Is it common for long standing childhood friendships to end in secondary school?
DS had an absolute best friend all through primary school, from reception to yr 6.
They were well known as being best friends and people used to say to me "They'll be friends for life those 2" because they were so close. My phone is filled with pictures of the 2 of them smiling and laughing together all through the ages from age 5 till 11.
Our families became good friends and we all spent days out together, meals at each others houses, birthdays together, met up in school hols, BBQs, camping trips, pub lunches, etc.
At the very end of yr 6 DS and BF hit problems and began to fall out. DS didn't like the way BF had suddenly started to behave towards him and towards other kids at school. BF suddenly - from around Easter of yr 6 onwards - developed lots of shouting, ordering around, setting extreme rules, name calling, mocking, put down comments, aggressive behaviour, controlling behaviour, paranoid thoughts, obsessive behaviour, threats, began telling a lot of lies about DS and then after all that he dumped DS to go and hang out with what he saw as the 'cool boys'. DS started pushing back at him at start of yr 7 and it led to a fall out, culminating in BF hitting DS.
BF's mum tried to repair their falling out and kept asking me if we (DS, me, her and her DS) would meet up for a sit down discussion about their friendship problems. But DS didn't want to do this and very clearly said to me that he had been treated really badly by BF for months by that point (turns out it had been going on for longer than I'd realised) and that he didn't want to sit down in a meeting and talk through friendship issues when his friend was treating him so badly that DS had started to develop anxiety in response to all the shouting and aggression and being lied about by said friend.
Me and DH completely agreed with him on this and became angry that the mum kept pushing for a meeting to talk about their friendship. I saw it as my duty to stand by DS's wishes and respect him not wanting to meet to discuss these problems. His BF's behaviour was already causing him anxiety and the thought of sitting down with him and his mother caused him even greater anxiety. I completely understood why he didn't want to have this meeting, and I didn't want to have a meeting either because by now I didn't want to repair their friendship, I wanted to keep DS away from his behaviour, not meet up to put him back in to a toxic situation.
When I declined to meet up, the friend's DM, by now a good friend of mine, kept pushing to meet up for a talk. The more I said No, the more she pushed. Ultimately that led to her getting cross with me and we stopped talking and our friendship came to a halt.
Then I found out she was talking about my DS to mutual friends and telling them things about him that aren't true (lies that her DS had told her). This made me livid. I never said a word about her DS's behaviour to any mutual friends as I considered it morally wrong to speak about another person's child's bad behaviour to mutual friends.
Anyway, we've now reached the end of year 8 and the 2 of them haven't spoken for the past 2 years. They're at the same secondary school together and are in the same classes for some subjects. And as adult friends we haven't spoken either.
I asked DS the other day how he's feeling about ex-BF now, and he simply said "I dont know him anymore. He's a completely different person to the one I was friends with through primary school. He really hurt me badly and that lasted for a long time, but I've moved on now and I'm getting on with my life".
When this friend first dumped him, DS was lost and very upset and went through quite a horrible time for the first few months of yr 7 because of it. His BF was going round school telling everyone he wanted DS to die, and everyone was reporting this to DS and it had a pretty bad impact on him.
But over the past 18 months, DS has made new friends at school and has strengthened previously existing friendships. He now has a variety of different friends, instead of 1 significant main best friend. These friends call for him, invite him out, make plans with him, he gets birthday party invites, goes for days out with them, has sleepovers with them, and they're all different friends so he hasn't got one particular set of friends.
Yet still, I can't help feeling sad about DS losing his BF like that, and in that way.
I'm sad that a friendship that DS loved so much through all of his younger childhood years ended so badly and no longer exists. They've got so many years of shared happy memories up until the age of 10/11. DS genuinely loved him up until his behaviour towards DS radically changed in second half of yr 6.
So.......what I'd like to know is, is it common or uncommon for long standing (as in years long) primary school best friend friendships to die a death at the start of secondary school?
I don't know anyone else in this situation.
I see so many children in DS's year group all hanging out happily together at the park, who are in yr 8 now and have been best friends since they started primary school or even nursery.
Feels like DS is the only one this has happened to which is what's making me sad for him.