“We Could Never Be Friends (’Cause We’ve Been Lovers Too Long)” is the kind of goodbye that doesn’t slam a door—it simply admits that some doors can’t be reopened without breaking the frame.
Right away, the grounding details: “We Could Never Be Friends (’Cause We’ve Been Lovers Too Long)” is a David Cassidy album track from his debut solo LP Cherish, released in the U.S. in February 1972 on Bell Records (catalog Bell 6070), produced by Wes Farrell and recorded in 1971 at Western Recorders (Studio 2), Hollywood. The song was written by Tony Romeo and runs 2:50 on the album’s track list. Because it wasn’t released as a stand-alone single, it doesn’t have a “debut chart position” of its own. The album did, however: Cherish reached No. 15 on the Billboard 200, while the title single “Cherish” peaked at No. 9 on the Hot 100 and No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart.
That context matters, because Cherish was designed as a careful step away from the brightly packaged Partridge Family world and toward something more adult in tone and material—still pop, still melodic, but with emotional corners that could actually bruise. And “We Could Never Be Friends” is exactly that kind of bruise: not dramatic, not theatrical—just painfully logical.
The title alone carries the whole tragedy. It doesn’t say, “We shouldn’t be friends.” It says, we could never be friends—as if the narrator has already tried, already failed, already learned that “friendship” is not a neutral place you can return to after intimacy has rearranged your heart. The parenthetical—(’Cause We’ve Been Lovers Too Long)—is the knife turned gently, almost politely. Not because the speaker wants to hurt anyone, but because truth, when stated plainly, can be sharper than anger.
What makes the song linger is how it captures a very specific kind of adult sorrow: the realization that affection doesn’t always turn into companionship once romance ends. Sometimes it turns into a quiet ache that flares up at the worst moments—when you see that person happy with someone new, when you hear their name spoken casually, when the past shows up uninvited like a familiar scent in the air. The lyric, as preserved in fan discography archives, starts with that visceral admission—“I kinda die inside / Every time you’re with someone new”—a line that isn’t poetic for the sake of poetry, but honest in the way real jealousy often is: involuntary, humiliating, and strangely tender.
David Cassidy sings it from a place that feels startlingly human for a young star in 1972. At that moment, the public idea of him was all light—posters, screams, glossy interviews, the comforting fiction that teen-idol life is uncomplicated. Yet on Cherish, you can hear an artist trying to sound like someone who has lived a little longer than the camera wants to believe. “We Could Never Be Friends” is a perfect vehicle for that shift: it’s not a tantrum, not a revenge song—more like a controlled confession from someone trying to keep their dignity while their feelings refuse to cooperate.
And there’s something quietly devastating about the restraint of it. The narrator isn’t asking for another chance. He’s not making promises. He’s simply stating a boundary—perhaps the first truly adult act in many love stories: admitting that “staying close” would be a slow form of self-harm. In older pop, that kind of emotional wisdom was often hidden behind sugar and tempo. Here, it’s brought forward with a clear-eyed sadness, as if the song itself is teaching you how to leave without turning love into cruelty.
Within the album’s bigger story, the track also adds depth to what Cherish represented commercially and culturally. The record was built to “break Cassidy out as a solo star” with more mature material, and its success—Billboard 200 No. 15—proved there was an audience ready to hear him outside the TV frame. It’s easy to remember “Cherish” as the headline, because hits tend to become history’s shorthand. But songs like “We Could Never Be Friends” are where the private truth lives—where a career pivot becomes something more than strategy, and turns into an emotional identity.
So if you return to “We Could Never Be Friends (’Cause We’ve Been Lovers Too Long)” now, it doesn’t feel like a relic. It feels like a note someone wrote at the moment they finally understood: love can end without hatred, but it still leaves fingerprints on everything. And sometimes the kindest thing you can do—for both of you—is to stop pretending the past can be edited into something painless, and simply let it be what it was: real, lasting, and impossible to call “just friends.”