It’s Aug’25 and I am visiting India after living in the US for one year. While I was planning this trip I was excited to meet my old friends and spend some good time with them. I did meet my closest friends a few times and had fun with them.
Then there were other groups of friends which were older and not particularly close to me now. They asked me to meet them but that is yet to happen. While I was thinking about meeting my old friends, I had a realization – friendships are transient in nature.
At first, I did not like this thought. Somehow I felt it was wrong to feel this way about my old friends. However, after reflecting a lot about it I did find some meaningful insights that I’ll share below.
Friendships are built on context
When we’re young we have many groups of friends. We often imagine that these friendships will live forever. But in reality, that is not the case. Situational context is the foundation of almost all friendships.
Some common contexts are:
- The area we lived in during early childhood – childhood friends
- The school we went to – school friends
- The college we went to – college friends
- The job / work we did – colleagues, partners, work friends
When the context shifts, these friendships begin to drift apart. As we get older and life puts us into new contexts, no matter how hard we try to hold on, those old bonds start to loosen.
The awkward reconnection
Currently, I am noticing that while I am still in touch with my old friends mainly through messages, it has been decades since we shared the same context. Now when I think of meeting them I stare at one big question – what should we talk about? A question that I never had to worry about in the past when we were the bestest of friends.
In reality, we no longer share any common topics to discuss or have the same opinions, the same frustrations to vent or the same social circles to gossip about.
In the past, I have tried to reconnect with old friends and from my experience I can tell that it feels forced. We expect to enjoy their company and have the same kind of fun as we did in the past. In reality, all we do is touch shallow topics like sharing life updates that are not too deep. These “updates” quickly run out and we’re left with dealing with awkwardness.
To deal with with this awkwardness, we rely on the good old nostalgia. The only common thread left between us is the past we once shared. The conversation then falls back to recalling past memories and the fun times we spent together. But the thing is, after a couple of such reconnect meets, even nostalgia feels overdone. After all, we can enjoy recalling those past memories only so many times.
I think once we reach this point where even recalling past memories feels repetitive, we should realize that the friendship has lived its full life. It doesn’t mean it no longer holds any value, it definitely does but there is no point in trying to force it any longer.
What I now realize is that we have had different life experiences and our world-views have developed accordingly. Meeting my old friends often exposes those differences between us. I tend to notice flaws in them that I never saw before. Unknowingly, I start to judge them and I am sure they do too. I can clearly see how completely different their perspectives are and how these differences can easily lead to disagreements and conflicts between us.
Instead of facing this changed reality and creating a new dynamic between us, I think I will prefer to let those old friendships remain preserved in my memory. In my mind, I want them to remain the friends I loved and not strangers with whom I disagree now.
Accepting & moving on
When I started thinking about this, I felt guilty for not being a “true” friend. I felt bad about myself for not putting enough time and effort into my old friendships. I felt like a pretentious person for no longer enjoying their company. But now after enough reflection, I am accepting that there’s nothing wrong in outgrowing old friendships.
There’s no need to feel like I am betraying my old friends. There’s no point in trying hard to find the same joy from old friendships. We all have moved on in life and so should our friendships. The best thing to do now is to cherish those old memories and move on.
Making new friends
As we grow older, new contexts emerge in life. Like in my life, I moved to a different city in a foreign country. In that context, I created new friendships. I currently share my joys, stories, struggles, jokes with these new set of friends. Everything feels relatable with them because we’re in the same boat right now. I am creating new memories with them.
However, I am now fully aware of the fact that as I grow older, there will be newer contexts in life like parenting, new cities, etc. My current friendships, like my old ones will also drift away once the context changes. So I am going to focus on enjoying my current context to the fullest as long as it lasts.
Life-long friendships?
Okay so I now wonder if life-long friendships even exist? I think most don’t. The ones that do are the ones that you intentionally choose to sustain. In such friendships, the foundation has to move from context to intention. Context driven friendships are easy to maintain while intentional friendships are hard.
Such intentional friendships like all other meaningful relationships, require a lot of dedicated effort to make them work and the most important part is that the intention has to come from both sides. These friendships are like the family you choose. So you have to be careful about which ones you want to keep around.
Maintaining these friendships require active work like taking time out to meet each other, talking on phone every now and then, discussing on deeper life topics, scheduling trips, dinners and other activities together, etc. You can’t expect such relationships to thrive on auto pilot mode like the ones driven by context. It demands constant nurturing by putting in the hard work and prioritizing it as an important part of your life.
Family bonds are permanent, or not?
While thinking about intentional friendships, I also thought about my family bonds: parents, elders, cousins, extended relatives, etc. What I realized (I may be wrong in the future) is that unlike friendships, family bonds don’t need context to survive.
Family bonds are based on the foundations of societal and religious structures. For example, in most religions there are specific festivals and traditional rituals that constantly keep these relationships active. We also tend to celebrate major life events and functions with our families that help to reinforce those bonds.
May be in the future I might like to take a deep dive into the dynamics of family bonds. That’s a story for another day. For now, I am happy to have my acceptance about outgrowing old friendships and embracing new ones.
