The Strange Loss of Adult Friendships...

There is a particular kind of lonely discomfort that comes with one-sided friendship maintenance. I mean it's certainly better on paper than having "no one at all" - hopefully none of us know the depths of that sorry pit.

It comes more from actually having people - important friendships with

long histories, funny, meaningful shared chapters - but a growing number of these, leave you with a creeping sense, quietly, that you may be the only one still trying. Or are you just trying too hard?

Most of us will recognize the feeling: the subtle imbalance of effort, the mental arithmetic that we all knowingly perform, with regard to - In whose court is the ball? How can it possibly take this long to responsd? Does their newsy content compare favourably to our own?

One of the strangest things about friendship in adulthood is how emotionally loaded the general effort seems to become. This is supposed to be (on paper) the stage of our lives when we are sufficiently wise, through age and experience, to be a bit more level-headed when we reach out, multiple times, to an old friend and get nothing back. Why does our adolescent ego take over to allow us to choose self doubt, and adopt that defensive, thin red-line of "what have I done"?

Where do we go, when basic correspondence starts to feel a bit risky? What is that all about?I don't want an email to be an emotional roll of the damn dice.. Yet we do treat mutual connection like it belongs on a balance scale. The apples should roughly equal the oranges. As if the equivalence in effort of maintaining a decent friendship, was a kind of unspoken negotiation in mental wellbeing. Nobody wants to be the one trying harder, because trying harder can make us feel exposed, and needy and even a little bit foolish.

Friendship "breakups" in adulthood are rarely dramatic. They don’t come with big fights or tearful confrontations. Instead, they unravel slowly, like a thread pulling loose from a favourite sweater - gradual, barely noticeable at first, until one day you realize the connection is gone, and we are left holding a sense of absence that is difficult to put a name to.

 Losing friends as adults isn’t generally about betrayal or moments of abject disappointment. More often, it’s a slow drifting apart, shaped by life changes. We move around so much more, with careers, relationships, parenthood, or simply different priorities. We get busy, we move to new cities, we develop new interests, and the friendships that once felt unbreakable start to fade into the background. Vanessa and spent 5 years living in Italy and it was remarkable how many benches beside village fountains, were filled with 3 or 4 very senior Italians, who just looked like lifetime pals. Because they were. They have never actually left the village.

At first, it’s easy to dismiss. We assume we’ll just catch up soon. An email is left unanswered, a voicemail gathers digital dust, but we don’t take it personally. So pretty soon, we write or call again. Crickets...

I seem to be using "we" a good deal more than I perhaps should be using it. These are my experiences, so I might as well own them and not hide behind your apron strings...

So how does it all progress?.. Well, in my experience - a kind of benign resentment starts to build. I make that rookie error, of aligning my daily sense of fulfillment with their timely responses - or lack thereof. I start to imagine that it might be my fault. And that is when it can be very tempting to put on the armour. Our egos want to protect us from a sense of dimninishing self-worth. Something whispers to me that I shouldn't be bothered. That I am better off without them. Another layer of armour goes on.

But the loss of a close friend in adulthood carries a quiet kind of grief, and one that’s rarely acknowledged. When a romantic relationship ends, we kind of get it. We can make sense of the heartbreak. But when a friendship fades, there’s no breakup conversation, no clear closure. You’re left wondering if you should have reach out further, or if the end was an inevitable result of the distance that slowly widened. Was it neglect, or simply the natural course of things?

There’s also a sense of self-reflection. Losing a friend forces you to question who you were and who you’re becoming. Sometimes, we think it may all be down to the fact that we have nothing very interesting to offer anymore. On better days, we might realize that we’ve just outgrown the friendhsip - like we do a pair of old slippers.

But losing friends isn’t just about loss - it’s also about change. Just as we evolve, so do our relationships. Some friendships last an effortless lifetime, while others serve a purpose for a reason or perhaps a season. And while it’s natural to mourn those that fade, it’s also a more urgent call to cherish the ones that remain. Hence perhaps the angst around unreturned correspondence. The furstration that we can't afford to lose another one... we are down to our last half-dozen. I feel like I am totally OK if people were up front and centre with things...with those that might say "Look, being friends for 40 years was great and all, but I am just taking things in a different direction.." or something...But where there is no conversation apart from the echoes of those darn crickets, how am I supposed to shift into that space?

You see, underneath all of this sits a particularly modern anxiety: the fear of appearing needy.

The word itself has become a kind of admission of something that is not on our list of character desireables. It implies embarrassment, as though wanting closeness is a flaw rather than a human instinct. We have absorbed, almost without noticing, the idea that the ideal adult is independent, self-contained, low-maintenance, emotionally unbothered. Someone who doesn’t need anyone. But when you really look at it, that ideal is just absurd. Humans are not designed to be self-sufficient islands. We are relational, regional, tribal creatures. We are built for belonging.

In the end, losing friends, or rather just mislaying them, teaches us one of life’s most valuable lessons: love, in all its forms, is not written in permanent marker pen. But that doesn’t make it any less real. AND it also encourages us to be more intentional with the connections we still have to nurture them, to appreciate them, and for me - from now on - if that means appearing needy? Well it's just something I have decided I need. I will be clear from today. "I need to hear from you."

I am making the call. What we often label as neediness is not neediness at all. It is simply my friend "vulnerability". Because to say “I miss you” is to admit that someone matters. To send the first message is to risk the no reply zone. To tell someone I care about their friendship is to expose a little more of myself than I would normally do.. That is not weakness. That, my friends, is courage. Connection is a bit messy, caring is messy, Being me is messy.

There is no shame in that.