Today I’m answering a reader submitted question about friendship. Thank you to The Messy Millennial for this rich and beautiful inquiry. I’m dividing the response into two parts; today’s post details some approaches to navigating shifts in friendship. Next week’s post will give more tactical suggestions for creating deeper richness in friendship.
If you want to submit a question, I’d love to hear from you. You can submit anonymously here. Or DM on Substack:
The Messy Millennial's Question: I’d love to hear your thoughts around friendship. Specifically around these questions:
1. How do you navigate your emotions as you watch friends move on to different chapters in their life?
2. How do you navigate the friendship itself changing? Has it changed for you?
I’m in a phase of my life where friendship has been a very important theme. I’d be curious to hear how other women in similar situations deal with this.
I’ve lived in NYC for 7.5 years and friendships are constantly in flux. My friend met her husband on her 2nd swipe and she’s gone on to have 2 kids. I’ve felt her focus shift as it rightfully should and will, but in my caution to be understanding I’ve also distanced myself.
That distance has risen from the nature of our friendship changed and me having certain feelings about not having the milestones I simply took for granted I’d have by now.
I’m curious how women in similar situations have navigated this. So it’s not about wanting more friendships. That seems something to perpetually work at given the nature of NYC. It’s the friendships themselves changing. It’s craving that richness in our bond that seems to only be allowed for friends in similar positions. I don’t know the answers to these. Rather than answers I think there are “approaches” and I wonder what the approach is for other women.
Before I dive into the approaches, I want to acknowledge how deeply painful it is to be single for long periods of time when you don’t want to be and then watch your friend get the exact thing you’ve been longing for.
The therapist Lori Gottlieb was asked by an “unhappily single person” if she could skip her friend’s wedding because “loneliness and heartbreak have been near constants in my adult life”. In part of the response Lori says “Interestingly, many people have an easier time accessing compassion for a woman struggling with infertility who chooses not to attend a friend’s baby shower than for a woman struggling with her singleness who chooses not to attend a friend’s wedding.” I’ve found that to be true. For whatever reason, our culture has less empathy for singleness. Which is weird, since our culture deeply values being partnered…
I have also felt left behind at times and there have been moments when it has felt like my friends have “moved on,” but I want to interrogate that premise for both of us.
I’ve watched friends get engaged and married. I’ve gone to engagement parties, bridal showers, bachelorette trips, weddings and baby showers. I’ve also watched them get divorced. I’ve watched them struggle with infertility. I’ve watched them get cancer. I’ve watched them get fired. I’ve watched them realize maybe they chose the wrong partner. I’ve watched one friend feel deeply alone in her marriage while simultaneously another single friend is having a transcendent sexual experience. I’ve watched them be showered in love. I’ve watched them be cheated on. All of that is to say—the married friends didn’t cross an imaginary finish line while the single ones stayed stuck on a never-ending race track. It’s all such a mixed bag.
One of the things that’s landed more deeply with me as I’ve gotten older is the seasonality to everything. There are seasons of closeness with certain people and seasons of distance. There are seasons where it feels like everything is going right, and others where everything is going wrong. There are seasons where relationships are thriving and career seems stagnant. And then the seasons change and suddenly relationships are a struggle and career is thriving. As humans, we’re bad at internalizing that whatever we’re experiencing in the present moment will in fact change even though we logically know that to be the case. Maybe in this season you’re unhappily single and your friend is happily married with two children. Maybe in the next season you’re deeply in love and she’s hit a rough patch in her marriage. Who knows.
And of course, there’s the chokehold that the marriage industrial complex has on young women; reinforcing that her crowning achievement is the day she’s chosen by a man. Now that engagement and wedding content is such a massive vehicle for follower growth and account engagement on social media, that feeling has only intensified and become more pervasive. There’s an underlying sense, especially in your twenties, that the women who get married “first” have won the race in some way. But what actually plays out, behind the veneer of social media, is so many more endings to the story than just ‘happily ever after’. I say all this partly to continue to dismantle for myself the societal association that married = good and single = bad.
