The changing nature of friendship

Over the years our friends come and go. As we move professionally, geographically and as we are busy and focused on supporting young families and careers, regular contacts become more difficult and originally strong friendships may gradually fade away, eventually replaced by new ones as we seem to have only room for a limited number of true, deep relationships. 

In friendship quality and quantity have very little room to coexist! True, friendships can be maintained but at a cost commensurate with the changes listed previously, but it’s often a very hard balancing act. It takes dedication, time, patience, tolerance and a will to build or re-build bridges. Forgetting or letting things slide into the past and oblivion is a lot easier, and as time progresses it becomes the default option for a vast majority of people. 

Then, there’s the unavoidable change in people, there are also arguments that arm or kill friendships; these can be hard to forget or forgive. Along the way, life experiences can make us diverge or get closer from one another, so it’s not surprising that someone who was a great friend in the past doesn’t fit anymore in our life, and conversely someone who was not necessarily close to us, suddenly reveal themselves after many years. 

So friendships are a living organism that can only last, mature and improve if we work hard on it, and it seems to me that the farther along we get into our lives, these continued efforts are very much worth their while.