The thought of losing a friendship can strum up a few tough emotions. It can be difficult to imagine never speaking to someone we have shared important moments of our lives with.
The skill to learn is not to stop caring about what happens, but to learn to be okay with anything that does. Acceptance and self-reflection are really the key here.
I remember a time in life where friendships and the maintenance of them were the most important thing. It mattered more than what I was going to eat that day, more than my relationships with my family and more than school.
During our teen years, I’m sure we can all agree, there was a pressure to maintain a friendship even if it wasn’t the healthiest. There was a common obsession with having as many friends as possible and basing your reputation on how many people you could keep around you.
How pop culture affects our view on friendships
I also don’t think it helped that pop culture across films and tv shows commonly demonstrated toxic friendships. I can’t say the same for everyone, but watching displays of friendships such as Blair and Serena in Gossip Girl played an impact on how I viewed some types of relationships. Mainly making me realise how toxic some friendships can be.
It used to really hurt me if I fell out with a friend, anxiety would surge, and it was all I could think about. In retrospect I can see how this was just small increments of my OCD tendencies sneaking in, but to me it felt real and for many people too.
I kept thinking how important it was to maintain a friendship even if it wasn’t the best thing for me at that time.
Although it may tie into people-pleasing tendencies, keeping as many friendships as you could was the expected social norm during our teen years. However, this all seemed to change as we hit our twenties.
Once we begin to get jobs and continue studying, we realise how our time has become limited and prioritising certain areas of our lives becomes key.
How does self-blame play a role?
The issues come when we start to blame ourselves instead of accepting the situation for what it is. Common signs of blaming yourself include questions such as:
- What did I do to stop this friendship from working
- How can I fix it, and I need to fix it now!
- Why is it always my fault if a friendship ends?
The self-blame is not helpful and can sometimes lead to a cycle of unfulfilling relationships.
Taking responsibility from our actions is different, healthy reflection and acceptance should remain our priority. It’s okay to outgrow people and it’s okay to want more from certain situations.
Once I left the comfort of my hometown and the friendships I had made at school, I realised the world is completely different to the way we viewed it at school.
Some of the friendships I had growing up were based solely on convenience. For the most part we had similar hobbies, or we were acquaintances in some way.
Friendships run their course at times: AND THAT’S OKAY
It’s okay to outgrow people. We live our lives without realising that we are constantly evolving. Every article or book we read is expanding our mind, every person we meet are expanding our expectations.
As we grow, we change, and sometimes the things that benefitted us in the past are not what we need anymore. Out in the real world we are friends with people of any ages, different backgrounds and people in completely different stages of life to you.
I think going to university really helped with this aspect. It dragged me out of a town which breeds clones and into a world where some of the clones would struggle to find common ground. It was everyone for themselves, but in the best way possible.
This did, however, lead to the inevitable drifting of some of my friendships. I call it inevitable because it’s a predictable pattern that happens all over the world. It’s scary to go through change and to leave your old life behind and forget all the attachments to our childhood that we hold so close to our hearts, but without this we will never grow.
It went from seeing my friends every day in school and every weekend for a get-together, to not seeing them for months as a time. This was very difficult to come to terms within the beginning. The less we saw each other, the less we spoke and the less we spoke felt like we were living on different planets.
Managing our expectations
One other thing we should bear in mind, is our expectations. In our twenties we have a lot of different things going on in the background, we have jobs to maintain (or look for), we have families to see, hobbies and a whole other load. It can be very hard to prioritise and fit in certain things especially when it comes to friends.
We may get jealous if a friend doesn’t spend every weekend with us, or upset that a friend who is home for the weekend has not come to see us. Accepting that we all are living our lives and unexpected events can come up will help us to manage our expectations and stray from negative thinking patterns.
As highlighted by Medium, friendship can be depicted in pop culture as “someone glued to your side all day or available at your beck and call”. We know from life experiences, that this isn’t always the case.
I soon realised though; it was very hard to lose something that was real. Real friendship comes in when, despite the distance and the craziness of our lives, we have trusting people who we can confide in and a willingness to meet in the middle.
I have lovely people in my life which I have maintained a friendship with for over a decade. On the contrary I have had some friends who I connected with for a short amount of time who have now become a memory. I appreciate them all. I have accepted that we are busy, we are living and it’s okay.
How can we learn to accept a friendship drifting without trying to control the outcome?
Sometimes it is best to learn to appreciate the moments we have with people whilst they are there, then to dwell on reasons of why it didn’t work out.
Sometimes it hard to try and accept this and to move on, here are some ways which can help you get out of this friendship rut.
- You can journal about the experience Writing down your experiences in this friendship and the breaking down of it, can help to control the self-blame, and witness the experience from an objective perspective. When we are in our heads about certain situations, we can catastrophise and picture scenarios in different ways. Writing it down and getting it out of your head can be on way to help with this.
- Connect with other peopleOne great thing about the world that we live on, is that there are humans everywhere and all different kinds of them. There are plenty of friendships waiting to be made and a hell of a lot of people to meet.
- Get back into the things that you loveIf a situation with a friend is really getting you down, I would suggest getting back into things that you previously loved doing. Think about any hobbies you had in your teen years or special interests. Join a sports group or social groups which share the same interests as you and get yourself involved. Hobbies work wonders for our minds and boost our creativity
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