Celebrity buddy breakups are a lot like ours

Her romances may have been overanalyzed to death, but the very public, one might even say performative nature of Taylor Swift’s relationship with her girl squad has long provided ample fascination for the gossip press and an unnerving amount of creative fodder for her lyrics. But lately, the once-tight bond between the Grammy winner and bestie Blake Lively appears to be cracking under the weight of the “It Ends With Us” debacle. And while the problems of blonde millionaire celebrities may seem a world away from the personality dramas going on within your own group chat right now, the fraught dynamics of female friendship — and the most effective methods of working through them — share a substantial amount of DNA. I’ve studied conflict resolution and survived enough of my own breakups to know that navigating the terrain when friends fall out is one of the hardest negotiations in life.

When, for whatever reason, close friends experience a rupture, there are a few different paths for reconciling. If the friends are in communication and willing, they could, for example, seek an interest-based approach. In this process, parties focus on the problem and what their proposed solutions are, over personalities. This type of negotiation can be effective during a classic friendship pain point when, formerly in sync, friends find their personal and professional paths diverging, leading to feelings of neglect. One person may, for example, be focusing on buying back the master recordings of her first six albums, while the other is enmeshed in rearing her four children with Deadpool.  

Swift and Lively have been friends for a decade, long enough to have shared and outlasted the iconic Rhode Island Hiddleswift era. The two have cheered each other on via their social media accounts, and strategically pap walked through multiple girls’ nights out. Swift has been a godmother to Lively’s three daughters, James, Inez and Betty, and used their names as inspiration for the love triangle narrative of “Folklore.” But now, Swift remains at the top of her game. Lively, on the other hand, is still struggling under the reputational damage of the “It Ends With Us” fiasco, while her “Another Simple Favor” film has earned only a lukewarm response. 

In an interest-based negotiation, friends might acknowledge that their positions involve different priorities and time constraints, but they share a mutual interest in nurturing the relationship. They might then set compromises like doing some activities with the kids and some away from the family.

Blake Lively and Taylor Swift hanging out in NYC, 2023. (Gotham/GC Images/Getty Images)

Or maybe a friendship falters because one person is mired in a bitter conflict and expects a show of support, while the other doesn’t want to be put in the middle of it.

This past winter, “It Ends With Us” director and costar Justin Baldoni’s team released a purported text from Lively in which she appeared to be flexing her powerful connections. “If you ever get around to watching ‘Game of Thrones,’ you’ll appreciate that I’m Khaleesi, and like her, I happen to have a few dragons,” it floridly read. “My dragons also protect those I fight for. So really, we all benefit from those gorgeous monsters of mine. You will too, I can promise you.” 

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Then in a May court filing, Baldoni’s attorneys alleged that Lively had asked Swift to delete text messages between them, and that her attorney “demanded that Ms. Swift release a statement of support for Ms. Lively, intimating that, if Ms. Swift refused to do so, private text messages of a personal nature in Ms. Lively’s possession would be released.” (Lively’s camp swiftly and firmly denied the accusation.) Baldoni’s team also briefly subpoenaed Swift, whose song “My Tears Ricochet” appears on the “It Ends With Us” soundtrack, though the subpoena was withdrawn earlier this month. It’s difficult to parse out what, if any, part of Baldoni’s allegations are true, but it would seem that Lively has been instrumental in dragging Swift into her fight. And Swift, with her lengthy track record of queen bee energy, can’t be pleased with the implication that she’s just the Drogon to someone else’s Daenerys.

The alleged cooling between the women has not reached the point of thinly veiled song lyrics, though a source “close” to Swift told People recently that “their friendship has halted” because “Taylor wants no part in this drama.” While the private interactions between the two women can’t be known, Swift’s presence in the dispute has gone conspicuously unremarked on by the singer. In all the lawsuits and countersuits, even as Lively’s fellow sisters of the traveling pants have voiced their support for her, Swift has excluded herself from this narrative, apparently preferring the company of other members of her squad. The two once inseparable pals have not been seen together in months.

In a dispute like this, where there are other parties involved and sides taken, feelings inevitably run deep. If you’ve ever experienced the phenomenon of one friend going through a crisis while the other doesn’t want to get involved, you know how awkward it can become and how personal everything feels. A transformative negotiation approach could work well in such a scenario. In this model, the objective isn’t coercion; it’s recognizing, as one of my professors once put it, our need for autonomy as well as connection. It’s healthy boundary setting.

Two friends, for example, could talk about how the outside problem is affecting their relationship with each other and then set parameters around the external disagreement. Perhaps they’d decide to limit their conversations around the topic, or one person might offer to listen when the other needs to vent, but remain neutral within the larger friend group. The key is acknowledging the value of the relationship, even when expectations of what the parties involved should ask of each other differ.

The hardest, weirdest, most confusing and dramatic relationships of a woman’s life are with her female friends. From their earliest shared Lunchables through debauched bachelorette parties right up to the Golden Girls years, women bond with intensity. And when they fall out, they fall out just as hard, sometimes for good. Of course, not everyone who comes into our lives is meant to stay there forever. Some friendships, even long-term and close ones, end just as surely as some marriages do. And while moving on is healthy, breakups are rough, especially when there are extended families, wider friend groups and professional networks affected in the fallout. I feel most for Lively’s daughters in all of this, caught in the tumult of grown-up friction. But then, they’re girls. They no doubt already know that sometimes friends work it out, and sometimes they’re never ever getting back together.