The Loneliness of Being the Friend Who Holds Everyone Together One of the strangest parts of getting older is realizing that some of your closest friendships existed only because you made sure they did. I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship lately, particularly how much it changes as you get older. There are so many conversations about romantic relationships, choosing the right partner, knowing when to leave, and understanding what you deserve, but I don’t think we spend nearly enough time talking about the heartbreak that can come from friendship. And in some ways, I think friendship heartbreak can be more confusing because nobody really teaches us what to do when a friendship starts falling apart. There’s usually no big argument. Nobody sits you down and tells you they don’t want to be friends anymore. Sometimes you realize you haven’t spoken to someone in six months, and the last five conversations were all initiated by you. You start thinking about all the birthdays you remembered, the dinners you organized, the random messages you sent because something reminded you of them. Not because you expected anything in return, but because that’s what friendship looked like to you. Then life gets busy, or you’re going through something yourself, and you don’t have the same energy to maintain every relationship. You stop calling as much. You forget to send the usual check-in message. You assume someone will eventually reach out and ask how you’re doing. And sometimes, nobody does. I think that’s one of those realizations that can really change how you see a relationship. You start wondering whether you were actually as close as you thought, or whether you had simply become very good at keeping the friendship going. I think our 30s expose things we could ignore in our 20s When I think about friendship in my 20s, so much of it was built around access. You had friends from university, people you worked with, roommates, friends of friends, and people you could randomly meet for drinks on a Thursday night. You didn’t necessarily need to be intentional about seeing each other because your lives naturally overlapped. But your 30s are different. People start getting married, having children, moving countries, building careers, and dealing with responsibilities that didn’t exist ten years earlier. Even finding a date for dinner can sometimes require three weeks of planning. I don’t think this means people suddenly become bad friends. I actually think most people are trying their best to manage their lives. But I do think this stage of adulthood forces you to look at your relationships differently. You start noticing who makes time for you when it isn’t convenient. You notice who remembers what you’ve been going through, who follows up on something you mentioned weeks ago, and who reaches out simply because they want to know how you are. You also start noticing the friendships where you seem to be doing most of the work. And maybe the harder realization is that you’ve been doing it for so long that the other person doesn’t even recognize there’s an imbalance. They’ve never really had to think about calling you because you’ve always called them. They’ve never had to plan anything because you’re the person who makes the reservations. They’ve never had to ask when they’ll see you next because you’ve already put something on the calendar. Someone can genuinely care about you and still get very comfortable with you carrying the relationship. I think that’s where things get complicated. There’s something about being the dependable friend I have a theory that women who are used to being the dependable person in their families, careers, and relationships often end up playing the exact same role in their friendships. They’re the people everyone comes to for advice. They know how to fix things, introduce people, organize an event, remember an important date, or make someone feel better after a terrible week. And the interesting thing is that most of them genuinely enjoy being that person. I don’t think every woman who’s constantly giving is secretly resentful. Sometimes you really do love taking care of people. You enjoy creating experiences. You like knowing that the people in your life feel supported. But I wonder how many of us have become so accustomed to being the person everyone depends on that we’ve never really considered what happens when we’re the ones who need support. What happens when you’re going through a difficult season and don’t have the emotional capacity to check on everyone else? Do your friends know how to show up for you? Do they even know when something is wrong? Or have you spent so many years being the person who has everything together that people assume you don’t need the same care you’ve been giving them? I think this is especially interesting because being needed can make you feel very connected to people. You know their problems, their fears, their family situations, and all the complicated things happening behind the scenes. But knowing everything about someone doesn’t necessarily mean they know much about what’s happening with you. You can be deeply involved in someone’s life and still feel strangely alone in the relationship. And I wonder how many women are only beginning to recognize that now. But I also think we have to be careful about the friendship audit Something I’ve noticed online is that whenever the topic of one-sided friendships comes up, the immediate advice is to stop calling people and see who reaches out. And I understand the temptation because sometimes you really do want to know who would make an effort if you weren’t constantly initiating. But I don’t think you can measure every friendship that way. Some people are terrible at texting but will get on a plane if you need them. Some people are dealing with things they haven’t shared. Others genuinely don’t realize that you’ve been feeling neglected because you’ve never told them. I’ve also realized that people express care differently. You might be someone who checks in every week, while your friend might be someone who makes sure she’s physically present during important moments in your life. Neither approach is automatically better. I think the more important question is whether both people feel responsible for maintaining the friendship. And if there’s an imbalance, can you actually talk about it? I wonder how many friendships we could save if we were more willing to have uncomfortable conversations instead of quietly withdrawing and expecting the other person to figure out what happened. Sometimes telling a friend, “I miss you, and I feel like I’m always the one trying to make plans,” might open a conversation you’ve both needed to have. Other times, you might have that conversation and realize that nothing really changes. And I think that’s important information too. Because there’s a difference between someone who doesn’t know you need more from them and someone who knows but isn’t willing to make the effort. The friendships that end without anyone saying goodbye I think one of the saddest things about growing older is realizing that you can lose people without ever having a falling-out. Some friendships were once such a huge part of your life that you couldn’t imagine going a week without speaking to that person. They knew everything about you. They were there for the embarrassing dating stories, the career disappointments, the questionable decisions, and the moments when you genuinely had no idea what you were doing with your life. Then somewhere along the way, things changed. Maybe one of you moved. Maybe someone got married or became a parent. Maybe your lives simply started moving in different directions. At first, you keep trying to maintain what you had. You make plans, promise to visit, and tell each other you’ll catch up soon. Eventually, months pass between conversations. And one day, you see something important happening in their life on Instagram and realize that you didn’t know anything about it. I think that brings a kind of grief, even when nobody has done anything wrong. You’re not necessarily angry with the person. You might still love them. If you ran into each other tomorrow, you’d probably spend hours laughing about old memories. But you also know that the relationship isn’t what it used to be. I’ve been thinking about how difficult it can be to accept that someone can have been incredibly important to one version of your life without necessarily having the same place in your life today. We tend to think that if a friendship was real, it should last forever in exactly the same form. But I’m not sure that’s realistic. Some people were essential to who we were at 25, but they may not be the people we naturally turn to at 38 or 45. That doesn’t erase what they meant to us. I think part of maturity is learning to appreciate certain relationships for what they were without constantly trying to recreate something that no longer exists. And sometimes that means letting a friendship become more casual rather than forcing it to stay as intimate as it once was. What I want from friendship now The older I get, the less interested I am in having a large circle of friends just for its own sake. I still love meeting people. I love dinner parties, interesting conversations, and friendships where you can spend hours talking about absolutely everything. But I think I’ve become much more aware of how I feel in certain relationships. There are people you can spend an entire evening with and leave feeling completely energized. You don’t have to think too much about what you say. You can talk about something wonderful happening in your life without worrying about how it will be received, and you can also admit that things are difficult without feeling like you’re bringing down the mood
