I Was ‘Caspered’ By My Best Friend & I Don’t Know Why

Everyone always talks about the importance of moms having a “tribe” or a “village” to fall back on when life as a mom, as a woman, gets extra hard. What they don’t talk about as often is how hard it is to make friends as an adult, and it’s even harder when you’re a mom of young kids. You set up playdates and cross your fingers that the kid your kid seems to like playing with in pre-school has a mom who doesn’t spend the whole playdate talking about gentle parenting or sleep training or homemade baby food, or other things you’ve tried without success. Sometimes the mom is nice, but just not your people. You don’t vibe because you have very little in common aside from being moms, and that’s okay. But when you find a mom who opens the door with a messy bun and a thrice warmed-up cup of coffee in her hand, you know you are home. At least that’s how it happened for me and the person we’ll call X.

When I met X, I nearly cried with joy. Our kids got along so well and we did, too. We had lots in common: 90s music, a love for sarcastic T-shirts, profanity (not in front of the kids), vaguely inappropriate memes, and the important stuff, too, like politics and activism and social justice issues. Our friendship was the kind where we texted frequently throughout the day — about kids, our husbands, what snacks we felt guilty about eating, what shows we were binging. Nothing was off limits. We texted first thing in the morning and usually late into the night. We went for coffee dates and walks and sometimes just curled up on each other’s couches and talked. We saw each other every day. For the three years we were best friends, it was perfection. My friendship with X was one that I couldn’t have dreamed up. I was deliriously happy to have found a friend like her this late into my life. It seemed too good to be true, which should have told me that it was.

It started when a day went by and I realized we hadn’t texted at all, or, rather, she hadn’t responded to my text. I asked her about it and she said something about having a busy day. It didn’t sound right to me, but I had no reason to doubt her. The next day we texted but her answers were short, one-word answers, not accompanied by her usual gifs or emojis. This was not the best friend nor the friendship I had grown used to. But we both had young kids, life happened, I knew, but it usually happened to us. We usually helped each other through the sleepless nights, the stomach bugs, the last-minute dinner meal ideas. After a few more days of the cold shoulder, I knew something was up. When I asked, her answer was opaque, life was busy, she was trying to focus on her family, she didn’t have time for much else lately. Being the kind of person I am, I ran through a list of what could have happened. Did I forget a birthday? Did I forget to appropriately celebrate a child’s milestone? It had to be something.

For weeks, she continued to skirt my questions. She kept saying things like “we were fine”, “things were fine,” and “I was making a big deal out of nothing.” I felt a little gaslighted, but I trusted her, that is, until I started to see photos of her and our other friends doing things together on FB. I tried not to let jealousy get the best of me, but it was hard. I didn’t know how to ask her why I hadn’t been included without sounding like a jealous ex-boyfriend, but finally I had to say something. She told me she was allowed to have other friends and that she didn’t love me “stalking” her socials for reasons to be upset. Stalking people through their socials used to be something we joked about doing; now she didn’t seem to find it funny.

Friendships change. I get that. People change. Sometimes there is a reason and sometimes there just isn’t. Like with a relationship, friends can come and go, and yet the heartache of losing a friendship feels like a worse betrayal. I felt lost and rejected. I even joined a FB group to meet new friends, like blind dating but for moms, but it felt too hard to put myself out there to strangers. It also felt too soon and too desperate.

I googled it what was happening because, surely, I couldn’t be the only person experiencing this. I learned the term “caspering.” It was technically a term that applied to dating, but it seemed to fit my situation. “Caspering,” which is not as severe as full-on ghosting, is a term that describes ending a relationship by slowly phasing out of contact rather than abruptly ghosting. It involves giving mixed signals, responding with vague or friendly replies, and hinting at continued interest without genuine intentions. Essentially, a less direct, but still dismissive, way of ending a relationship.

So, now I had a term for it, and knew that it happened to other people too, but what did that help? I had the diagnosis, but not the explanation of how I got the disease. What if it spread to my other friends? Was I doing something I didn’t realize to turn people away from me? Eventually, my kids noticed that X and I weren’t hanging out as much anymore and I tried to explain that friendships grow and evolve and sometimes you grow apart. They worried it would impact their friendships with X’s kids. I promised it wouldn’t, and for the most part it hasn’t. The kids hang out on their own mostly; X and I stay in our separate corners.

I moped around for a good few months, explaining the situation as I saw it over and over to my husband, hoping he would find something I’d missed so we could solve the mystery. But as time went on and X started to miss important things happening in my life — my dad’s hospitalization and worsening illness, my own emerging health problems, our family’s dreaded bout with strep throat — it seemed like more and more of my life was happening without her in it. So, I decided to try and live it.

It was hard at first. The loss of the friendship felt like a death, and I grieved it. But I also focused on work, on my writing, on my kids, my family, my relationship. Life went on. It was different, and certainly not as humorous without her in it, but I had no choice. I had to make my own jokes. I reconnected with old friends. I dug in and didn’t text or beg or keep asking what was wrong. This doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt — that it doesn’t still hurt — but I learned to do something I had never been able to do in other relationships: I let go. I realized that friends that leave are meant to. The ones that stay are the ones who you invest in. When friendship becomes a one-way street, you may need to take a detour. And sometimes that detour turns out to be the scenic route you’ve been missing out on.

Jill Bodach is a former journalist who spent ten years covering the police beat for a daily newspaper in Connecticut. While she liked the excitement and busyness of the newsroom, she decided to try something new and went to graduate school where she received a MS in English and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. For the past 16 years, Jill has taught college writing, literature and creative writing courses.