So, how do I navigate my emotions and shifts in friendship -
Feel The Feelings
Sometimes I think I’ve let myself feel my emotions because I’ve felt low-grade shitty for a long period of time. But then I really go into the darkest part of my feelings and my deepest fears, which usually involves a lot of ugly crying. And then, and only then, that state of depression, or low grade shittiness, finally shifts and I can move out of it. As they say—what we resist, persists.
It sounds like maybe you haven’t told your friend how deeply painful it is for you to be single. Don’t carry that sadness alone, share it. Let her hold it with you. You said you’re craving a richness in your bond. This is exactly how you create richness, by vulnerably sharing what’s actually going on for you. And my guess is that she probably has some complicated feelings about being a new mother, which she would probably really appreciate having a friend for.
Emotions are messengers; the wisdom that jealousy and envy hold for us is like a metal detector that’s found treasure. It’s like This! Here! This is what you want! Pay attention! We don’t envy things we don’t want for ourselves. That particular messenger stings on arrival and often remains sore, but I try to bring myself back to that acknowledgement of “Ok, ok, I hear you. This is something I deeply want. But if they can have it, so can I.”
There’s a concept in To Be Magnetic, that in order to manifest the things you want, you need to surround yourself with expanders: people similar to you that have the things that you want, so that your brain knows it’s possible for you too. So great work, you’ve found some expanders.
Be Aware of The Season You’re In
When I was 24, my dad died very suddenly. We were extremely close and losing him was my worst fear. For the rest of my twenties I walked around in a living coma, just going through the motions. My friends held me so lovingly during that time and let me be in my grief without asking anything of me. I’ve been blessed to have friendships with those chosen sisters since I was 12 and additional ones since college. I’m pretty sure I gave nothing to my friendships during that time and I was also miserable to be around. Not only did they not hold it against me, but they continued to show up for me, until I slowly started to come back to myself.
Now, I’m in a chapter of my life where I have a lot more to give in many ways—more money, more time and more emotional capacity. Particularly with my friends who have young children, I’ll take care of their kids, I’ll be the one to fly and see them, I’ll send them elaborate gifts. I have the capacity for more of the heavy lifting in my friendships. I’m sure at some point that balance will fluctuate again. So yes—my friendships have changed. I’ve changed. My friends have changed. In the (hopefully) long arc of a friendship, it’s going to have all kinds of seasons.
Replace scorekeeping in the friendship with an internal commitment to friendship integrity.
Being in friendship integrity looks like this to me:
Understanding what season you are in and the bandwidth you have.
Understanding what season they are in and checking on their needs. Don’t assume you know what their inner reality is at the moment.
Giving generously within your current capacity. Giving generously could look like long phone calls or daily text check-ins.
When you don’t have capacity, communicating directly how you want to be loved and cared for. Don’t sulk or disappear.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had moments of feeling neglected by a friend, only to call them and realize they’re absolutely drowning. I was so consumed in my own pity party that I didn’t realize they were probably feeling just as unsupported by me.
Don’t Make The Acute Chronic
In my late twenties, I was the most depressed I’ve ever felt about being single. On top of not having the partner I so desperately craved, I had internalized being single as not being good enough, skinny enough, pretty enough—you name it; I wasn’t enough. During that time, I said no to going on a couples ski trip with two of my best friends because I couldn’t handle being around a group of couples. In hindsight, I regret letting the one thing I didn’t have take me away from the other amazing things in my life. There are acute periods of sadness where I think it’s responsible caretaking to not attend something. But try not to make the acute chronic.
I’d love to hear how you’ve navigated shifts in friendship:
In Case You Missed It
I wrote about leaving a relationship that I wanted to be a life story. And then my ex responded, which went viral. Highly recommend you stay for the comment section of that piece.
I was given a Soul Code on my 40th birthday, which contained my worst fear.
A step by step exercise to finding your purpose, what energizes you, qualities to look for in a partner and qualities to cultivate in yourself for partnership.
I’d Love to Hear from You
I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to say hi and tell me what about dating and relationships is on your mind right now.
You can always submit a topic or a specific question, anonymously, here. Please note I will potentially publish the actual question in a future Substack.
You can send me a DM:
hi Sara!
As you can imagine I have so many things I want to say to this piece but I appreciate you taking the time to respond to my question!