Who are my friends? I’ve made so many over the years but so many I no longer talk to. Is that my fault? Are they still my friends? Why does it feel like I can’t hold on to friendships?
These are all thoughts that pass through my head a lot, and may well pass through yours too. Over our childhoods, teenage years, and for the rest of our lives, we meet so many people and often hit it off and become good mates. Suddenly, 6 months go by, and you find you haven’t heard from them or reached out to them yourself. You wonder why this happened and why you seem to have collected many people who are there for a part of your life but not for the rest of it.
The coming and going of people is a fact of life. At a point when there was a lot of change in my life, my godmother told me: “you have friends for a reason, friends for a season, and friends for life”. This sentiment has stuck with me, and I hope it will stick with you too.
Friends For A Reason
Think about the friends that you have now. If you think back to how you became friends, you’ll probably find that some of them are friends because you were put into a situation which pushed you together, such as school, sports club, drama group or family ties.
These are your friends for a reason. Now, just because you were put into a situation where you inevitably had to make friends with them doesn’t diminish your friendship – in fact, these friends can be intensely strong as you share common interests. For me, the friends I made throughout my schooling are some of the strongest relationships I have; we watched each other grow up, argued with each other and still came together again.
Friends for a reason may not be lifelong friends, but they might be the people that come in and out of your life occasionally as you cross paths, pulled together by that common interest or invisible tie.
Friends For A Season
Have you ever been on a school trip or gone somewhere where you make friends with someone and it feels like you’ll be friends forever, but then when you go your separate ways back home you hardly speak again? Or have you had people that you talk to in a certain period of your life and then when you grow out of that period, you never talk to them again?
These are your friends for a season and, in my opinion, the hardest to get your head around.
These friends are people you bond with due to you both being in a new environment. In my experience, there are very few of these people that you continue to stay in contact with after the trip. This can be really difficult to understand and can make you feel like you wasted your time – it certainly did for me – until you realise that it’s okay for people to float in and out of your life. What’s important is the amazing times you had together in that ‘season’ of your life. The memories you make with these friends will stick around for as long as you treasure them. The likelihood is that you won’t forget about them and they won’t forget about you, but your lives just don’t coincide anymore.
Friends For Life
These darlings are the friends that you may have met in a ‘reason’ or ‘season’ moment of your life, but have stuck around because you just get on that fabulously well! These people make you a better person, and you equally bring the best out in them. Even if you drift away from these friends for a while, you will inevitably find you come back together again and it’s okay to let this natural ebb and flow happen. As much as I’m a firm believer that if something’s meant to be it will be, I also believe that you don’t get what you want unless you put in the effort.
In my experience, there have been people who drift out of my life who I would really like to stay. I know that it was an unconscious drift due to a lack of effort on both sides; in these cases I try to make an active effort to meet up, text or call them to spark a new conversation. This is not always easy, but as long as they’re giving back what you give to them, you’re on track to keep your relationship alive for as long as you want!
A recent study by the Economic World Forum showed that only 13% of people stated they had 10 or more close friends, which is not a lot. It can feel daunting in life, especially with social media, when the people around you seem to have loads and loads of friends. I like to remind myself that it’s quality over quantity and that friendships, like most things in life, come and go. The people who are good for you and who you are good for, will stick around.
It’s so exciting to think about all the people we are yet to meet and all those treasured people that we already know. So, when asking “who are my friends?”, I find it helpful to dig up lovely memories from school, travel and work, to remind myself that although some of these people may no longer be in my life, we had a bloody good time and those memories will never leave.