Jean de la Fontaine once said, “Rare as is true love, true friendship is rarer,” so what happens when a friendship you thought was true turns out not to be forever? You grew up together, from giggling over schoolyard crushes to learning to drive; you were inseparable and determined to stick together until the end, laughing over the idea of someday becoming old women causing trouble in a nursing home.
These days, though, it’s clear that something has changed. You no longer text every day and hang out all weekend, and when you do see each other, it’s different. There are lulls in the conversation, forced laughs; being with them feels like being with someone you hardly know. You have school, your friends, your partner, and they’re on a different path—your futures don’t align the way they used to. You want so badly to get back to how things were, but you’ve changed and so have they, and there’s nothing anyone can do about that.
I know, it’s sad. What happened to the goofy teenagers who shared their first sip of beer and stayed up all night obsessing over the upperclassman who asked you out next weekend? Why can’t we just go back to the starry summer nights of denim short shorts and bonfires? Why can’t we forever feel invincible, infinite, and once again see the future as a distant dream rather than a stressful reality?
Growing up is never easy, and growing apart is even worse, but it’s a fact of life: one that happens over and over in the most unexpected of ways and breaks your heart every time. Friends that I was close to in elementary school found new friends in junior high and junior high friends found new ones in high school, so it’s only inevitable that high school friends will part ways after graduation, no matter how close you were or how many times you swore it wouldn’t happen.
But let me let you in on a secret: this isn’t always a bad thing. Just as you grew out of your own Justin Bieber obsessed pre-teenaged alter ego, it’s only natural to leave behind parts of yourself that no longer fit after a big change, and going to college is definitely a big change.
When I left for my first year of University, my closest friends remained in our hometown, working and still figuring out exactly what they wanted to do with their lives. I was changing so much—living on my own, meeting new people, finding new passions—and I’d decided that they stayed the same. It was hard for me to relate to them because we were on different paths, and being with them reminded me of how much my own life had changed, so I distanced myself from them. What I neglected to recognize was that they were changing too, just in different ways than I was; I didn’t want to see that they were growing up because it reminded me that I was, so I pulled myself away and left them frozen in my mind as the same girls I’d been so close to all of high school, which didn’t do the trick either, as it made me feel more estranged and alone than I’d ever felt.
They were going through the same shock I was, just in a different setting. Yes, we were changing and further becoming three entirely distinctive people, but recognizing that meant that I also had to face the possibility that those three people might not fit together anymore. So I put things on pause and resumed our friendship through text, never asking them to see my new life at school and reverting back to my high-school self whenever we got together.
However, they were doing the same thing I was. Both of them had separate lives and separate friends they’d met at work and through their own interest groups, but when we got together, we ignored all of that. Being together was the only thing that felt the same, but at the same time, we were aware of how artificial our hang outs were, and it made me sad knowing that there was a part of myself that I had to negate to feel connected to them.
As that confusing, awkward year came to an end, it was time to be honest. I tried to show who I’d become and so did they, but things were different and our time spent together was even less frequent and our visits more brief, however, we enjoyed telling stories and hearing about each others’ lives; we were all so interesting and unique, so it was fun to talk even if we couldn’t have the same friendship we had before.
True friendship requires allowing each other to grow, even if that means growing apart. True friends do not envy or resent, but let go of their own insecurities and prejudices to allow their friends to become who they’re meant to be. If your quiet, dorky friend has suddenly become an outgoing, fashion-savvy It-Girl, then you should encourage that part of her, even if that means it’s harder to relate to each other. If your popular, party-obsessed best friend is now an Engineering major who would rather spend weekends on calculus homework than doing shots, then it is your job to make her feel comfortable with her decision. It takes a long time and a lot of courage to become the person you really are, so why add guilt to the already stressful mix of change and fear?
Since high school, I’ve become someone that I never imagined I would be, and I’ve met people that I never would have imagined I’d relate to. My friends and I still keep in touch, just not as frequently or in the same way that we used to. That doesn’t mean that the time we spent together as central parts of each other’s lives wasn’t meaningful or worth it just because it didn’t last forever, it just means that we changed and so did our friendship. Maybe someday we’ll be at similar places in our lives, but for now, in order to move forward, we needed to stop trying to force the way we were then onto the way we are now.
We’ll always be a part of each other’s lives—our memories together are memories of awkward junior high crushes, of Friday night sleepovers and groggy Saturday mornings, and of countless birthdays, firsts, and, of course, lasts. However, we won’t always be friends in the way we said we would, and we may not talk daily, weekly, or even yearly. But true friendship is always there as the stories you’ll tell for years to come—it is adaptive and ever changing, but it remains. While you may not end up old women in a nursing home, at least you can be the women who grew together and changed each other for the better.