Friends Drift Apart

As painful as it can be, connections fade. They disintegrate and eventually become non-existent in our day to day life. The older I've gotten the more I've accepted this. It can be difficult to accept because we often form our identities around our friendships or those we hold close to us. Even with family, we can drift apart or temporarily go through a period where we lose contact. We can certainly make the effort to stay connected, but often it just doesn't work. Why?

We change more than we think we do over the course of our lives. While a change we're making might not seem like a big deal to us, it might be a really big deal for our friend. They may not understand why we don't go out to that bar anymore, why we don't like the same sport anymore, why we've shifted our music tastes, or why all of the sudden our political or social views have changed. They may not understand why we have chosen to be with our new significant other or even feel betrayed by new found connections we have. We all get exposed to so much every day and that changes who we are. Sometimes something really sticks with us, it resonates strongly, but not with our friend. They may stick with us through our abrupt changes, or it may end up being a turn off for them and they just slowly stop communicating with us as much.

Good news. It's ok! At first, it might feel heart-wrenching, but we will learn to accept this eventually. We find new ways to be enriched in life and so do our former friends. Although having a close connection with the same people for a long time can feel good, we can still always evolve to find new people. New people have new ideas. New people can teach us things that we wouldn't have learned from our past friends. The experiences that we had with our former friends were great in one period of our life, but may not carry over to every chapter of our story. Viewing things from this lens can make this a more welcome change, rather than feeling bad about losing particular connections.

However, they may come back us. Even if a separation feels final it might not be. I wouldn't expect that a person will definitely come back into our lives, but they might. Even with social media, I have personally unfriended or unfollowed people when the connection no longer felt right and years later they sent out a friend request again and I accepted. Will we be best friends again? Maybe not, but it is certainly ok to let people back in as time passes and they reach out again. We can also choose to reach out to someone again if we feel called to do so.

If we take the pressure off what connections need to be for us in our life, we can have a bit more ease and be open to the ever-shifting changes life brings. If we do end up connecting with our past friends again it makes things all that more interesting. While we were in a period of going our own way and connecting with new people, we have created new stories. We have gained new experiences that we can share in a way that we might not have been able to with the same people in the past. Who knows, we may even connect with a former friend in an even deeper way because we have gone through an expansive phase in life. Maybe we end up sharing a new interest and connect in a new way. We never know what will happen, we just have to stay open to the connections life gives us.

Top photo credit: David Marcu on Unsplash