It is said that "the only constant in life is change," and I definitely believe that to be true. It particularly holds true in terms of who we are as people, when it comes to personal growth and changes in our life circumstances.
Our lives will change!
One of the things people generally don't like very much is the fact that when your life circumstances change — or you successfully navigate a serious change in how you deal with life; a quantum leap in personal awareness and growth — you often also end up changing friends.
From a purely objective perspective, that is perhaps not so surprising since something you previously had in common with somebody else might have radically changed in such a way that whatever you used to connect over is now something that separates you instead.
This is something I have especially noticed in friends and acquaintances who have been struggling with some form of addiction, and when they succeed in changing their lives, the friends of their old life were not entirely happy about the situation.
However when you encounter a major change in your life circumstances you often end up discovering who your real friends are.
We have that old saying that ”I'll stand by you through thick and thin” but some folks end up shocked to learn that those are just words for some people in their ostensible friends circle.
I learned this the somewhat painful way when I went from working a corporate job to being self-employed. My new self-employment meant that my income was substantially lower than it was previously, so constant expensive weekend trips and happy hours and dinners out at fancy restaurants had to be part of my past.
It was a phase of my life during which I learned a lot about who turned out to simply be drinking buddies and who turned out to be genuine friends. Sadly, there were only a handful of people whom I continued to be friends with, while a larger number quietly disappeared into the woodwork with the unspoken words ”we're not really interested in hanging out with you anymore now that you're poor.”
When we make these major life changes we're often completely unprepared for the effect those changes will have on the people around us, and how they feel about us.
Groups of people — particularly groups of people who are friends — often work harder at maintaining the cohesiveness of the group itself than at pursuing the individual friendships with each member of the group.
I have previously written about a group of couples my ex and I used to hang out with when we were all in our late 20s. We used to get together several times a week either to cook at each other's houses, or to go out to eat, or to have picnics in the park. This particular group of six couples ended up being a remarkable illustration of such group dynamics.
We all felt pretty sure we'd still be a group 20 years down the road, older and perhaps with the group expanded by kids.
Then one evening, at one of our usual gatherings, Rob and Steph dropped the bombshell on us all that they had separated and we're going to divorce. I won't get into the ensuing long discussions about why and how, but the remarkable thing about it was that within 12 months five of the six couples we're either separated or divorced!
The cohesiveness of the group had been broken, and the truth of its surprisingly fragile underpinnings had suddenly come to light.
The single couple who didn't have just had their 40th wedding anniversary.
Anyway, the point here is that sometimes we make the painful discovery that many of the people we consider friends are actually only friends as long as we are useful to them in some fashion. And not to hold myself harmless in this, there are certainly people I have known in my life that I have only chosen to hang out with in relation to one single activity and when that activity stopped we also stopped seeing each other.
True friendship is a rare and beautiful thing. And when we are able to ascertain that somebody really is our friend, it behooves us to work hard to maintain that friendship. Everyone else? Not so much, perhaps…
Thanks for stopping by, and have a wonderful weekend!
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Created at 2025.01.17 22:45 PST
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