I’m 36 years old, almost to 37.
About 4 months ago I got into a fight with my friends. We all had been friends for many years but certain problems had been bubbling for a while. I was the one who seemed the most hurt at the time and decided to step back from the friendships.
Nobody really fought to keep me or fix it. But we did decide to meet at a later date to talk it out.
Time passed, and my feelings shifted and then I was open to reconciling. In the meantime, however, my friends got more upset about the situation, and began to place all the blame on me.
At our meeting (which was about two months after the fight) I was pretty much decimated with all of the blame on me for what happened and hostility. A path forward as friends seemed impossible.
A month afterword, I texted them all (there are four of us in the friend group) and basically said I regretted not trying to fix things sooner, none of us will probably ever agree on what happened, and invited everyone to dinner if they wanted to try and put what happened behind us.
Dinner went well. Nobody mentioned the fight or the estrangement and it was a pleasant, catch-up session.
Because I was so thrilled that it went well, I glossed over the subtleties. I didn’t really clock at the dinner that whenever I mentioned meeting again, everyone was “open” but non-committal.
Since the dinner, nothing has changed in the friendship. There have been no texts, nobody has liked my social media posts and the guy of the group I liked the most won’t even view my “stories” even though I know he has been online.
It’s hitting me that we aren’t moving forward as friends anymore. I feel bereft. I always believed deep down we would find a way to be friends again…but I feel like that is no longer the case.
The tension and anger is gone…but what remains is just…indifference.
It’s painful not to be missed, and it’s painful to slowly start feeling forgotten. I’m becoming aware I will transition from “lifelong best friend” to “someone they used to know.”
Has anyone ever gone through this? I’m starting to realize I will probably live my life without these people in it…and I’m devastated by this.