The Ever-changing Scope of Friendships As An Adult

Earlier this year, I spent a lot of valuable time with my journal reflecting on what life felt like a year on from an intense friendship break-up. The past 12 months have been tricky, joyful and magical: so many of my friends and many of you in the community helped me to navigate the unexpected break-up. And, throughout the process, I realised that I was certainly not alone in my experience.

Lots of us struggled with painful friendship break-ups – often more difficult to deal with than the breakdown of a relationship – and several struggled with knowing how to properly maintain friendships in adulthood. As a kid, it’s a little easier, if you don’t get along, you pick somebody else to hang out with on the playground. Turned down to play make-believe? You brush it off and nobody remembers it the next day. In my teenage years, I’d regularly feel crushed that I was never cool enough to make it into any friendship groups at school. I had one or two friends in odd classes that I’d chat to, but I was largely a solo student, enjoying breaks in the library or hanging on with those separate friends as a tagalong in their friendship groups.

As an adult, you feel it a little more deeply. In your thirties – certainly in mine – you come to an unsaid expectation that these friends are your people. We’re all ‘too old and tired’ to do a break-up, after all. Equally, by the time you hit adulthood, everybody’s paths look different. There’s the cohort that left University and valiantly tried to make it amidst multiple recessions. There’s the cohort that already had jobs are, as such, moved on faster in life. There’s a cohort who decided to leave their corporate jobs and try their hands at something new.

I thought I had a very level-headed approach to friendships, but I’m realising that things are always in flux. When my now-ex best friend broke up with me last January, I’d never felt more lost. We shared the same friendship maintenance level! We’d been besties since the age of 17! We’d survived hugely different career starts and still made it! We’d lived on opposite sides of the world! Ultimately, he and I could never remain friends so long as I had a partner. We’ll get into this another time. The loss of this friendship devastated me: I didn’t really know how to navigate big life changes without him, as I’d always turned to him for advice; and an unexpected confession from him changed my perception of many of the things we’d done together.

Sometimes, this means that our paths change our connections. And that’s life. It simply means our friendship maintenance changes: we pop for a catch-up coffee every other month, rather than heading for weekly Saturday brunch; we exchange longer WhatsApp messages once every week rather than daily. The rhythm of our friendships change all the time. That’s life.

I’m no stranger to when friends (or I!) require more, or less, at different stages. As a chronic people-pleaser, I have always put friends first and will always be there to lend an ear, offer advice or rustle up a deviant plan. There may be a little push-and-pull when somebody requires me to be there more than I can be. (I’m the very low maintenance friend that rarely talks daily!) But it always equals out.

Friendship has an ever-changing scope that I’m not sure many of us were ready for. As I get older, it may feel harder to navigate but it’s simple: all that I need is within me, and my friends nurture the best of me and vice versa. Having a small circle of friends is far more valuable than attempting to collect as many as I can, like Pokémon cards, which was my mindset as a teen. Much of the time, life’s natural course has a curious way of guiding you to where you’re supposed to be, with who you’re supposed to be with.

Here’s to quiet, stable friendships. May we embrace them as they are.