the.com/estrangement
the slow leak of a relationship, where silence does the work no fight ever could.
means the gradual or sudden cooling of a once-close relationship into distance, where people who were intimate become strangers to one another.
from From the verb 'estrange,' which came into English in the 1400s by way of Old French 'estranger,' from Latin 'extraneare' — to treat as a stranger, to alienate. The root is 'extraneus,' meaning 'foreign, from outside' (the same source that gives us 'strange' and 'stranger'). So buried in the word is the quiet ache of its literal sense: to make someone outside, to push a familiar face back across the threshold into the company of strangers.
- by choice
- Over a quarter of adults are estranged from a relative
- slow burn
- Most ruptures grow from accumulation, not one explosion
- word roots
- From Latin for making someone a stranger
- often quiet
- Many never formally announce the cutoff to anyone