Friendships Can Have A Shelf Life
Most connections do not end with a bang or a shouting match. They simply run out of momentum. And that's ok.
Most friendships don’t end in a screaming match, stomping of feet, and the protagonist striding away. More likely the opposite, there’s no great climax, no cinematic denouement, just a slow, silent receding of the friendship tide.
Sociologists study this as friendship dissolution. In everyday terms, it feels more like friendship drift, the slow loss of the shared structures that once held the relationship in place. The connective tissue of a shared life gradually dissolves, the text messages, drinks after work and birthday wishes dissipate.
I touched on fading relationships a year ago in my article “The Silent Drift: How can a Lonely Man Form Friendships?“
“How many of us have sat in a pub or cafe on a Saturday afternoon scrolling through our phones wishing we had something to do that evening. So often we fail the ‘pub test’ - can you call three friends right now who would meet you for a drink?”
Why does a faded friendship feel ambivalent? Maybe you sense a pang when you see their name, but it’s not a romantic breakup; there’s no ritual or period of mourning.
The digital age has made all of this much more complicated. I’ve always railed against social media’s use of the word ‘friend’ to describe a connection between myself and another person. It’s a ridiculously simplistic structural method of describing the complexity of human connections. There’s no rating of the strength or type of friendship.
I have, in theory, hundreds of friends, some through work, some romantically, some through shared activities. The work ones have faded completely since I left full-time work at my company last year. I see their names float past on the occasions I bother to look at LinkedIn, but apart from a couple of notable exceptions, I have had no contact with them for nearly eleven months. They haven’t reached out to me, and I haven’t made any effort either.
I have hundreds of friends on Facebook and Insta, some are more ‘friends of friends’, or people I follow because I am interested in what they say or do. Some are ‘following’ me because of my posts and interests, including Alone Rangers.
But how many of these ‘friends’ are actually active? I’ve been on Facebook for many years. I even had a trawl through the list a while ago and unfriended a bunch whose names I simply didn’t recognise. I have no memory of the people or of interactions that might have led us to be conjoined. How many friends on social media do you have that honestly are zombie connections - perhaps once were valid but now are lifeless? Yet you are seeing their photos from their Thailand holiday this week?
In recent years, I have, perhaps for the first time in my life, discovered connections with substance, rather than those with just a thin veneer of connection. A ‘like’ on social media is not the same as saying “I like you” to someone’s face; clicking the button is a low-effort signal. It’s even worse when it’s some celebrity or influencer, they want your connection and likes because for almost all of them it adds commercial value to whatever they are selling, whether it’s makeup, crypto schemes or streams of their latest song or movie. These are completely one-sided relationships - and we’re on the valueless side.
The reality is that many friendships are contextual. They are built on the “side-by-side” nature of shared activities or life stages. When the context changes, when you leave that job, finish school, or move to another city, there’s no structural integrity to survive the transition.
Perhaps we should view this drifting not as a failing, but as a form of necessary social pruning - just like when I trimmed my social media friends. We have a finite amount of emotional energy. To be a good human to the people currently in our inner circle, we must sometimes allow other connections to move to the outer rings and then fall away completely.
A friendship that lasted for a period of time was not a failure because it didn’t last a lifetime. It was simply a relationship with a natural shelf life. This is how I view my ‘work friends’, people I spent time with, enjoyed their company, but have now moved on from.
We need to change our perspective. We all have a history; some friendships may be transitory, but we can still feel a sense of gratitude for what they brought to our lives and the role they played, without taking on any guilt for the relationships ending.