Why Is It So Hard to Maintain Friendships in Your 30s?
The Lonely Truth of Growing Up, Growing Apart, and the Chaos of Adulthood
Since reaching my mid-30s, I’ve celebrated the pinnacle milestone by simultaneously and abruptly losing several close friendships in the past couple of years: each from different eras of life. Each so confident in the bond that I never considered the possibility of an end.
In one case, a former co-worker-turned-nomads together. Years of happy hours after work, fantasizing about life abroad while sat at the Boulder pub down the road, all to unravel in a fallout in London over a male friend she definitively did not want to date, but for undefined reasons also did not want me to date either. To be honest, I figured it’d blow over. Years later, it hasn’t.
In another, a PR co-worker I used to walk Manhattan streets with from 57th to 110th, musing our future together as old ladies drinking wine on porches. We were close in the way your mid-20s demand: watching out for one another when debit cards were overdrawn, shit-talking fuckboy men, and bemoaning the crookery that is the corporate cog. In the years following it, I’d felt the friendship fade as our now cross-country lives rushed on, but when I voiced concern about the withering connection, I received an email tidal wave of grievances.
I’ll admit, I never replied: the discomfort of reading what I’d done so inadequately over the recent years too difficult to know where to begin. I still contemplate: at what point in a friendship does it also become one's own responsibility to voice their needs or boundaries within it? And if you’re not, and the other person doesn’t know the expectations, well aren’t you then just setting the relationship up for inevitable demise?
I’m not saying I didn’t commit any of the asserted wrongdoings, of course. But, I certainly had no idea the narrative even existed until it was spelled out on email parchment.
While arguably the most significant ones, there’s also been a couple others that for the sake of this essay I’ll minimize the detail, but suffice it to say the friendship outcome was certainly not my choice, though I’ve begrudgingly been forced to accept the distance.
Because the demise of friendships aren’t often formally acknowledged—sans someone sleeping with someone’s significant other, etc. — instead, we all just walk around heartbroken but too embarrassed to admit it. It’s a unique, open-ended, flinching type of pain, like having a papercut between your fingers you can’t soothe.
You can’t really tell people “my friend broke up with me,” without sounding like a young adult having an affair with an older married person who “promises to leave their spouse.” Point being: no one wants to hear it; friendships often accepted as having a natural life span, much like an affair.
It’s a unique, unsettling position to grapple with when it happens multiple times in a matter of years: I’m left rattled on my ‘mental health walks’ ruminating obsessively over the years the friendships endured. I imagine it’s similar to walking into your home one day and finding that your spouse has cleaned out their side of the closet and secretly rented an apartment downtown.
All of the sudden, you’re forced to look at the lens of your memories and siphon through what you missed. And whether this end was in fact what you secretly, selfishly, shamefully suspect - in part your fault. (and to that, I’d say: well, of course it’s in part your fault. Every relationship is a mixture of distorted attachment styles and balance beams of consistently forgiven faults and fuck ups.)
We forgive our significant others for egregious sins, often privately. Sometimes publicly, if unlucky. There’s no limit it seems for some when it comes to excusing the acts of a beloved.
But, friendships feel slimmer on the scale of tolerance. You forget to text back one too many times, fail to meet up to some unspoken expectation, or not procreate at the same time as another, and you’re booted off the amity alliance.
Ultimately, you can give yourself the same self efficacy your parents probably gave you as a kid: “anyone who’d treat you like you don’t matter doesn’t deserve your friendship anyway.” But, as adults, we now (should) know there’s nuance to that statement, and that the reason someone leaves is that either you’re not interesting/relatable enough for them to continue nursing the connection, they expected more from you and didn’t communicate it in a way you understood, they just don’t have the time for you right now, or that they feel you did something they view as “terminable” but don’t have the energy, desire, or societal pressure to terminate it with dignity.
Our culture doesn't recognize friendship as an institution in the way it recognizes romantic relationships, so outside of brief Instagram slides I see from influencer therapists on “When to leave a friendship” there's no real protocol for ending one, just signs of when one *should* leave one, which I’ve always found lacking nuance and arguably more harmful. The conclusion often resonating as “you’re the best, most loyal friend. If they don’t match that, don’t walk away, RUN!” which I find sickeningly eye-rolling and self aggrandizing. Just in case no one’s told you, you probably have annoying characteristics or lifestyle habits that your friends continue to forgive. A truce of sorts.
Because ultimately, there’s no formal paperwork served for ending a friendship, no matter our age, people tend to do it in the most passive, blame-based, avoidant ways possible, by more or less dropping any effort to communicate (i.e. ignored texts, broken plans, pulled invites to assumed events, etc.) and the other person is left to figure it out for themselves. Or dare to ask around, and be labeled ‘dramatic’ or ‘pot stirring’.
Wherein it’s perfectly reasonable to inquire about the emotional bonds in romantic relationships, it seems less acceptable to affront on friendship dynamics.
Shouldn’t it be normal to check in on the status of your friendship? Shouldn’t it be healthy to clear out the cobwebs every now and again?
When you're a kid, your best friend is often of circumstantial details. But as an adult, you pontificate that your friendships have more substance - shared hobbies, defined memories, common interests, general political views, genuine affinity mixed in with petty, easily forgiven malice and jealousies.
But, it's a startling revelation when you realize that that exact substance can sometimes be sand sifting through your fingertips. Even moreso when a close friend locks in a partner, new job, a move, or births children, and they disappear in that way where, for awhile, they still post Instagram stories of said partner or kid or trip update and you think “Okay maybe they ignore me more often but they’re still doing the day-to-day motherhood or travel thing.”
