When you hit your 30s and realize that you need to reassess friendships, it can be very devastating. It's hard to accept that the friendships you made during childhood and your early 20s may not continue further into your life.
Childhood and University Friendships
In our childhood and early 20s, we often fall into friendships because people are around us all the time, sharing the same classrooms and school calendars, and experiencing life-changing events together.
However, it's often difficult for us to leave our childhood and university years and transition into the world of work while maintaining our friendships. These friendships, which were formed based on proximity, often weaken as we and our friends move away and settle into our daily routines. We may come to the realization that the friendship is not as strong as we thought it would be, or that the connection we shared was largely fueled by the frequent interactions we had.
The Challenge of Maintaining Friendships in Adulthood
Without the ease of running into each other regularly, we are now forced to be intentional about maintaining our friendships. Our time is now taken up by work, relationships, grocery list making, errands, and other responsibilities, leaving us with less time to randomly stumble upon friends. This means we must be deliberate about the time we spend with people. As a result, we are forced to re-evaluate the friendships we've carried over from childhood and university into our adult lives, and consider who we want to spend our limited time with and how.
And that sort of assessment can be uncomfortable. Sometimes, we realize that individuals have standards and ways of looking at the world that are incompatible with our own. Their morals and trajectory may not align with what we want for ourselves, but it doesn't mean that they've chosen a bad path or that we have. It just means that we've grown in our lives, made strides, and are no longer going in the same direction.
It is sometimes confusing to see the changes in our friendships when we weren’t prepared for them.
If individuals in our lives are going in different directions and we want to hold on to that friendship, it will require deliberate work, effort, and making space in our lives for those individuals. But there are only so many hours in the day and only so much space to allocate.
The challenge with losing friends in your 30s is that you may realize that you never developed the habit of making friends deliberately. Friendship is much easier when it falls into your lap, but deliberately going out of your way to make a friend calls on you to be a friend in a different way. You may also need to question what makes you a compelling friend or identify any red flags that might make someone decide you're no longer worth their time.
The Pain of Losing Friends
It hurts on both sides when individuals are no longer friends with someone they had been close to for quite some time. There's a period of reassessment and realization that they're not held as closely as they thought, both for the individual and for ourselves. We're faced with making decisions about who we want to be around us and realizing that we no longer want certain individuals around us. With distance instead of proximity, we're no longer seeing them as often as we did, and we're being challenged to look and see if they're the kind of person we want to be around.
The Importance of Deliberate Friendship Making
If the saying is true that we are the sum of our five closest friends, we're being asked to look at who we want to become. In your 30s, you start to see that the people you surround yourself with can have a significant impact on who you are and who you will become.
You get to see those older than you and the kind of lives that they are living. You will speak to those younger than you and help them realize that some habits and directions are not useful long-term. You now live in that middle ground of deciding what you want to be but also what you don't want to be.
You are now releasing friendships but chica, it’s hard. You have the desire to make new friends that fit the life you currently live while knowing that you don't yet have the skill set to acquire those new friends.
And so, you know that if you lose those friendships that you had for a long period of time, even those that for a myriad of reasons that no longer appeal to you, you might have a gap. A gap between releasing those friendships that you previously had and finding new friends. Friendships that currently suit where you are on your journey, friendships that have clear boundaries, the kind of friendships that are, and this is my favorite phrase here, “mutually nourishing”.
Looking after all of your life plus making new friends are things that take time and energy and effort, and in your thirties, when you realize that your friends are pairing up and people seem to be having the best of lives, you can question if it makes sense to get rid of a friend. You can question if it is really just not something to hold onto in the meantime until you're able to sort this skill gap out.
I'm here to say to you that it's perfectly normal for that assessment to take place. It's perfectly okay for you to sit and make a judgment call that says, "I am no longer that person, and I no longer want to be in that space," and then start taking steps.
It's hard to be the friend that is left behind.
It's also hard to be the friend that does the leaving. But in this, do not see someone as worthy of blame or shame but instead see it as a glorious place where we get to move with intention and try to plan for what, God-willing, might be the second half of our lives. We get to now deliberately make an assessment and a decision about who we have around us.
The Normality of Assessment and Moving Forward
Losing friendships is hard at any point in time, in your life. But in the 30s is when many people realize that they're losing and releasing clusters of friendships, not necessarily from death, but because of decisions and intentional choices, and some people might feel wracked with guilt about making that judgment call. But never fear, you are, in fact, making a decision that if you thought about it and have given some real space for yourself to assess if it's the right one for you, it might be a decision that's just the making of the person you want to be.
Remember though, in all things take care of yourselves, my loves.