No one really prepares you for this part of growing up. The part where friendships don’t end with fights or drama… they just slowly fade. One day, you’re talking every day, sharing everything, feeling like you’ve found “your people.” And then, without realising it, things start changing. Replies get slower. Conversations feel forced. Plans stop happening. And you don’t even know when it started.

The hardest part is that nothing “bad” happened. There’s no clear reason to walk away, but something just doesn’t feel the same anymore. And so you keep holding on, hoping it’ll go back to how it used to be. But it doesn’t. Because the truth is, people grow. Priorities change. The version of you that connected so deeply with them… isn’t the same anymore. And neither are they. And that’s not a failure.

We’ve been taught that real friendships are supposed to last forever. That if they don’t, something went wrong. But maybe that’s not true. Maybe some friendships are meant for a phase. A version of you. A time in your life that you needed them — and they needed you.

Letting go doesn’t always mean cutting people off. Sometimes it just means accepting that things have changed. And that holding on too tightly only makes it harder. Because not every friendship is meant to last forever. But that doesn’t make it any less real, while it did.