The Great Friendship Shift of Your Early 20s

I don’t miss the old days. I don’t mourn over my teenage years nor yearn to reignite old friendships. Leaving town kind of has that effect on you – you either passively begin to notice or actually sit down and evaluate your friendships. Were you really ever destined to be ‘best friends forever’ or was it just convenient to believe so at the time?

I’ve spoken to friends around the globe. All of us are now in our early 20s (or beyond) and it seems that we’re all faced with the same thoughts – why do we hold on to so many unnecessary friendships? We’ve all experienced this ‘friendship epiphany’ of sorts where we’ve realised that if you don’t want to be friends with someone, you literally don’t have to.

Some friends we have left behind in our home towns as we’ve gone off to university, only to return and find we have nothing in common with them anymore. Some friends, after having met new people and experienced different definitions of friendship, leave us questioning the validity of our relationship with them. There are those, such as old school acquaintances, that we were never really friends with from the start, but we held onto them for the sake of our social lives and there are some that still want teenage drama, constantly harping on about what Betty BadGirl did in 2012, whoever she was. Others, through no fault of theirs or our own, have simply become irrelevant to us.

Our early twenties are the years when we attempt to build the foundations for our future – whether that means giving ourselves a total attitude makeover, seeking valuable opportunities and experiences, building a healthy lifestyle or even pursuing a stable love life. It’s the time for us to be selfish and to absolutely not apologise for doing so.

At this stage in life, we’re less reliant on having friends. We’re learning to cope in the big bad world without having somebody to hold our hand, and we seldom have the energy to be holding theirs either. We’re more forgiving of the friends we keep because we’re past the naive stage of thinking they’re sparkling rainbow unicorns that can do no wrong. Above all, we’re more willing to cut out anybody who we don’t feel comfortable with, and we don’t need an explanation.

I was always a people-pleaser, the kind of person that wants to be on good terms with everyone and will work tirelessly to patch things up when things go wrong, no matter how much somebody had hurt me. It was exhausting, and I would gain very little reward for the effort – in fact, it had me seen as a total pushover, adding to more stress as people continually took advantage of me. The day I started to avoid these toxic people was the day I started to feel better, both towards them and within myself.

‘Intentional drifting’ is how I like to see it. Not too far off from Gwyneth Paltrow’s term ‘conscious uncoupling’, but instead applied to old friends and acquaintances. You don’t meet up with them so often, and then you don’t speak to them as much and then when it feels right, you remove them from all forms of contact. It feels negative at first, but in time you feel great, with a new found mental clarity due to no longer having your brain clogged with concern over all these people in your life.

Don’t hesitate over those unfollow/unfriend buttons on social media. If you’re even thinking about cutting someone out, you know that you probably should. If you’re the one getting cut out by old friends, try to understand that it’s better than them secretly harbouring negative feelings toward you. Take it as a positive – now you too can move on from them and go on to live a satisfying decade of personal fulfillment!