What do we owe our friends?
On navigating adult friendships, being at peace when things change, and getting intentional about nurturing your relationships.
Here’s something nobody tells you about growing up: adult friendships are hard. And complicated. And sometimes things change and you don’t really know why. Or what to do about it. Or if you should even do something about it. Do you reach for an explanation? Do you risk making things awkward and try to have an honest conversation? Do you just let it go? Do you move on without closure, go out, and make new friends?
Over the last few years, I’ve done my fair share of reflecting on friendships, especially how they change once you reach your late 20’s and early 30’s. I don’t think anybody prepares you for how tricky navigating adult friendships can be. When you’re in college, living pretty much the same life and seeing each other every single day, bonding over cheap beer and similar experiences in real time, friendships feel like the easiest thing in the world. Even if you’re friendships are that deep, there’s a certain casual, low-maintenance quality to them. As blissful as this sounds, it doesn’t (it won’t) last forever. Once you’re done with your degree, heading to a new city, moving-in with a significant other, investing in your career, and so on, friendships become a lot of work. We hate admitting this because we love to romanticize everything, but the truth is that every relationship, no matter its nature, requires effort. And sometimes, for many different reasons, we’re just not that invested in investing in our friendships.
I think one of the biggest shifts that happens in a friendship is when priorities change, and when we, ourselves, change as well. The nature of our world makes it difficult (if not impossible) to have the exact same path as our friends, at the exact same time. Although friendships are so much more than saying “me too!” fifty times over a glass of wine, most of us have come to associate this kind of relationship with having the same experiences, timelines, interests, likes and dislikes. Sometimes, realizing that our lives are so different means that we won’t relate to people who used to be our whole world. Perhaps we feel like we’re not that compatible with them anymore, or we don’t have the energy to discover new, common ground. Maybe we feel like we’ve outgrown them. Zara Hanawalt paints the picture perfectly in this article about the “awkward reality of adult friendships”:
My Bumble-scrolling clued me into a reality that so many women are navigating right now: struggling to hold onto friends whose lives look drastically different than our own. We’re not living in our parents’ plotline, after all. Thanks to technologies like egg freezing, the rise of unconventional career paths (see: digital nomads, gig workers, influencers), and shifting attitudes toward marriage, we’re operating with a more fluid set of societal expectations and timelines. It’s totally normal for one friend to move to the suburbs with a spouse and baby while the other goes on three Tinder dates a week. Or maybe one friend works a desk job while the other makes her living posting IG #sponcon, or one moves abroad while the other is a hometown lifer. That range of options is thrilling, but it makes friendships among adult women even more complex and challenging than they’ve ever been.
Sometimes, realizing that your life is drastically different from the life your friends lead can also trigger a more perverse feeling of comparison, or even a certain degree of jealously. I don’t think this makes someone a bad person, necessarily—this doesn’t mean that we should excuse repetitive toxic behavior or feel like we’re obligated to maintain a relationship with someone just because, but it’s also important to remember that we’re only human, that we’re going to get it wrong, and that we’re all battling with complex, conflicting feelings. To be very honest, I feel like we do each other a disservice every time we pretend like we haven’t struggled with these feelings at all. The more we normalize the nuances of our existence, the happier we will be—with ourselves, and with each other.
One thing that I’ve come to realize about adult friendships is how important intention is. I started reflecting on this especially after listening to felicidade depois da adolescência (happiness after adolescence), which was shared by a friend over WhatsApp a few months ago. In this episode, Lela Brandão talks about how challenging it can be to find happiness once you reach adulthood, and how getting intentional about your friendships is absolutely crucial. If we don’t make time for our friends—to go out for dinner every two or three months, to catch a movie now and then, to have a quick coffee because we’re in their neighborhood, or to reply to a text message—time won’t just create itself. If we don’t carve out space to nurture our connections, they’ll end up feeling one-sided sooner or later, and eventually disappear into thin air.
I have also come to the conclusion that honest, vulnerable communication can really make or break a friendship. I think we’ve all been there—hiding how we really feel because we’re too afraid of hurting a friend, interacting less to avoid what we think will be an awkward conversation, and never really knowing how to act to make things better. As someone who has always shied away from confrontation, therapy was a big “ah-ha” moment, giving me the clarity I needed to understand that no good comes from avoiding the difficult (and much, much needed) conversations. The hard truth is that we won’t always be able to show up for our friends how we wanted to, or support them in the way we intended to—but we can be honest about it without feeling like we’re failing them.
This also helped me realize the importance of setting realistic expectations of other people, and learning not to take everything so personally in a friendship. Oftentimes, we’re so quick to judge each other, or move with a narrative that might not even be true, that we forget to look within and realize that maybe we have done the same thing in the past. As we mature, I feel like our friendships—and all our relationships for that matter—require even more empathy, patience, understanding and vulnerability. They require the space and time to be what they need to be at that moment, without the pressure of being what they used to be in the past, or the need for a drastic ending. It might be challenging to navigate this kind of profound (and sometimes silent) change in a friendship, but as Zara writes in that same article:
The truth is that friendships bend and change (…) In the real world, shifts in friendship don’t always become A Whole Thing. People are busy, and life just…goes on. Friendship breakups have gotten a lot of PR recently (…), but we don’t often explore the idea that friendships can shift without ending entirely. Those weekly brunch dates can morph into monthly FaceTime calls or a best friend can become someone you still love and root for but can’t fully relate to, now that they’re posting TikTok dances in Fiji while you sanitize baby bottles until 2 a.m. (…) Women deserve better, more authentic stories about friendship than the flat “best friends forever” plots we’ve long been fed.
Thank you for reading Nobody is reading this! Now, I would love to hear from you: how do you navigate your friendships? What is something you’ve learned about adult friendships?
Thank you for this lovely piece. I really needed to read this today since I’ve been struggling all weekend long with feeling low and lonely and not knowing how to handle the lack of friendship from my friends when I really need it. ❤️