The Vegan Street Blog

When Vegan Besties Break Up

When I first went vegan, new friends were a big part of helping me to ease into that transition. I was lucky enough to be folded into my local animal rights organization along with a bunch of other newbies as if we were all going through a new vegan orientation together. There was one woman in my unofficial grouping and we immediately clicked as friends. She was hilarious, confident, brutally honest and deeply committed to the cause. It wasn’t long after we met that we were genuine let’s-hang-out-together friends. We would seamlessly segue from protesting outside the circus to sampling cruelty-free body care products at the old Garden Botanika like it was the most natural thing in the world. It was an intoxicating time and I will always associate this friend with those heady days when life felt very electric and I’d found my life’s purpose.

For a few years, we remained very close. Remember those early years with your first best friend, how close and intense those friendships could be? Our friendship was like that. We were ride-or-die besties. Over time, though, life happened. There were moves, marriages, breakups, deaths, and, for one of us, motherhood. We would still touch base a few times a year and remain friendly - we had the kind of comfortable, easy shorthand unique to friends who share a lot of memories - but our friendship kind of withered on the vine. We grow the things that we put time into nurturing and I think we both kind of moved on with our lives, which was easy to do living across the country from each other. No harm, no foul. We maintained a distant friendship, though, touching base even less often as the years passed. Finally, we didn’t really have anything in common but our shared past and veganism.

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I have had similar experiences with some other vegans on my path: We grew apart. There were no angry confrontations or resentments necessarily, it was simply that we no longer had the same connection, or maybe we assumed that there was more of a connection than there actually was. Friendships between vegans are not all that different from other kinds of friendships and there are a million reasons for growing apart but sometimes, as vegans, we feel like we’re supposed to be friends. Sometimes a friendship fades out over purely circumstantial reasons: one gets married or moves and lives change. Maybe those circumstantial changes exacerbate other areas of difference. Maybe one’s politics have changed. Maybe personality clashes have emerged.

I think sometimes we feel pressured within ourselves to stay friends with other vegans because we share that important commonality that makes us different from so many other people. Especially if we don’t have a big vegan community, we can hang on longer to the friendship than we would otherwise. At a certain point, though, we all have to decide if friendships are worth hanging on to when we have outgrown them or moved in different directions, whether we are vegan or not.

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We all have our lines in the sand with what we’ll accept from a friend and what we will not, whether it’s QAnon adjacent conspiracy theorizing or narcissism, bigotry or gossiping. There are some times when the conflict is not bridgeable. There is a sense of sadness and loss with that, of course, but if the friendship is not worth the maintenance of it, it may be time to move on. 

My first vegan friend and I will always have our memories: The protests, the great conversations, finding the world for ourselves as vegans and warm friendship. But when it is time to move on, it is time to move on, whether or not the friend you are cutting loose is vegan.

How important is it for you to maintain vegan friendships even when that is the main commonality?