Four years after my dear friend cut off contact, I was reading my eight-year-old a bedtime story—Batman, I think—and doing my best to blink back tears.

After a while, my daughter said, “Why are you sad, Mama?”

I said, "Because my friend is mad at me and will never speak to me again."

She said, “I feel sad for her. And you.”

When my friend cut off contact with me, few in my social circle acknowledged the pain I was going through. They shrugged it off with a joke or a quick “that’s sucks” and changed the subject. Sometimes, they said my pain was unreasonable; I just needed to learn from my mistakes and do better. Sometimes they lectured me: “People have a right to choose who they have in their lives," as if I’d said they didn’t. Sometimes, they said nothing. I find it telling that one of the few who accepted my pain—who accepted the sadness of the situation—was a child. She had not yet learned to ignore the obvious: feeling thrown away by someone you love wounds you.

Relationship cutoffs are defined by disconnection: disconnection between the cuttee and cutter, often disconnection between the cuttee and cutter’s whole social circle. But perhaps the most damaging disconnect is between the reality and social narrative, the disconnect that occurs when you are cut to your core and others say nothing much happened.

That’s the disconnect that kept me crying four years later.

...

The crucible of this cutoff has been so unlike anything else I have experienced that it became a revelation, a death and a rebirth. I am not an exception. Being cut off by a loved one is an intensely traumatic experience for many people. Cutoffs can protect people from untenable situations, and we cannot and should not eliminate them, but as a culture we can do much better in supporting all people in ways that minimize relationship breakdown and trauma. Honestly examining how cutoffs work is one piece of that cultural healing.

Cutoffs matter. They have psychological weight; they do psychological damage. They are also often the best choice. I have personally been on both sides of this chasm.

I have cut someone off too, another dear friend, in 2007. I, too, had my reasons, and if I were in exactly the same place, I would probably do it again. That cutoff—first by my choice and then, for a brief time, by his—lasted until 2014. Indeed, it was my later experience of being cut off myself that led me to reach out to him in 2014, and with grace, he allowed me to reconnect. That story is part of this book as well.

Both these stories hurt. Now multiply that by millions of people worldwide who go through events like this. For personal relationships to end in absolute severance is very common. It isn’t always traumatic, but it is traumatic far more often and deeply than our society recognizes. The aims of this book are twofold: first, to validate the psychological weight of cutoffs. Second, to propose a different kind of cultural awareness to mitigate the harm associated with cutoffs. Although this book includes some self-help suggestions, it is not a self-help book; it’s more a help-each-other book, an invitation to reinvest in relationship with others.

Cutoff Culture

This book uses the controversial phrase “cutoff culture” to describe a set of cultural practices that validates relationship cutoffs and makes them likely to occur. The term was coined by Jeff Reifman in his 2013 essay, “Shining Light on Relationship Cutoff.” 1 He subsequently apologized for using it, following critiques that it made an inappropriate comparison to rape culture, implying that cutoffs are like rape. 2 Let’s be clear: cutoffs are not in the same category as rape. To cite just one crucial difference, there is almost always a right to cut someone off. There is never a right to rape.

That acknowledged, I don’t think Reifman had anything to apologize for. This book uses his term, and I find it an appropriate one. In his apology, Reifman conceded it was an improper use of the word “culture.” 3 I don’t concede that. “Culture” can mean many things, but in the sense of “rape culture” or “cancel culture,” it means a set of practices that work to make something common or accepted. 4 It also connotes a significant, negative trend. We have a set of practices that make cutoff common and accepted, and I do contend that the normalization of cutoff has, on the whole, been negative. Thus, I argue, we do have a cutoff culture (and a rape culture and a cancel culture). As to the idea that the phrase “cutoff culture” creates a false equivalence with “rape culture,” the fact that two troubling issues both have cultural practices associated with them does not make them equivalent.

In fact, I’d argue that cutoff culture is connected to rape culture and to cancel culture. They are all outgrowths of the same dominant culture. Cutoff culture, rape culture, and cancel culture, though the terms focus on very different phenomena, are all enabled by a larger culture that promotes dehumanization and disconnection. In many ways, cancel culture and cutoff culture emerged as defenses against rape culture. We should be talking about these cultural phenomena together, and not as a competition over which is worst. Rape culture is worst. We should talk about them together because they are entangled, and to heal ourselves, we must address the root causes that perpetuate all of them.

If the term “cutoff culture” is triggering for some in ways another phrase might have avoided, I regret that. Nonetheless, at the time I am writing this, I feel the benefits of this useful and concise term outweigh the detriments...

A Relational Ethics Alternative

I propose a relational ethics approach to cutoffs. Relational ethics is a loose term that touches numerous different practices and movements, from care ethics to transformative justice to many traditional Indigenous perspectives. The core of all relational ethics, however, is a recognition that we live in relationship with others: other people, lifeforms, systems, etc. Because we are in relationship, we affect each other, and because we affect each other, we have some ethical responsibility to act in a way that supports each other’s well-being and minimizes harm....

