Some friendships do not end because love disappears. They change because life does. We grow into different people, carry different responsibilities, and inhabit different worlds. Sometimes we drift so gradually that we don’t even notice it happening until one day we realise the person who once knew everything about us now knows only the highlights we choose to share online.
I don’t remember saying goodbye to my childhood friends. There wasn’t a fight. No misunderstanding. No dramatic ending that could explain why the people I spent almost every day with for more than a decade slowly disappeared from my everyday life.
We finished high school, and then life happened. Some stayed in our hometown. Others moved to different cities. I left Nepal altogether.
University introduced new friendships, work brought different circles, and later, moving across countries reshaped my world yet again. Somewhere along the way, the girls who knew every version of my younger self became people I now occasionally see through photographs on social media.
Sometimes I pause on those pictures. I recognise every face but I no longer know the stories behind their smiles. I don’t know what keeps them awake at night, what dreams they are chasing, or how life has unfolded for them. And if we were to meet today, I often wonder whether we would know where to begin.
As the years passed, I noticed the same thing happening again in different ways. Marriage changed friendships for many women around me. Some friendships naturally deepened, while others gently faded as priorities shifted, families grew, responsibilities multiplied, and different lives demanded different versions of us. The women who once met every weekend suddenly needed weeks to find a common date. Conversations that once flowed effortlessly became occasional check-ins filled with, “We should meet soon.”
For a long time, I thought friendship endings happened only when something went wrong. Someone lied. Someone betrayed trust. Someone walked away. Now I think differently.
Some friendships do not end because love disappears. They change because life does. We grow into different people, carry different responsibilities, and inhabit different worlds. Sometimes we drift so gradually that we don’t even notice it happening until one day we realise the person who once knew everything about us now knows only the highlights we choose to share online.
And, I guess, this is one of the heartbreaks we talk about the least. And it hurts because friendship is where so much of our emotional life unfolds. Our friends are often the first people we call after receiving good news. They are the ones who witness our awkward teenage years, celebrate our first achievements, sit beside us through heartbreaks, and laugh at stories that no one else would understand. They become living archives of who we once were.
When those friendships change, we are grieving both the person and the version of ourselves that existed within that relationship. The friend who knew me at sixteen remembers a girl whose biggest worry was passing her exams. Another remembers the excitement of my first job. Someone else carries memories of long conversations over endless cups of tea in Itahari before life scattered us across different countries. Those versions of me still exist in their memories, even though the woman I am today has changed in countless ways.
For so many of us, drifting apart can feel strangely disorienting. Yet friendship loss rarely receives the recognition we give to other forms of grief. There are no rituals for it. No one tells us it is okay to mourn a friend who is still alive but no longer part of our everyday life. Instead, we often dismiss our feelings with phrases like, “That’s just adulthood,” or “People naturally drift apart.”
They do. But understanding why something happens does not make it hurt any less.
Psychologists describe the idea of ambiguous loss, a form of grief that lacks a clear ending or closure. It helps explain why changing friendships can feel so emotionally complicated. The person has not disappeared. You may still exchange birthday wishes or occasionally react to each other’s social media posts. Yet the intimacy that once defined the relationship has faded.
Because there is no obvious ending, there is often no permission to grieve. Instead, we carry these small heartbreaks silently, convincing ourselves that they are too ordinary to deserve attention.
But emotional wellbeing is shaped not only by the crises that everyone sees. It is also shaped by the losses that change how connected we feel to ourselves and to others.
As human beings, we are wired for connection. Close relationships are considered among the strongest predictors of wellbeing, resilience, and even physical health. Friendships give us a sense of belonging, offer emotional safety, and remind us that we do not have to carry life’s challenges alone. When those relationships change, it is natural for us to experience sadness, confusion, or even loneliness. These emotions are not signs that we are weak or unwilling to move on; they are evidence that the relationship mattered.
The goal, then, is not to hold on to every friendship forever. It is to honour what each friendship gave us while allowing ourselves to grieve the chapters that have quietly come to an end.
