why does no-one talk about mid life friendship changes?
This post was written a while ago, but I chickened out of posting it. I then read ’s post here and thought “this is something that needs to be discussed more.” So here goes…
Towards the end of last year I was driving home from a group-lunch with a friend. We’d had a wonderful afternoon with a collection of women we don’t get to see as often as we’d like. What started as a really beautiful “isn’t it nice how it doesn’t matter how much time we don’t spend with each other, everyone at that table can just start where they left off” … evolved into a conversation about quite the opposite.
My driving companion is a dear friend of mine. An excellent human. Someone who has never so much as irked me in the 12/15 years I’ve known her. I can’t see how she’d irk anyone, in truth. So when she said, “I can’t believe the seismic changes to my friendships in the last few years” and went into a little detail about the ups and downs of her friendships (that were all super pivotal to her at various points) I felt three things.
an incredible surprise because she wasn’t someone I ever envisaged having these kind of issues
an incredible relief because I was on the tail end of a “close friend evolution” which had been both painful and deeply humbling
an incredible realisation that this really does happen to everyone.
I have had my own friendship changes in recent times and I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t been deeply painful. Having gone through a decade with few to zero incidents, this was a huge curve ball for me. Female relationships are as (if not more) important to me than my relationship with my family. The phrase “friends are the family we choose for ourselves” has never felt truer - but with an emphasis on the word “choose.”
In your thirties things change. Sh*t gets real. Losses and gains come with bigger consequences. This only get greater as time goes on and who we have alongside us really starts to matter. We don’t need wingmen for the same things; most of us don’t need someone to take that third jagerbomb with us anymore, or to hold our hair back in the pub toilet. Instead we need advisors, carers, mood lifters and confidantes… Watching our friends become spouses and parents can throw up a world of different feelings and dare I say it, opinions. Where we live, how we live, our choices - slowly our similarities and our differences become more profound. In some cases, it’s too much for a friendship to sustain itself.
I have had to make some incredibly difficult decisions, some I am more comfortable than others. I think some people have probably had to do the same with me too, as I recognise my own faults in all this. I didn’t do this alone (and doubt I ever would have). I started with a new therapist in early 2023. Lets call her Jane. When I started with her I expected to be called out on my own sh*t - and boy did she nail that brief - but what I wasn’t expecting was for her to highlight the poor behaviour that people around me exhibited and their monumental effect on me.
As much as I am grateful and most definitely better off for Jane - it has sparked changes in my life that have been harder than anything else I can remember facing. Given how much better I felt to know I wasn’t the only one who has experienced it, I thought I’d talk through my learnings to help anyone else who might read this. We can’t be everything for everyone, which means sometimes we need to swallow some hard truths alongside some hard decisions…