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Over a glass of pét-nat and bar snacks, my friend is venting about someone we both know with whom she’s fallen out. Words like ‘narcissist’ and ‘gaslighting’ are thrown around as casually as drink orders. Having heard the other side over a coffee a few weeks prior, I piece together two versions of the same story. As is the case in most conflicts, neither — and both — of them are right. Most of us have been a version of each of these women at one point or another, and as my friend speaks, I catch glimpses of patterns that play out in almost every relationship.
In the wake of a rift, it’s cathartic to let off steam with someone who knows you well. However, equipped with nothing but second-hand context, I can’t help but imagine how much more fruitful it might be if both these friends were in the same room, hashing out their differences with an impartial (and professionally trained) voice of reason. After all, their friendship had lasted longer than most marriages in Australia, which the Australian Bureau of Statistics places at an average of 13.2 years.
On the bus home, tipsy and curious, I google ‘couples counselling for friends’. And voilà — articles, Reddit threads and resources about a seemingly fledgling but growing practice: friendship therapy.
“The term ‘just friends’ drives me a little crazy,” says Rhaina Cohen, author of The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. As a journalist who has spent much of her career exploring the nature of friendship, Cohen has seen countless platonic connections take the shape of something closer to a spousal bond than a casual social tie. “A very close friendship isn’t fundamentally different from a romantic relationship,” she says. “There might not be sex, but there’s commitment, vulnerability and the same kinds of communication issues.”
According to Elisabeth Shaw, psychologist and CEO of Relationships Australia NSW, friendship isn’t a ‘nice to have’ but a core pillar of our wellbeing. “Friendships can have as great an impact as any other relationship,” she says. She attributes this shift to evolving lifestyles and a growing recognition that no one person can meet all our needs. “If people do marry, they’re marrying later, so there’s a longer phase of life where broader social networks play a really significant role,” she adds. “That gives friendships more time and space to deepen.”
Of course, the significance of friendship itself is nothing new. The pantheon of great thinkers, from Aristotle to Sex and the City’s Charlotte York, seem to agree — the former more than 2000 years ago writing, “No-one would choose to live without friends,” and the latter 25 years ago suggesting that women might be “each other’s soulmates”. What’s really changed is how we define, navigate and nurture these bonds.
Engagement with psychology in all its forms is on the rise. The global marriage counselling market has reportedly grown by more than $2 billion in the past year alone. Meanwhile, Medicare data shows a 13 per cent increase in mental health services in the past decade. As therapy becomes increasingly commonplace, it’s starting to filter into most areas of our lives. It’s shifted from a last-ditch option to an early intervention, maintenance rather than repair.
Shaw sees the benefit in friends pursuing therapy together, noting that the value is often symbolic as much as practical. “Having someone acknowledge that the friendship matters, and that it’s worth setting time aside to talk about what’s become stuck, can be really powerful,” she says. The act of engaging with the issue, she adds, is sometimes as important as ‘fixing’ it.
On reflection, it seems obvious: most of our issues involve other people in some way, so why relegate therapy to a purely solo pursuit? Dr Scott Terry, a psychologist and marriage and family therapist who has worked extensively with friends, says, “When we think about relationships, we think about the fact that there are three people there: there’s you, there’s your friend and there’s who you are together.” He adds, “We don’t live in a vacuum … we live in connection to others,” and encourages everyone to interrogate that dynamic. “If I don’t understand my connection to others, how can I understand my connection to myself?”
Although one-on-one therapy is undoubtedly valuable for self-understanding, it may not fully address the patterns we create with others. Terry argues that society is overly individualistic, and that we tend to focus too much on the self, not the system.
Whether or not we actually attend a therapy session with a friend, the language and logic of therapy has entered our friendships. We’re more familiar than ever with the tools of the trade, from holding space and doing the work to co-regulation and reparenting our inner child, and we’re bringing this knowledge to our relationships. Social anthropologist Laura Eramian examines how therapy-informed thinking has shaped our expectations and understanding of platonic bonds. “Therapy culture says you need to have these close, intimate, talk-based relationships for it to be a strong friendship,” she says.
