GUEST POST: The gradual loss of a friendship...

Amy Grier on the sadness, grief but also (whisper it)… relief, of accepting the death of a friendship group...

Photo by roland deason on Unsplash

When we’ve lost something, we try to find it again. We rarely let things go. Nostalgia, or a sense of failure, can often hold us in the past, stuck in a loop, as we try to capture who we once were.

I certainly used to feel this way about friendships, I’d look back on the people I had lost and wonder ‘what if,’ browsing through my old Facebook albums and then click through their lives now, trying to place myself within them. But, as I get older, I’ve begun to realise that just because something doesn’t last, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t special. That it didn’t matter. Time passes, people change and suddenly, as Amy says in the below, you find yourself making small talk with people you’ve known for decades.

There was so much of this piece I could relate to (I also had a ‘thread’ that I said I would make into a book one day!) and comment on, but I want to hand over to Amy’s beautiful, and wise words. So here (as part of my new series, exploring different forms of grief and loss) the writer Amy Grier looks back on a faded friendship and recognises the freedom in letting people go…

I can still remember the exact moment our Facebook thread was set up. We’d just left university, a group of ten women who’d come together over three years at Cardiff University. There, we’d bonded over our shared passion for Cherry Lambrini, Hollyoaks omnibuses and chips, cheese and gravy.

In 2008, we were let loose on adult life. I moved back to my home in London, and a few of them followed for work soon after. ‘The Thread’ as it was (and still is) called became a virtual portal to the shared physical space we once had with each other in the impossibly close quarters at uni. It started on Facebook and migrated over to WhatsApp, but on there, as months became years, we shared everything. The closing of old loves, the finding of new ones. Job interviews, work fails and travel plans. We planned trips away together and nights out. Those of us in London met up all the time, hazy hilarious nights fuelled by cheap white wine and the stamina only twenty something women with their first proper pay cheques can muster. The Thread housed all our hopes, dreams, loves and losses. I used to joke that one day I’d print it all out and create a memoire of our lives together. Of course back then, I couldn’t picture a time when those lives wouldn’t still be so intertwined. When I wouldn’t know the intricacies of their lives, and they wouldn’t know a single thing about mine.

The writer in her university years

Years passed, and everything and nothing changed. One by one, a few of the group got married, and we were a vital part of each wedding, a true wolfpack of female she-banshees with our own language, rituals, games and feeding patterns. The more wild stories (like the time we all got barred from our favourite bar after simultaneously wreaking havoc, minesweeping, crashing the DJ booth, stealing a tray of someone else’s birthday cupcakes and nearly setting the place on fire with those indoor sparklers propped up in prosecco bottles) were now peppered with more serious life events. Parental illness. Breakups. Work traumas. Money worries. The terrifying feeling of knowing that at any moment, everyone might realise you’re only playing the part of someone with their shit together. The collective power of ten women’s ambitions, our bravado, but also terror that none of it might work out, was potent. That thread, those women, were how I knew I wasn’t alone in this world.  

Of course as with any group that large, there were some of us that were closer than others. But there were no jealousies, no petty infights. Just a shared camaraderie, history and understanding of the roles we played in each other’s lives. We were the lucky ones, we told ourselves. We would not lose touch. We were different.

I’m really not sure if it was the pandemic, the babies or the inevitable early 30s exodus out of London that sped up our demise. None of them would have been enough on their own, perhaps, but combined they were fatal.

Whilst the weddings were a pack sport, the babies weren’t. They signalled the start of a new elite side club that only certain members of our group could join. Soon The Thread became a mass of black and white sonogram pictures. Then chubby red cheeked baby photos. There was loss and division within this time too. Some horrific grief which I will not go into here as it’s not my story to tell. Shit well and truly got real for this group, and whilst we’d always been there for each other, some distances – be they emotional or geographic – are just too vast to navigate.

There was a minor falling out between myself and one of the other girls. Minor to her I think, not minor to me, as it coincided with the catastrophic breakdown of my five year relationship. I was distraught, alone, I had to move in with my mum. And now there were visible cracks in the walls of one of my safe houses. Even though this incident was very clearly just between me and just one other of the ten, it made me look more closely at the friendship group as a whole. And I wasn’t sure about what I saw.

Then the pandemic happened. I remember one painfully awkward Zoom call we all had early on. I was in a terrible headspace, living alone, single, 35 years old, desperate for a family and only just a year out of that breakup. I should never have taken that call, or I should have been more open about what I was really feeling. But I didn’t have the language. Not for them and not at that time.

But as everyone made conversation about how hard it was living with young kids, I felt myself physically checking out of my friendship group. When it came round for them to ask me questions (which took an embarrassingly long time for them to do), they were all about work. As if any other topic in my life was too unknown, too scary, for them to acknowledge. For the first time I felt like I was making small talk with people I’d known for over a decade.

It's a strange feeling, mentally breaking up with nine people at once, and not telling them you’ve done so, but looking back I think that’s what happened. That was the moment our friendship was put on life support. Technically, it’s still alive, but the lights aren’t on. For me at least. Some deaths are dramatic, bloody, messy affairs. Some are quiet, slow marches into nothingness. This is the latter. It’s sad, but is it wrong to admit that it's also…ok? When I first realised what was happening, when those beginning fissures began to show, I was devasted. Hurt. I didn’t know if I was doing or feeling the right thing. I swung wildly between a few different stages of grief – denial (characterised by randomly posting ‘witty’ asides into the thread), anger, reckoning (maybe if I just told them how I really felt we’d start afresh?). But now I’m at acceptance. Friendships they say last a reason, season or a lifetime. Me and my uni girls met for a reason. We stayed for a season. Those formative years from university into your early thirties are, to me, a lifetime of their own. This friendship has become the elderly relative, that when they eventually pass, quietly in their sleep with their loved ones around them, people say ‘they had a good run’.

We had a good run. There was love and laugher and the full spectrum of human emotion there. But to keep it alive out of some misplaced sense of duty and shared history would be cruel. Of course, there is grief there. Grief for the younger versions of ourselves and the expectations they had for this friendship. Grief for losing the people who bore first-hand witness to the most exciting, exhilarating, and terrifying period of my life. Anyone who has been through something similar will know the fear that if you lose the people you made the memory with – you lose the memory or the right to remember it at all. Friendships are and always will be our most important social narrators. The things that validate and make sense of the paintball clusterfuck of adult life. But no, just because we’re not friends now doesn’t mean it wasn’t real then. If anything it makes those memories all the more vivid. Like a fossil crystalised in rock, those times will stay preserved exactly as they were – safe from erosion or infiltration by future memories layered on top.

I’m still in The Thread. I probably won’t be for ever. After all,  some threads are so strong when woven together, that they make tapestries that survive for thousands of years. Other threads serve a more transient purpose, and eventually unravel or break. I have been picking at the corner of this friendship thread for a long time. And now it’s finally time for me to walk away.

Wasn’t that beautiful? I am lucky enough to have Amy as a friend, and I love the chats we have about friendship and how powerful, and impactful, friends can be on who we are. To follow her work, and read more of her writing, follow her on Instagram.

I’m also so interested in how, as we get older, our friendships shift, and sometimes those shifts can either cement, or fracture us… Have you found a friendship fading recently? Let me know in the comments. And, as always, thank you for your support.

Here’s some older pieces, exploring friendship and similar themes, in case you missed them…

When you want to time hop back to your old self

What do you do when your best friend moves to the other side of the world?

It’s OK to grieve a friendship that’s changed, Ruby Warrington on how being child free impacted her friendships