When Longtime Friendships Fumble: How to Know Whether to Stay or Cut Loose
The best question to determine whether or not to stay or go
The internet is full of floppy-sloppy memes about long-term friendships and how wonderful they are. How they get better with age, all that.
True for some.
For others, you and I may find ourselves chafing, sometimes badly, with friendships that have continued past their due date.
Sometimes we make excuses. Shore them up with scaffolding even as the structure is so obviously not worth saving. While I can’t speak for you, I’ve been known to construct all kinds of excuses to hang on to a friendship, even as it costs me more and more of who I am in order to continue to participate.
For myself, I’ve been guilty of allowing a few of those continue, feeling awkward about ending them, and getting into the habit of calling up increasingly old memories of happier times in an awkward attempt to justify sticking around.
One particular person used to send me some of those memes in cards, a way to celebrate how long we’d been friends as opposed to whether or not our friendship had indeed flourished and evolved.
