When you find yourself growing apart from friends, how do you know when to work at it, and when to call it a day?
Sometimes Kelly pops up in my Instagram feed. Smiling and bright-eyed, leaning into her young son with a hug.
Sometimes it feels as though she's looking directly at me. Sometimes I smile back. More often, I just feel a twinge of sadness. Kelly and I haven't talked in years. We've grown apart as friends.
Once, though, we shared an intense friendship forged in the fire of young adulthood and bonded through impulsive road trips, late-night confessionals, and the kind of daring bravado you feel when facing the world with a ride-or-die friend at your side.
My friendship with Kelly is essentially past tense. I moved across the country, and she started graduate school. There were emails and late-night phone calls, but it wasn't enough, even when we eventually ended up back on the same coast, less than a hundred miles apart. The distance might as well have been the deepest ocean for how far we'd drifted.
All those nursed heartbreaks, hair-holding sessions in the bathroom and spontaneous adventures had faded into blurry mental snapshots. Today, we're basically social media acquaintances, the kind who like each other's photos and never text.
Where did we go wrong? Nowhere, actually.
Friendships come and go. Some dissolve thanks to geography or changing interests and obligations. Others die a slow death, poisoned by bad behavior. And a lot of them simply get squeezed out. According to the U.S. Surgeon General's advisory on loneliness and social connection, the time Americans spent socializing with friends in person fell from about 30 hours a month in 2003 to about 10 hours a month in 2020. Remote and hybrid work have also cut much of the casual, unplanned contact that used to keep friendships ticking along, which is one more thing to weigh when you choose a work setup.
When a friendship fades, it stings, partly because women tend to lean on friends hard. In a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, 54% of women said they'd be extremely or very likely to turn to a friend for emotional support, compared with 38% of men.
Drifting apart is normal, and understanding how it happens is an essential part of learning how to deal with personal boundaries, says Natalie Lue, writer, founder of the long-running site Baggage Reclaim and author of The Joy of Saying No.
In fact, Lue says, it's healthy to let go of connections that are harmful or have outlived their use-by date. And there are ways to do so gracefully and without guilt.
Check Your Status
Solid friendships require a sense of balance built on even ground. If that foundation seems to be cracked or shifting, then it may be time to move on. "A friendship should be a mutual relationship," Lue says. "If it's unbalanced, then you have to pause and think about what the friendship is based on."
This could mean (among other things) that one person puts more work into the relationship. We've all had the friend who dominates every conversation, or the whole group chat, with her own problems, rarely if ever pausing to check in on ours.
Or there's the friend who constantly cancels plans, never settles up her share of the bill or goes radio silent for weeks or months at a time, only to resurface when she needs something. Then there's the super-bossy kind who passes judgment instead of support. So not cool.
Whatever the type, it may be time to ask yourself one really important question, Lue says: "Is this a friendship where I can like myself and be friends with this person at the same time?"
But what if there's no drama, just a friendship that's dulled over time? Don't guilt yourself, Lue says. Feeling distant from your best friend from high school? They just might not be the right BFF for you now, and pretending you haven't grown apart could be emotionally harmful for you both.
Life-stage splits are a big one. One of you has kids, and the other doesn't. One of you moved for a job, or changed careers and took the old common ground along. Values can pull you apart too, and plenty of women have found political and cultural differences harder to talk around in recent years. None of these automatically makes either of you the bad guy.
"You meet a person in one phase of your life, and now you're trying to still behave like you're 14 [but] things evolve and change," Lue says. "We grow as people, and we have to acknowledge that. Not every friendship is supposed to go through until the end of time."
Be Mindful
It's time to stop blaming the other person and look inward. "Friendships require self-examination," Lue says. "This doesn't take away from anything that the other person might be doing, but we should acknowledge our own side of the street."
Think about why you wanted to hang out with this person in the first place, she says. Does this friend boost your social status? Is she always down to hang out, even though you don't seem to have much fun together? Do you keep making plans out of nostalgic obligation instead of true kinship? None of these are good enough reasons to keep a relationship going.
"Sometimes we're motivated to stay friends with someone not because we want to, but because we're lonely," Lue says.
That pull is real. The same Pew survey found about 16% of U.S. adults feel lonely or isolated all or most of the time. But a friendship you keep only to avoid an empty calendar rarely fixes the loneliness, and it can take up the time you'd otherwise spend on people who feel like home.
When a Friendship Is Worth Saving
Plenty of drifts don't call for a goodbye. If you've checked your status and the foundation still feels solid (you trust each other, you like who you are around her, and the distance comes from logistics rather than hurt), the friendship may just need more time than it's been getting.
Time is the key ingredient. A University of Kansas study by communication professor Jeffrey Hall found it takes more than 200 hours together to become close friends. A friendship that's been running on two texts a year is running on fumes.
A few ways to put time back in:
- Say it out loud. A simple "I miss you, and I don't want us to drift" does more than another liked photo.
- Make it recurring. A standing monthly call, a regular walk, or a running voice-note thread beats waiting for a weekend you're both free.
- Lower the bar. Running errands together or a 20-minute video chat counts. Not every catch-up needs a reservation.
- Look at what's eating your time. If work stress has crowded out everything else, the drift may say more about your workload than about the friendship.
If you reach out a couple of times and get nothing back, that's an answer too. You've done your part.
Navigate the Dissolve
So, you've been honest with yourself, and you realize it's time to say goodbye. Great, but don't write that kiss-off text just yet. Even if the friendship in question is toxic, blowing up bridges is rarely the smart move.
Not every ending needs a big conversation. If a friendship has faded on both sides, you can simply let it rest. If you're stepping back from someone who still expects you to show up, a short, honest message is kinder than ghosting. And if seeing her posts keeps reopening the wound, muting is a perfectly fine middle ground.
"Sometimes we've got to bless and release these friendships," Lue says. "What I've learned in [these situations] is not to get angry, but instead remember all the fondness and the good times." And, she adds, it's essential to reflect on what has been lost, too.
"Grieving is healthy and, obviously, depending on the [friendship], it can take different forms," she says. It's OK to be pissed and cut off that toxic frenemy. Just be sure to do it with honesty and self-awareness.
"If we don't grieve, then the next thing you know, you're doing something really destructive like sending angry, drunk texts," she says. "[But] if you grieve properly then it can be a nice, clean break rather than a messy thing."
Letting go also frees up room for the people who fit your life now. Many of the women founders we've talked to this year are deliberately putting themselves in more rooms with new people, and one hosts a monthly open house to keep her community close.
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