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On Complimentary Closes and How We End Things (Like Letters)
Recently a friend of ten years decided to silently and completely sever our friendship. I found out when I went to send him a funny Instagram video that I thought he would enjoy, only to dreadfully discover that he had had me removed from his follower list entirely. It was pretty upsetting to find that a friend you’ve known since you were 12, albeit never having been super close, thought you weren’t even worth the effort of having an awkward conversation with to platonically break things off.
Darn the universe’s cruel sense of humour, because I had the sudden coincidental urge to reorganise my drawers the following night and came across a box containing all the birthday cards I had collected over the last few years. “You’ll never get rid of me,” he wrote in last year’s. “Lots of love, [former friend’s name]”. Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to get rid of him, but he definitely got rid of me pretty quickly.
Complimentary closes are the conventional phrases in letters and emails that immediately precedes the writer’s own signature — common ones include “Sincerely yours”, “Best wishes, “Warm regards”, et cetera. Complimentary closes are undoubtedly one of the stranger social platitudes that we have collectively decided to keep around for some reason. They used to *actually* be complimentary: examples include Thomas…
