Why Losing Friends as You Age Hurts (But It’s Normal)

(bright music) Headspace Studio. Hi friends, it's Rosie here. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Thursday. Have you ever had a friend you were inseparable from? The kind of friendship where you did everything together, traveled, worked on projects, helped each other through breakups, the whole thing, and you thought, this is it, we going to be in each other's lives forever, but then, slowly, without either of you meaning to, life started moving in different directions. So far this week we've been talking about aging, the physical, the emotional, and today we're gonna get into something that might be one of the hardest parts of growing older, friendships. Because as we evolve, so do our relationships, and sometimes that's really uncomfortable. I had a friend with that kind of bond. She got married, had kids, and was building a whole new chapter of her life. Meanwhile, I was focusing on my career, traveling and working on myself, and at first it didn't feel like anything was changing. We'd still check in, we'd still say, we need to catch up soon, but over time, soon started stretching longer and longer. I didn't think much of it until one day I saw her posting about an all girls road trip with her and her best friends. And let me tell you, it hurt. It wasn't that I expected to be invited. It wasn't even that I felt left out exactly. It was that something had shifted and I wasn't sure when or how it happened. Friendships, like everything else in life, aren't meant to stay the same forever, and that's not a bad thing. Some people grow together, some people grow apart, but all relationships evolve. The key is learning to honor what the relationship was without clinging to what it used to be. And for a long while, I felt so guilty. I had this fear that maybe I had done something wrong or maybe I wasn't being a good enough friend, but then I realized there wasn't anything wrong. We hadn't had a falling out. There was no drama, no hurtful words exchanged. We had just changed and the love was still there, it just looked different. Instead of weekly calls it became occasional check ins. The occasional Instagram reel. Instead of constant texts, it became a quiet appreciation for what we had shared. And when I stopped resisting that, when I stopped seeing change as loss, I found so much more peace. One thing to note, however, there's this old saying about time heals all wounds. I remember reading Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy disagreed with this. She said, I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessons. I liked that a lot more. So friends, if you felt a shift in a friendship, try this. Instead of mourning what's changed, take a moment to celebrate what was. Write down three things you love about that...