I have a few close friends; some that I see monthly, others that I see every couple weeks, and some I don’t see for several months. We are all adults who have our own busy lives, and luckily all my friends are very understanding of this. However, as we grow older our needs change, what we want/need in our lives is always shifting, and sometimes friends drift apart.

I struggle sometimes with what I am looking for and needing in a friendship, because of course I want to surround myself with positive people who are wanting to progress in life, but I also am not saying I never want people to express their emotions/feelings to me; I mean we all need to vent!

I guess I just don’t agree with a lot of my friends with certain things, but at the same time we are still able to see through those things and continue a regular friendship; I think more-so it comes down to that I feel like I cannot support a behavior that I do not agree with. But then I’m also like, I can ignore that and remember that everything happens for a reason/it is what it is.

I guess that’s where I struggle, as part of me is like “am I too judgemental with my friends who I don’t agree with?” or are they truly not good for my progress in life? I guess it comes down to, would I rather be alone than have them as friends? That gets hard too because I am a person who enjoys solitude, so it’s hard to say if I’d be cutting people off for the right reasons or not.

I had a best friend years ago, we were friends in high school and we were friends for a couple years after that. I called her my best friend, but in reality we never had any real conversations. One of the reasons we aren’t friends anymore was because I couldn’t deal with her immaturity anymore, but I had also been coming to a realization toward the end of our friendship that she never had her own opinions on anything, which made it hard for any real conversations to happen.

It felt like she just said what other people were saying, but had no idea why she was doing that or how she actually felt about it. She prioritized drinking/partying as well as taking pictures for social media. I’ll admit, I fell into that with her in that friendship; I was new to social media as my parents wouldn’t let me have Facebook until I was 16, and I enjoyed taking/posting pictures of myself having a good time with friends, and she was my best friend for that.

Over time she started disrespecting me, and I’d honestly usually let it go. She’d make fun of me, she’d talk all about her sex life but if I said anything about me and my boyfriend she’d gag and tell me to stop talking about it, but overall she had no respect for me whatsoever. The last straw was when I went to visit her at her college campus to celebrate my 21st birthday.

We celebrated a week after my birthday since her dad and I share a birthday, and I drove up to see her and she said we would have a girls night out drinking and we’d just stay at her sorority house that night. I met one of her other friends and we started bar crawling. At the last crowded bar there was a dance floor, and she wanted to go in and dance. I’m all for dancing with my girls so I said yes, but that quickly turned into her finding some guy to start grinding on. Mind you, I am in a committed relationship and had been for five years at that point, so I’m not out here trying to having dudes dance all over me.

So I exited the dance floor and hung out by the bar talked to a couple girls I met (you know how drunk girls always become friends? LOL), well eventually my “bff” comes out from the dance floor with that same dude she was all over, and she tells me she is going home with him. I am freshly 21 in a college town that I’m unfamiliar with, and she just told me she’s leaving me there. I asked her “where am I supposed to go??” and she gave me the code to her sorority house and left with this dude.

I called my boyfriend (mind you, it’s like 2am) and asked him to stay on the phone with me while I walked a couple blocks back to her place. He was infuriated of course, and I was too, but the alcohol likely helped to keep me more calm. I was very observant on my walk and truly just wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to get attacked/raped because you hear all these horror stories about college campuses. Luckily I made it to her place safely and have obviously lived to tell the tale, but safe to say that was basically the end of our friendship.

We did talk afterwards as she got mad at me that my boyfriend messaged her telling her she was a shit friend (which I didn’t know he was going to do), and she said that I didn’t want to be her friend because my boyfriend convinced me of that. Like no girl, you left me alone in the middle of the night in an unfamiliar area while we were celebrating MY BIRTHDAY! But once she was mad about that we had a text argument back and forth where I ended up just blocking her completely, and that was finally the end of a five year friendship.

The problem for me is that it took five years for me to realize that she was not a good friend to me, even when my boyfriend had been somewhat telling me that the whole time. He also says that about current friends, and my mom does too, which makes me feel like I am possibly just settling for friends again when I really don’t even need them. I don’t mean that in a malicious way, I more-so mean that I’ve grown to know and love myself a lot more over the last few years, and I am very content with being alone and having minimal friends.

I need to do some exploring within myself to see what it is that I am wanting/needing in my life when it comes to friends. As I grow older, my priorities are changing, life is changing, and sometimes you need to let certain people go to allow room for growth. I’ll be sitting with this for a while, as I feel I already have been. Please feel free to share your own story or advice in the comments, as maybe we can help each other.