Nobody Warns You How Hard Friendships Can Be in Your Twenties

I think one of the biggest scams of adulthood is that nobody tells you how hard friendships can be in your twenties, both to make and to keep.

When you're younger, making friends feels relatively straightforward. You're in the same classes, on the same sports teams, living in the same residence building, or seeing each other every day at school. Proximity does a lot of the work when it comes to building and maintaining friendships.

Then life happens.

People move away. They get into serious relationships. Work consumes all their time. They go back to school. They have kids. They disappear for three weeks and then text you like no time has passed.

Somehow, despite having more ways to stay connected than ever before, a lot of us feel lonelier.

I don't think we talk about this enough. We talk about breakups, dating, and family drama, but friendship changes can be just as painful.

Maybe you had a friend you used to talk to every day and now you can't remember the last time you had a real conversation. You still care about each other, but every time you try to make plans, one of you is busy. Maybe you've started feeling like you're putting more effort into the friendship than they are. That realization can feel surprisingly heavy.

One thing I've noticed about friendships in your twenties is that they often don't end with a fight. They usually end with distance. Not intentional distance, just life.

One person moves. One person starts a demanding job. One person gets into a relationship. Before you know it, the friendship that once felt effortless now requires scheduling three weeks in advance and hoping they won't cancel at the last minute.

The weird part is that nobody really teaches you how to grieve friendships.

If you go through a breakup, people check in on you. If a friendship slowly fades, you're often expected to move on and not make a big deal out of it.

But losing a friendship can hurt. Sometimes it hurts more than we expect.

It's not just that you miss the person. You miss the version of your life that existed when they were in it. You miss being 22 and staying out too late. You miss having someone who knew every detail of what was going on in your life. You miss who you were before everything got so complicated.

I also think a lot of people carry guilt when it comes to friendships. Guilt for not reaching out enough. Guilt for being too busy. Guilt for letting people drift away. Guilt for outgrowing friendships that once meant everything to them.

The reality is that relationships change as we change.

The friend who was exactly what you needed at 19 may not be the person you connect with at 29. That doesn't mean the friendship wasn't real. It doesn't mean it wasn't important. It just means you're both different people now, and that can be a difficult thing to accept.

I think many of us enter adulthood expecting our friendships to stay the same forever, and then we're surprised when they don't. The people who matter to you might still matter to you, but the relationship itself may look completely different than it once did.

Some friendships become occasional phone calls. Some become yearly catch-ups. Some become memories. And some deepen in ways you never expected.

If you're in your twenties and you've been feeling lonely, disconnected, or confused about your friendships lately, I want you to know that you're probably having a much more common experience than you think.

A lot of people are sitting at home wondering why making friends feels harder than it used to. They're missing friends they don't talk to anymore. They're questioning whether everyone else has some magical social life that they somehow missed out on. Spoiler alert: they probably don't.

Most people are figuring it out as they go.

Friendships in your twenties can be beautiful, but they can also be complicated, disappointing, unexpected, and sometimes heartbreaking.

That's not a sign that you're doing something wrong. It's just part of navigating a stage of life where everyone is growing, changing, and trying to find their place.

Including you.