KEY POINTS:
We live in a world of transient relationships. This is the era of the casual coupling and breezy unhitching.
Never has it been easier to get hooked up, loved up and then disentangle when it doesn't go to plan.
There are a few more than 50 ways to leave your lover these days, none of them overly labour intensive. In fact, the ease with which we slip in and out of intimate relations make the exit strategies dreamed up by Paul Simon look positively Herculean.
"Slip out the back Jack?" Why bother, when you can just text her from the toilet? "Hop on the bus, Gus?" Too much effort. Who needs to do a legger when you can just change your Facebook status to "single" and she'll get the message loud and clear?
Back in the 90s Daniel Day Lewis incurred the wrath of feminists everywhere when he broke off with Isabelle Adjani, the French actress and mother of his child, via fax.
It's a gesture that seems almost quaint in the age of the SMS dumping.
And it isn't just men. If anything, women's superior ability to multitask and our smaller fingers make us even quicker at tapping out those vowel-less messages that are the harbingers of singledom.
And this among people who are ostensibly grown-up.
We have accepted this casualisation of relationships with nary a murmur, and suffering the indignity of being unceremoniously dispatched via mobile or online is the reward we reap.
All that remains is to look forward to the day when even those cursory notifications will be unnecessary; the first you'll know of the end of the affair is when he or she goes out for a packet of Dunhills, never to be seen again.
It's a logical progression of events, considering the accepted wisdom of the past few decades which decrees relationships are there to be moved on from, preferably unencumbered, and preferably at speed.
Women especially are warned against carrying "emotional baggage" from past relationships. It's a no-no if you ever want to couple up again, apparently.
Leave with no memories, no connection, no regrets. And don't leave a forwarding address.
I didn't understand the collective outcry when Air NZ announced new charges for an extra bag on domestic flights last month. We've been travelling light emotionally for the past 10 years, is it too much to ask we pack our clothes the same way?
And yet despite the newfound ease with which lovers can be left, there is still one type of relationship which remains as difficult as ever to sunder. How to break up with a friend?
What happens when for one reason or another a friendship becomes unsustainable and you have to get out? It's a fraught and delicate situation which has nothing in common with the death of a love affair. Adult sexual relationships, for all their complexity, follow a fairly standard trajectory. You meet, you spark, you give it a go. It works. Until eventually it does not. A bald, but nonetheless accurate rendering of most failed relationships.
Friendship however, is a far more amorphous creature. Aside from the initial fact of meeting (you spark), no one friendship is the same as another.
The story of a friendship is not a linear one. It can't have a start and a finish because everything we value and treasure about it is predicated on the idea that it won't ever end. Living in amongst the litter of casual relationships, the bonds of platonic love are all we have to depend on.
Friendships, like puppies and tattoos, really are supposed to be for life. And so when they aren't, when the wheels fall off, and the spark goes out or they messily implode, it is very hard to know what to do.
There are a plethora of excuses available to someone wanting to dump a boy or girlfriend, or even wanting to rid themselves of a husband or wife.
Timing, past history, pre-existing mental issues, even astrology, all can (and have) been pressed into service as reasons why "it just isn't working anymore". That's if the relationship is even deemed to warrant a verbal break-up at all.
But how to tell a friend, a person who provides unchanging love and companionship, that you've dispensed with them without causing pain?
The heady dynamics of sexual chemistry might complicate romantic relationships, but they also provide a handy distraction, another front on which to stage a break-up, not mention a good excuse for irrational behaviour.
That component isn't present in platonic friendships, which means the break-up is rational and clear-eyed and more likely to pain the other person so much more.
And the fall-out from friendship break-up can be ugly, as history shows. In Sir Vidia's Shadow, novelist Paul Theroux traces his relationship with controversial Nobel Laureate VS Naipaul from its beginning in Africa to a messy and public disintegration three decades later.
The glamour and the attraction the older man held for the younger is apparent from their first meeting at a university in Uganda, when Theroux charmed Naipaul by quoting a line from one of his novels back to him.
It was a dynamic that was to endure for many years. Theroux was spellbound by the older writer, he craved his company, sought his approval and was jealous of his wife and lovers. Friendships of this depth and intensity are often unsustainable, and Naipaul in any case was a famous misanthrope. A man who declared "the melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid and common people" was never going to be very easy to befriend.
And when the relationship finally did collapse it did so spectacularly. Naipaul dispensed with the friendship of Theroux, late 90s, because of a new wife some said, or maybe just because of his own contrariness. In any case he rapidly cooled his warmth towards his former protege, publicly disavowing their connection in literary circles.
Theroux vented his hurt and frustration in his book, outing his former friend as a racist, misogynist monster who called Arabs "Mr Woggy" and believed Indian women encouraged rape by the way they wore their hair.
Theroux received a barrage of criticism for his bilious memoir. Most reviewers saw him as stabbing his friend in the back.
But most of Theroux's accusations are backed up by a new biography of Naipaul released this year. He is dead now anyway, Sir Vidia, and so he can't tell his side of the story. But his feud with Theroux has taken its place in literary history, and the younger writer's book remains a testament to what can happen when "the compassionate intimacy and powerful kindness" of friendship breaks down.
Friendships are the most important thing in our disposable world. They are not to be taken lightly, and their dissolution should not be either.