Traditionally, friendship was seen as voluntary, easygoing — an escape from our more demanding, ‘obligatory’ relationships, such as family or colleagues. It wasn’t a commitment you had to ‘work on’ in a structured way. In previous generations, you’d be unlikely to find friends analysing their perceived emotional labour. Engaging in a clinical setting with a friend could certainly be interpreted as formalising a once low-pressure connection.
Expectations of emotional intimacy and openness now strongly coexist with self-protection and boundaries — often in tension. “People still want their friendships to be easy and pleasurable, relaxing and fun, but they also have this new kind of layer of expectations on top of that,” Eramian says. To explain this friction, she uses the example of confiding in a friend. “Acts of disclosure can be read as either building intimacy or as burdening your friend — and can be both at the same time.”
Cohen has observed this, too. “There are these competing ideas: one that says if something isn’t serving you, leave, and another that says relationships take work and deserve effort,” she says. In the conversations she’s had with people who have tried friendship therapy, approaching conflict with a formal set-up was helpful. “Having that structure gave them an excuse to have conversations that might otherwise feel awkward or unnecessary.”
With relationships an extension of the self, and the self a project we’re constantly trying to perfect, friendship therapy may also be a symptom of society’s obsession with optimisation. “Therapy culture tends to turn anything it touches into an object of reflexive monitoring,” Eramian says. “It leads people to think in strict binaries: the friendship is either healthy or toxic.” Actively striving to have calibrated, healthy affiliations is a sign of the times — call it friendshipmaxxing. But the difficult truth remains: expectations are often misaligned, and not every friendship is meant to last indefinitely — treating all of them as solvable problems risks overlooking that.
There’s neither a specific accreditation nor a unique framework for treating platonic relationships. Instead, couples counselling-style models are generally used. The workaround points to several possibilities: that friendship is similar enough to romantic relationships to borrow from existing models, or too fluid, informal and low-stakes to justify its own. Or it might suggest that our expectations of friendship are evolving faster than the systems that could support them.
Cohen views the use of couples counselling frameworks by friends as somewhat inevitable. “When there isn’t a structure designed for your particular relationship, you scramble to use the next best thing and adapt it,” she says. “It makes sense to me that people would try to use something that’s already established.”
Therapy, and therapists, are not monoliths. Shaw explains that some professionals whose training is solidly in couples work can sometimes approach friendship situations in ways that don’t fully account for how different friendship is. “The dynamics aren’t the same, particularly because friendship sits within a wider social network and carries different kinds of expectations,” she says. “You wouldn’t want to imply that two friends have the same kind of bond or obligation as a couple, but the principles of bringing people together to talk through what’s happening can still be very helpful.”
The elephants in the room have been patiently waiting their turn: money, insurance, logistics. Couples attending therapy will likely draw from shared funds; business partners might expense the cost. But with friends, who pays? The person who suggested it? Do you take turns?
“I find the people who are more serious about [friendship] therapy are the ones with something more at stake … maybe they’re living together, or they’re wanting to move from romantic to friendship, or they’re in business together,” Terry says. He is straightforward about the financial reality of it: “How many thousands of dollars are you willing to spend working on a friendship?”
And this is the crux of it. Friendship is a relationship that’s sustained entirely by its participants’ desire to be in it. In other relationships — a marriage, family or business partnership — there are tangible stakes, like children, finances, housing or careers. With friendship, the stakes are simpler: losing the connection.
So how do you know if it’s the right decision to opt into friendship therapy? You don’t. But if a friendship matters enough to consider it as an option, it might matter enough to work through — together.
A-List Fall-Outs
Stars – they’re just like us. They’re not immune to friendship struggles.
