Why do long term friendships sometimes get difficult? Everyone says that friendships fizzle out as we grow up, but why does that actually happen? Why can’t we be the same people we were in 8th grade for example, and why are we different now that we’re in our 20s? Subconsciously, as we grow up, I think we look at our friends with some sort of expectations set in place. If someone does not go towards the same goals as we do, it’s a bit unnerving, especially when you spent years sitting next to each other in class, while discussing how we would take an apartment together when we grow up. I’m not saying that it’s bad—a lot of long-term friends end up living together in a different city, maybe similar workplaces, same grad schools, same kind of lives. But if that happened with your best friend, will you be happy that you’re together or will you be sad that you never evolved for the past 10 years? Will you be happier if you move away? Will the grass be greener?
It’s hard to accept, theoretically, that people grow at different paces, but developmental psychologists have actually mapped out why 8th grade felt so different. According to Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, adolescence is the stage where we’re actively constructing an identity, figuring out who we are, and our friends aren’t just company during that process, they’re part of the machinery of it. You weren’t just spending time with your best friend in 8th grade; you were building a self with them, testing out opinions and interests and versions of yourself in a relationship that felt safe precisely because you were both mid-construction at the same time. That’s why the apartment-in-the-future conversations felt so real: you weren’t planning a future so much as imagining a self, and it was easier to imagine it with someone whose self was still just as unfinished as yours. But the task doesn’t stay the same. Somewhere in your 20s, the psychological job shifts from “who am I” to something more like “who do I let in, and on what terms”, and a friendship built around co-constructing an identity doesn’t automatically know how to become a friendship built around two already-diverging identities trying to stay close. It’s not that the bond breaks. It’s that the bond was doing a specific job, that job finished, and nobody told you it would need a new one.
It’s sometimes hard to accept that people grow at different paces. Yes, we do know that theoretically that people grow up and grow out of things, but to see that in practice? Completely different things. It’s quite different from the friends you lose in your teens, I might add. It hits you harder and nine times out of ten, you wouldn’t have time to process what hit you in the first place because you have to clock in to your work at 8 am the next day.
There’s actually a name for this specific flavor of loss, and it might explain why it hits harder than teenage friend breakups did. Family therapist Pauline Boss coined the term ambiguous loss to describe grief that has no clear ending, no funeral, no diagnosis, no formal goodbye to mark it. Losing a friend at fifteen usually comes with some kind of event: a fight, a falling out, a new friend group that made the split obvious. But adult friendships rarely end that way. They dilute, through time zones, through schedules that stop overlapping, through a slow accumulation of unreturned texts nobody meant as a message, until one day you realize it’s been eight months and neither of you can point to what happened.
Maybe the honest answer is that there isn’t a clean one; no verdict on whether staying close for ten years is a win or a quiet form of stalling, no way to know if the grass is greener until you’ve already walked across it. But that might be the wrong question to be asking in the first place.
The convoy model of relationships, developed by psychologist Toni Antonucci, suggests that we move through life surrounded by a changing circle of people, and that the people closest to us are supposed to shift as our roles and needs do. Under that lens, a friendship that changes shape, gets looser, gets tighter, moves from the center of your life to somewhere further out, isn’t evidence that it failed. It’s evidence that it’s still alive, still responding to who you’re becoming instead of freezing you both at who you were, 10 years ago. The friendships that survive aren’t the ones that stay exactly the same. They’re the ones that figure out a new job to do once the old one is finished. And the ones that don’t survive deserve to be grieved as what they were, not dismissed as something you should’ve been too busy or too grown-up to feel. You don’t have to know yet whether you’ll end up in that apartment together, or in different cities, wondering. You just have to stop expecting the friendship to prove itself by staying still.