Get Your Friends on Your Calendar

One day you eat, sleep, and breathe what your best friend is doing. You have double sleepovers on the weekends and, in your seldom time spent apart, you are texting and Facetiming every minute. 

No decision got made without running it through your best friend. Not your outfit, Friday night plan, or boyfriend. 

And then the next day, you find yourself meeting your best friend for dinner once a month, having a powwow, and then going home. 

My question is what happened in the in between. 

I remember the first time I left dinner with my friend and it felt different. We weren’t dying laughing over inside jokes anymore, we were discussing internships and workout schedules. 

Tears ran down my face as I drove home. Not because anything was bad – it was a great dinner. Not because our friendship was anything less than it was, because it wasn’t. 

It was almost as if I was mourning a friendship that had just changed. 

As I have gotten older, most of my friendships have changed. Each of us have matured in our own ways, blossoming into a person that is truly our own and uninfluenced by friends. We don’t rely on each other to help make decisions anymore. 

A lot of my friends have their guards up. They don’t want to be bogged down by friends' opinions of what they are doing with their life, so they keep to themselves. They don’t want to be hurt by another friend, so they avoid making new ones. They don’t want to be influenced the wrong way, so they cut their friends off all together. 

Why is it that way? 

At what point did it become that we are supposed to be unaffected by our friends? 

One of my friends hurt my feelings about a month ago. What did I do? Avoided her. Why? Because, for some reason, it felt embarrassing to tell her that she affected me that badly. 

Our friends are some of our deepest relationships we have in life and, like it or not, they have strong potential to hurt us. Recently, to me, it seems like people don’t want to deal with the negative emotions that having a friend entails at times (sadness, anger, hurt, left out, etc.) so they decide to ditch the concept altogether. 

And then do you know what we do, girls? We start to rely too much on our boyfriends. And we know how that goes. 

There are many great roles a boy can play in our lives, but being relatable is not one. Boys and girls simply think differently, so when you isolate yourself from your friends and rely on him to hold both the role of boyfriend and best friend, he will crash under the pressure. It is not something he can uphold, because we need girl time. 

We need to get everything off our chest in a 3 hour long conversation and feel related to, understood, and not alone in our emotions. 

And, other times, we just need a laugh. 

Or sometimes, you need an extra push. 

It’s commonly known that as you get older, your circle gets smaller.

While yes, I agree that the friends I would sit down with for a 3 hour vent-sesh are few, I think we went wrong in thinking that our entire circle needed to be small. 

Because the friend I would go to for relationship advice is not the same friend I would go to for work advice. 

And the friend I would go to for a good time is not the same friend I would go to to hold me accountable. 

But each friend serves their purpose in my life and I can nurture each friendship accordingly. 

The truth is that I need them all.

I am done with pretending that my friends are disposable, because they aren’t. The second they hurt you you can’t throw them away. When we don’t have them, we crumble. 

And, despite what you may think, you have them. 

Maybe you don’t know what went on in the “in between” of double-sleepovers and the rare catch-up powwow, but I can guarantee she is just as upset about it as you are.

Let’s normalize the fact that our friends hurt our feelings. Talk to her about it. 

Get your friend-time on the calendar. 

I promise, you need it. And so does she.