A relational ethics response to cutoff recognizes that cutoffs in significant relationships are psychologically weighty and highly contextual. Such ethics resist a one-size-fits-all approach, preferring to examine each cutoff as a unique social situation. While respecting the necessity of some cutoffs, a relational approach also recognizes that cutoffs are often psychologically devastating and promotes practices to foster healing for all involved: the cutter, the cuttee, and bystanders. Because cutoffs can be traumatic, relational ethics resist their use when less extreme boundary setting will serve the same purpose. The goal of such ethics is to minimize harm.

Relational ethics recognize contextuality and nuance. They are inherently systems-oriented and foster connection over disconnection. They are premised on the notion that our actions are rarely truly neutral in their effects. In most cases, they will generate some good and/or bad. Thus, in our ethical decision making, we should strive to maximize the good. I advocate a relational ethics that recognizes rights and duties but regards them as the ground floor of ethical decision making, not the whole house....

Chapter 1

Why People Cut Others Off

Carolyn jolted awake to find her brother standing in her bedroom. She was in her sixties and lived in her own home, which he had entered without permission. She told him to leave, and he did—and proceeded to tell his wife, untruthfully, that Carolyn had sent him packing with screams and curses. After decades of boundary violations, lies, and misrepresentations of her character, this was the final straw. Carolyn ghosted her brother, resolved to cut him off for life. Now, she is done with listening to him blame her for parental abuse they suffered as children, done with providing fresh fuel for accusations of her hatefulness.

She likens her brother’s conduct to having lead bullets slowly fired at you over the years until you die of lead poisoning. “I love my brother,” she says, “and he’s important to me, but over fifty years [of harm] is enough.” 5 Carolyn asserts that if she dies before him, she will ban him from her funeral. When I asked her why, she said, “Because he would stand there and tell lies,” just as she saw him do at their mother’s funeral. She says she didn’t cut him off sooner, in part, because he said he loved her, and she wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. But as the years went by, it became clear that his words were not going to match his actions. Ultimately, she decided, “I’m not willing to harm myself in order to be in relationship with him.” Carolyn’s situation speaks to the intense wounding that often drives permanent cutoffs: the need to escape abuse, the inability to find any other way to establish the necessary boundaries....

The need to protect oneself from abuse or dysfunction is an all-too-common reason for cutoff, and one our culture understands pretty well. We have an established discourse, for example, around setting boundaries to exclude what we call “toxic” people.

But protection from toxic behavior is not the only reason for cutoff. Triggers cited in popular media include:

• Power and control
• Exhaustion
• Loyalty to others
• Perceived slights
• Money
• Abuse
• Not being happy around someone
• Someone being negative
• Someone taking more than they give
• Lack of trust
• Lack of support
• Single outrageous actions
• Frustrations over time
• Being made to feel inadequate
• Coercion from others to cut someone off
• Nothing

So why do people cut others off? It depends. Here is a small illustration of the diversity of cutoff situations.

Cutoff to Unambiguously End an Incompatible Relationship

Author Deirdre Saoirse Moen writes about cutting off a man who was her former partner and friend. She explains that she and this friend, whom she calls X, had incompatibilities that led to an unhealthy relationship: X was looking for a woman to be dominant in a relationship. Moen had no desire to be that woman, but her tendency to “chew him out” when annoyed enabled him to lean on her to fill that space in his life. With numerous tensions in their beliefs and expectations, she increasingly wished the friendship to end, even as he wished to rekindle a romance. Finally, she decided that cutting him off would not only free her from a relationship that had become distressing but also send a clear signal to him that they would not get back together as a couple. Thus, she cut him off both to spare herself pain and to communicate that he should move on. As my wise mother observes, there can be multiple motives for the same act.

Moen’s account is an excellent illustration of the complexities that can surround cutoffs, including years of miscommunications, incompatibilities, growing apart, and mutually flawed behavior. As Moen puts it, “[A] flaw in my character exploited one of his needs, and he also took advantage of that.” Moen states that she regrets not cutting him off sooner and, thus, hopefully sparing both of them wasted energy and suffering.

Cutoff to Appease Jealous Family

In her insightful discussion of ghosting for Time magazine, Deborah Tannen discusses being cut off by her close friend Susan in high school. When she tracked Susan down fifty-four years later, Susan explained that she cut Tannen off due to pressure from an older brother. Tannen writes that the brother “had insisted she stop seeing me, because he felt I had too much influence over her. But looking back, [Susan] said, she thinks he was just jealous. And it broke her heart at the same time that it broke mine.” 10 In this case, Tannen notes, the cutoff was not a sign that Susan didn’t care or wanted to get rid of her. If anything, it occurred because Susan cared so much that the friendship left her brother feeling jealous of it. A cutoff, Tannen observes, “might, in fact, be a testament to how important the friendship was.”