I am going to go ahead and assume most of my readers have ended a friendship or had one ended for them. Sometimes it is neither, and both at the same time, but either way, it ends. And it is ok. Friendships end. It really sucks and it really hurts and often it isn’t one person’s fault, but it does happen. This is a fact of life.
Sometimes you know it is over, or you sense something is off. The ending may have been looming for a while. Now this is not true of every case. There certainly are times when you feel completely blindsided by the ending, and you waste time after the fact going over things in your mind to search for the clues you missed beforehand.
This article hopes to point out some clues that your friendship might be headed to an ending or just drifting apart. What you do about that is up to you and your friend. Maybe you try and salvage it, or maybe you let it end or maybe you end it directly. There isn’t a right or wrong one size fits all solution. But if you are worrying about a certain friendship or wondering retrospectively, here are some signs.
You have nothing in common or nothing to talk about anymore.
Maybe these should be separate signs, because it is certainly possible that having nothing in common means you have plenty to discuss, as long as each of you is interested and invested in what the other has to say, whether or not the subject matter is of personal interest to you. But the reason I have kept these 2 together is because they tend to go hand in hand.
Remember when you were both crazy about the same pop group in your young teenage life, or when you both hated the same boss in your early 20’s? Remember when it was all you could talk about and you would easily fill the hours?
Maybe you used to love op-shopping together, spending every Saturday leisurely browsing the charity shops in love of a good bargain and then stop for an even more leisurely late lunch on the way home? Then your friend got a promotion and started earning the big bucks, and her passion for expensive fashion bloomed, while you stopped working when you married and had a couple of kids who now accompany you begrudgingly instead?
Now when you catch up for lunch she lets out a frustrated sigh every time your child interrupts your conversation, and even when the kids aren’t there she is never off the phone taking business calls and responding to emails. That said, without the interruptions, what is left? You know nothing of her world and she isn’t especially interested in yours either. You don’t relate anymore, so the interruptions are actually a bit of a welcome relief to each other’s pain… or painful silence.
You never speak or spend time alone anymore.
You used to be as thick as thieves, even in a group situation it was like nobody else existed as you were drawn together, huddled up talking, or sharing private jokes and cackling on the sidelines of whatever the group was doing. Then slowly it started changing. One of you invited a third into the mix, which made the other one feel pushed out. In response they spent time with other members of the group until it reached the point that you never actually talk anymore although you do hang out with the same people.
You might not be sure if this was a deliberate act. It may not have been as deliberate or conscious as your brain allows you to believe, but this is a sure fire way to dilute the closeness between 2 friends. It is a covert way of stepping back. Stepping back from a friendship may be something someone needs to do for themselves for whatever reason, however, often times it just kind of happens. One person forms a close connection to someone else and realises what other cool people they have been missing while focussing solely on you for example. So they start expanding their circle, or options if you will, leaving you little choice to do much else in return.
There are insurmountable issues between you.
If one of you has betrayed the trust of the other in some big way, or put your friend at odds with their values or put them in a terrible position, this can be a death sentence for a friendship. And it isn’t always as immediate as you might imagine. One person may try to forgive the other and may want to repair things, however finds themselves unable, wanting space and creating distance even while trying to pretend that everything is fine. When clearly it isn’t. I usually find the best way to find out is to ask. If you tell a person you feel that something is off between you, and they insist you are wrong, then they aren’t interested in fixing the issue, are they? If a friend doesn’t care that you feel less close, you can take it as a fairly good indication they don’t want to feel closer.
You aren’t there for one another
Ok, yes, life gets busy. It doesn’t matter if you have kids, or no kids, or a career or if you stay home. It doesn’t matter if you have elderly parents and grandparents to care for or if you have only your 10 cats and your routine. People are creatures of habit and we do what we do. Often times that doesn’t leave room for things like socialising. But if something big, good or bad, happens to you, and you try to contact your friend to let them know about it, and they leave you hanging for 3 days before getting back to you, then that is a fairly good indicator that they aren’t available to you. They probably are genuinely busy, it isn’t a personal slight at all, but regardless, you needed someone and they didn’t pick up the phone. It goes both ways, maybe it was you who forgot last time. The point is that you actually don’t really know what is happening in one another’s lives anymore because you aren’t really a part of it and you don’t have time to be either. Often it isn’t that you don’t want to be, but the timing in your lives is an obstacle right now.
Much of the time, it is some combination of these 4 factors, more than any one of them alone. The good news is that it often means your friendship is drifting apart for now. I know that doesn’t sound or feel like good news. But if you let it fade out and drift away, you never know when the tide might wash you back in the same direction again later. Kids grow, people retire, people go through things that make them realise what matters most is the people and relationships in their lives and not all the other things. On the other hand if you cannot stand the ambiguity, if you must know and assign blame and insist that it be what it was or nothing at all, then that may be harder to recover from in the future.
The choice is yours, but meanwhile, I recommend investing less in this particular friendship for the time being, both in time and thought and focus on someone else who is more available or in a similar place in life. Reduce your expectations of your current friendship, and accept that for now, it is going through a phase that will be less close, perhaps indefinitely. Easier said than done. I know that. But what other choice do you even have, realistically? It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, does it?
❤ Love,
Your Best Friend ForNever
xx
