How to Deal with an Expired Friendship
“When you find friendships fizzling out naturally, it says nothing about either of you as a person, but as your life changes it’s inevitable that the people you surround yourself with will change as well.” — Dina McMillan
It's always been good to have a close friend who we understand and makes us feel understood. As someone who, according to an internet study, is 70% introverted, I prefer to keep the connections I already have rather than forge new ones that might drain me. Dealing with friendship breakup is a novel experience for me. Kind of breakup that brings us a different new approach from a romantic breakup. A closure of a romantic breakup may seem way more clearer than a friendship breakup. In fact, they both still hurt.
Though I live with the belief that “friendship lasts forever,” if it doesn’t, at the absolute least, they’ll end up as a name in your contact list. Lack of communication time, being separated by hundreds of kilometers, or any other possibility that I didn’t think would split a friendship apart. Calculating how many hours we spent preparing, growing up, and seeing every amazing moment we had led me to believe that there is no other way for a friendship to end. We share our raw thoughts, push one another, witness each other’s ebbs and flows, and look for tools to help us navigate difficulties, yet we no longer hold meaning.
“A friendship you make throughout your school years is the finest friendship you will ever have,” they stated. Indeed. Making friends in your twenties is as difficult as deciding what kind of friendship you want. Everything is driven by what intention you want in your friendship. Not the one that comes naturally. But the truth is if we can’t find anything else in common, familiarity or history should not be a reason to keep the connection going. We are evolving and not necessarily at the same pace.
We’re all grown individually, both as a person and together. There were the times where we fell out and had not spoken for a months but there was always a way to reconnect, or perhaps we were attempting to force things. Taking a new step in life requires us to reconsider our priorities. And in this phase, your friendship may not offer value anymore to your life. It just didn’t work as it should. The people you met at high school, university or when you moved to a different city may only be in that season of your life.
In the end, we have chosen our friendship because we have connected, not because we went to the same high school for ten years or spent childhood together. In this state, I realize it’s fine to state your friendship isn’t working anymore because we don’t recognize the ‘feel’ energy in our friendship and just don’t value the same things. Every friendship that I had always taught me something, even some of them didn’t last.
“Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” — Anais Nin
