We celebrate great friends all the time—doting on our BFFs, our Fave Fives and on folk heroes like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; even our children’s toys are coupled like Ragged Ann and Andy, and tales of Jack and Jill. But defriending is too often a quiet and shameful event, treated like a car wreck; better ignored, but we find gruesomely intriguing.

Even though there is perhaps no living or dead person who hasn’t been touched and hurt (or freed and exhilarated) by a defriending, it is a taboo subject, rarely spoken above a whisper in polite company. Consider that it is an act shared by each and every culture since the first cave-person gave his former best hunting-and-gathering buddy the silent treatment, yet such a shameful act that Eskimos have exactly zero words to describe defriending and the word doesn’t appear in any Chinese text or has never been translated from any Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Defriending is not as easy as dropping an out-of-fashion pair of pants at the Goodwill, nor should it be as cowardly as deleting a friend from Facebook. It is a skill, an art and, yes, even a science. We are here to help you know “when to” and “how to”, and here to provide the most complete collection of tales of defriending in world history!