Lena Dunham & Jenni Konner
In her new memoir, Famesick, Lena Dunham outlines the many struggles that came with fame, not least of all the end of her romantic relationship with music producer Jack Antonoff, but also the slow demise of her friendship with her Girls co-showrunner and writer Jenni Konner. These two did try therapy, and that session was the last time they spoke.
Lauren Conrad & Heidi Montag
Once roommates, best friends and co-stars of two OG reality series, Laguna Beach and The Hills, Lauren Conrad and Heidi Montag had a falling-out to end all falling-outs in 2007. There was disapproval of Heidi’s boyfriend (now husband and wannabe LA mayor) Spencer Pratt, and accusations that Heidi and Spencer spread rumours about a sex tape between Lauren and an ex. Anyone who can still hear Lauren yelling “You know what you did!” needs no further explanation.
Gwyneth Paltrow & Winona Ryder
These two 1990s icons lived together before their friendship apparently ended over the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love. Rumour has it that the screenplay was on Winona’s coffee table (why it wasn’t a shared coffee table, given they lived together, is unclear). Gwyneth picked it up, read it and immediately called her agent to get her the role, which earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress. If you’re to believe the disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein’s version of events, Gwyneth originally turned down the role and recommended Winona. Later, Gwyneth accused Winona of starting the script-on-the-coffee-table rumour. Who to believe, the convicted sex offender, the shoplifter or the Israeli real estate ambassador? (Winona Forever).
Paris Hilton & Nicole Richie
The stars of The Simple Life famously broke up in 2005, but the reason was unclear (“Nicole knows what she did”). Was it because Paris hosted Saturday Night Live by herself? Did Nicole really show Paris’ leaked sex tape at a party? Whatever happened, they reconciled a year later over dinner at a steakhouse, according to TMZ.
Kylie Jenner & Jordyn Woods
These two middle school best friends turned roommates’ friendship blew up in 2019 when reports emerged that Tristan Thompson allegedly cheated on a pregnant Khloé Kardashian with Jordyn. In a 2024 ELLE cover interview, Kylie said she was “heartbroken” at the time. The pair seemed to try to repair things after Jordyn apparently apologised in 2023, and this year they’re hugging it out courtside in orange and blue as two Knicks superfans.
Tyra Banks & Naomi Campbell
Newcomer Tyra Banks and supermodel Naomi Campbell were pitted against each other in the 1990s fashion industry, which seemed to only have room for one Black model at a time. Tyra said she felt intimidated by Naomi backstage when she apparently said, “You’ll never be me. Don’t think that you can be me.” For her part, Naomi said she does not recall making those comments. The pair smoothed things over in 2005 during an episode of The Tyra Banks Show, where they made peace and agreed to move forward; they acknowledged the real enemy was the industry’s racism, not each other.
Alexandra Cooper & Sofia Franklyn
The co-founders of the now wildy successful podcast Call Her Daddy were once the very best of friends. In 2020, two years after launching the podcast, they went their separate ways due to contract disputes. Alex is now the sole host of Call Her Daddy and co-owner of the Unwell media empire with her reportedly problematic husband, Matt Kaplan; Sofia launched her own podcast, Sofia with an F. Sofia has promised to detail her side of the split in her perfectly titled upcoming memoir, Daddy Issues, out in November.
Taylor Swift & …
Better to have been part of a girl squad and kicked out than to have never been part of a girl squad at all, right? Katy Perry fell out with Taylor Swift after three backup dancers left Taylor’s Red Tour early to perform on Katy’s Prismatic World Tour (they’ve since reconciled). Karlie Kloss was a key squad member from 2013 to 2016, only have been demoted thanks to Kloss’ manager Scooter Braun owning Taylor’s masters and her marriage into the Kushner family (read: Trump’s in-laws). Despite multiple rumours of friendship breakdowns, apparently Taylor and Lorde are experts at navigating disputes while remaining friends, and Taylor and Blake Lively’s text exchanges were recently made public due to the latter’s legal dispute with her It Ends With Us co-star Justin Baldoni, reportedly forcing Taylor to distance herself from the friendship.
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