Then, all of the sudden you swipe to your social apps, and up pops an IG story where they’re posed with a bright “BFF” sticker overhead a photo of them with a friend you’ve never even met.
I can’t really help thinking that as we age, for many friendships become a matter of convenience, a brief retreat used often as an outlet for partner-complaining, hobby-indulging, travel-planning, job-bashing, and child-rearing comparison. Whether it’s out of pure exhaustion or not, once people settle into their mid years they seem to simply begin to rate friendships on convenience and relatable, preaching to the choir table talk. (For nomads, who are characteristically unsettled, I’d argue the convenience stems from the duration of time each of you will be in the same spot or if you plan to travel onward together.)
People often come together because each is giving one another something they both desire, and they drift apart when the dynamics shift -
And while there’s nothing essentially wrong with this - in fact it’s all very human and very psychologically pragmatic - it’s still been quite startling to live out in the 30s.
I read somewhere that like most love affairs or favored vacation spots, friendship are meant to have these natural life spans, too.
But, I guess I just didn’t think it’d be so abrupt.
My mom, likely tired of listening to me bemoan my losses and also very likely gussying herself up for her own impending happy hour ladies event, recently said something that stuck with me so I thought I’d share it here:
“Honey, your 30s are a not a decade conducive to closeness. Wait til you’re 50s and 60s, it’ll all come back around.”
And while I hear the logic behind that sentiment: the very real reality that your 30s are this landmine of work, travel, kids, marriage, or whatever else fills the limited space in your brain for connection —
the whole reality of this has still led me to effectively shut down the desire for new ‘best friends’ over the last couple of years.
I am 35, been a Bridesmaid 14 times, and I do not have a particular best friend right now.
I still have closeness to many, arguably even more than the average person my age. For that, I’m beyond grateful (even as I fret at night about the state of all of those friendships. Are they OK, are they mad at me secretly? Will I receive an email letter soon?)
Where I used to raise all fingers when counting future bridesmaids, I currently dread the idea of even entertaining a wedding party. An elopement (financially) more responsible, and frankly - less humiliating when I paranoidly contemplate asking women to be in my wedding and them texting behind my back “Really? She wanted me? We’re hardly close now.”
I’m embarrassed even writing that to be honest. Like I’m exposing a raw, festering, infected sore on the internet. Just waiting for the comment section to re-confirm that I am, in fact, a shite person and they don’t, in fact, want to be in my figurative, imaginary wedding (that I’ll likely never have).
Truth is: I’m a bit of a chaotic person by nature — well meaning, but at times unreliable. Loving when directly in front of you, aloof at times when not. Close friends rarely know what part of the world I’m in, and I forget to share my location with family. I’m more comfortable in airports than apartments. I work in the range of 11 hours a day and work email notifications are almost always pinging at dinner.
In turn, I forget birthdays until days later. I beg for baby pics but have yet to meet the child.
I text back at odd hours.
I suspect that when I was younger, my chaotic nature was different: more age and drinking-induced which seemed more fun and sociable, therefore more acceptable, a chaos that was endearing because it’s “youth.” As I get older, I reckon that its current manifestation has made me less lovable. Or at the least, less tolerable.
Who really wants to hear about my nonsensical client PR crisis with my faltering WiFi in South America while breastfeeding their crying child as their toddler pulls down a bookshelf in the background?
A very real part of me mourns the innocence of my past self: another part of me resents it.
Had I known it would be this bloody difficult to maintain closeness in friendships, I’d have held the moments a little tighter throughout my youth.
I took it for granted, and expected the good times to go on forever. I just figured one day we’d put headphones on the babies and rock on.
I mourn a past reality, yes, but oddly not an alternate one, and therein lies a bittersweet sting.
I don’t want to go back to youth in order to have those moments and experiences again.
While of course at times I miss sitting on Brooklyn apartment stoops with an IPA bottle in tattered jean shorts on a Saturday afternoon, surrounded by friends smoking cigarettes and contemplating just how f*cked we are on rent money that month —
I don’t miss the heedlessness of my 20s. Or how confusing that time period was. I don’t miss the binge drinking, immature intimacy, junior work dynamics, overdrawn bank accounts, and general lack of self confidence that accompanies the murkiness of that decade.
I just sometimes miss walking down the street and knocking on a friend’s apartment door, letting myself in with no thought as to the intrusion. Now, I call ahead to let someone know my ETA: the thought of just busting into someone’s home so foreign to me I can’t ever believe I did it in the first place.
I suppose there is beauty in surrendering to new rhythms in a new season of life.
When it comes to friendship, I trust that time will sort itself and this wave of life will crescendo into another in the years to come, much as my mother continues to promise.
Perhaps people ebb and flow in and out of our lives, and maybe one day I’ll find that that didn’t necessarily mean the relationship was gone when it ebbed in the directions of less contact.
I’m not sure what I’ll find, to be honest.
But, I do know I’d be a fool to not state in here at least once —
that no matter the outcome, I’m grateful for every single person I’ve had the privilege to walk on the same path together.
And, my life was better with you in it.
Where to begin??? My most heartbreaking bff breakup was in my 30s and I’m still confused and conflicted about it. I know I’ve closed myself off from that level of friendship ever since. As in 40 years since.
I find myself in the exact same position, having lamented many of the same sentiments and comments to my therapist session after session.
But alas, I keep telling myself that the tide will turn and it’s okay to focus on my career now and course will reverse itself and friendships will boomerang back into my life.
But .. what if they don’t? And I’m left stumbling alone? Well, that’s the predicament I find myself, like you, in now, I suppose.