Why best friends drift apart

Although friendship should be automatic to a degree, it also has to be a priority in your life. Simply put, your priorities are where you choose to spend your time. When you and your friend were closer, you probably took much more time out to spend with them, go to their birthday parties, take trips together, and hang out together.

Think about the last time you made time to spend with your friend and the last time they took to spend time with you. Do you find yourself canceling plans with them in favor of other activities? You read the same books, watch the same movies, follow the same TV shows, like the same hobbies, and listen to the same music.

But these days, do you find that you have less and less in common with your friend? But in the last few months or years, do you find yourself calling someone else to share the good news? There were phone calls once in a while, but they always felt rushed as we dashed off to lectures, or to jobs, or to socialise with someone else. In many ways, it seemed totally normal to outgrow a childhood friendship.

Why should a relationship that worked at eight still feel right at eighteen? Then, in our twenties, we started careers in different industries, working to different schedules and with different demands and priorities. We spent time nurturing the many other relationships that had developed over the years since school and so, naturally, we had less and less time for each other. In addition, I was dedicating many of my evenings and weekends to writing a novel.

I wanted to write about something that felt personal to me, something that was true to my own experiences. I was drawn to consider the importance of friendship and how the milestones of our lives can shift the parameters of a lifelong bond, and I wondered if I could tell an interesting story set against that theme.

Eventually it came to me; I chose to write about two women in their late twenties, because that seemed to me to be a period of particular flux.

This, at first, felt unsettling. For a friendship to survive, it must develop with every year, with every decade, reinventing itself again and again. This awakening stayed with me, and it was a theme I chose to explore in my book, Seven Lies, about a friendship that fails to do these things, that stays the same despite new challenges and opportunities. As a result, the friendship between the two characters becomes very uneven, with one woman moving forwards with her life while the other refuses to allow the relationship to evolve.

Writing it, I found myself thinking about my own friendship too. We were no longer attending dance classes together once a week.

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Brides's Editorial Guidelines. You Can't Agree. You'd Rather Spend Time Without Them Another sign that you and your partner are drifting apart is if you have a desire to literally physically separate yourself from them. Not everyone can fit into your current friendscape. That was quite literally the case in the age of lockdowns and social distancing. First, listen to your gut, as Degges-White suggests. If you would be, then feel free to contact them.

If when you start opening up your social life again you find you miss someone, you can always reach out again — but don't feel obligated to Credit: Getty Images. Another situation many people find themselves in is having reconnected with old friends from years ago during the pandemic, like old pals from university.