack of love or affection.
We can love each other very much and be extraordinarily bad at understanding one another.
And that is something we can work on.
A healthy relationship is not a conflict-free relationship
This is one misconception I would really like to clear up.
A healthy relationship is not one in which nobody ever argues.
Two different people will inevitably have different needs, perceptions, rhythms and sometimes different interests.
So conflict is not always the problem.
The problem may be what we do with it.
Can we express disagreement without humiliating the other person?
Say that something hurt us without immediately turning the other person into the guilty party?
Hear criticism without assuming that the entire relationship is being called into question?
Set a boundary without using silence as punishment?
Acknowledge that we were wrong?
Repair things after causing hurt?
A strong relationship is not one miraculously spared from every tension.
It is often a relationship that knows what to do with its tensions.
What if our circle of relationships deserved as much attention as our career?
We spend enormous amounts of time working on our professional lives.
We develop skills.
We review our progress.
We think about our future.
We change careers when a situation no longer suits us.
But our relationship circle?
Who are the people we are close to?
With whom can we be vulnerable?
Who can we ask for help?
Who helps us grow?
Which relationships nourish us?
Which ones exhaust us?
And above all: who are we ourselves within our relationships?
This is not an invitation to conduct a quarterly audit of your friends complete with KPIs, pivot tables and annual performance reviews for Gérard, Kévin and Stéphanie.
It is simply about recognising that building and maintaining healthy, reciprocal and satisfying relationships also deserves some attention.
That is precisely why I wrote Relation’Aile
Relationships have long been the common thread running through my work: romantic, family, professional and friendship relationships, but also our relationship with ourselves and the way we build connections with others.
It is also the subject of my book Relation’Aile, in which I explore this relational material and what we can learn from the way we connect with other people.
Discover Relation’Aile, the book
Because ultimately, we learn an enormous number of things throughout our lives.
But relatively little about how to be in relationship.
And yet it is probably one of the skills we will use for the longest time.
Friendship deserves our attention
So yes.
Share this article with your friends to tell them how much they matter to you.
And… if an important relationship is deteriorating, you do not have to wait until it is completely destroyed before doing something about it.
Whether the problem concerns your partner, your best friend, your mother, your adult daughter, a colleague, a business partner or a relationship so atypical that no administrative form quite knows which box to put it in, it is still a relationship.
And a relationship can be observed, understood, worked on and sometimes repaired.
That too is relationship coaching.
Not learning how to have perfect relationships.
Learning how to build relationships in which everyone can truly exist.