How To Cope With Friendships Growing Apart

Maintaining friendships in your 20s is hard. People move away, you move away, and everyone gets busy with work. It’s not the same as college, where you live within 10 minutes of all your close friends. You try to keep up through texts and calls, but it’s hard to balance with adult life. It’s the tough reality of post-graduate life. 

I’ve always taken friendship break-ups worse than other heartbreaks. We rely on our friends to confide in about our deepest secrets and biggest troubles. They’re our most reliable support system. Losing someone you’ve shared so much with cuts deep, whether it’s from a dramatic falling out or unintended growing apart. 

Feeling like a friend has abandoned you can lead to a mix of feelings: confusion, disappointment, and general hurt. I’ve struggled with this throughout my early 20s, but I’m learning how to accept the things I cannot change.

And that’s step one: understanding that we’re all human.

We can’t control many things in life. Only you can determine how much effort you put into maintaining friendships. It can be frustrating when you feel like your effort isn’t being matched. 

I try to remind myself that there could be a lot going on in someone’s life. Work could overwhelm and drain them, or there may be going through something that makes communication difficult. Sometimes, our friends need space to focus on healing and dealing with their own issues, and it’s okay that they can’t put more energy into our friendship at the moment. 

Some people are simply bad texters. This can also be frustrating, especially for those of us that don’t find texting to be a chore. In this day and age, it seems that everyone is glued to their phone, but this can’t be generally applied to everyone. 

Additionally, doomscrolling is a much more brainless task than responding to a text. Your friend that’s chronically online may still struggle with communication; they’re not ignoring you on purpose.  

If they truly are ignoring you, however, you can still cope with the fizzled out  friendship. Appreciating the relationship for what it was always helps me deal with fading friendships. It’s bittersweet, but it replaces the feelings of disappointment and despondency with gratitude for what that person gave me while we knew each other. I’m a big believer that everything happens for a reason, and if it’s meant to be, it will be. 

If someone has left my life, I’ve learned to be thankful for the purpose they’ve served and the lessons I’ve learned from them, rather than feel bitter over their departure. They added so much color to my life while I knew them, and that’s something I’ll always carry with me.

What this leaves is acceptance.

It’s the hardest step, especially when the friendship has come to such a slow close that you spent months wondering if you were still friends. Acceptance is the last step in the stages of grief, and it certainly applies to the grieving of a friendship. Learning to move on and be okay with the loss of someone so important to you and influential on your life is a feat. But there comes a day where you wake up and realize that what once felt impossible is completely achievable. 

They say that distance makes the heart grow fonder; whether that’s true or not, you learn to keep the fondness and ditch the resentment. As mentioned earlier, there’s only so much in life that we can control. You can accept that you did all you could to maintain the friendship and that it simply wasn’t meant to be. 

Keep the people that treasure your time and effort close. It’s never worth it to hang onto someone who won’t give you the time of day or  doesn’t prioritize you the way you prioritize them. The friendships that are worth keeping around will show you the effort and love you deserve.

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