Written by: Akshita Pandey, Moitrayee Das
There is no official mourning period for friendships that quietly disappear. There is no formal recognition of the friend who is gradually becoming a stranger to you, or the individual whose name remains on your favorites list though conversation is a thing of the past between you both.
As a young adult, relationships seldom come to a dramatic close; rather, they simply fade away into missed calls, cancelled plans, fatigue, and the realization that you and this other person are going different ways.
This sort of loss can be hard to articulate since nothing seems to have happened at all. There was no betrayal, no explosion, nothing to show where it ended. But something did change, and one day, you find yourself realizing that while the other person used to know all of you, now they know just pieces of you.
As a society, we are primed to deal with breakups, which feature strongly in our movies, music, literature, and even common conversation. However, there is far less preparation for the pain of losing our friends because they grow up. Friends help to form us as much as romantic partners do, witnessing the process of becoming and knowing who we were before adulthood made things difficult. Friends carry memories of hallway conversations, late night debates, abandoned dreams, mutual fears, and the selves we no longer recognize.
The fact that it hurts even more because you could outgrow people without losing your feelings towards them is what adds to the difficulty. As was demonstrated in the article The Quiet Pain of Outgrowing People You Still Love, it is not always the case when an emotional gap emerges and leads to loss of affection. Quite often, it happens that two individuals just grow up on different paths in life with other values and ways of viewing things (Rao, 2026).
The twenties tend to be viewed as the most adventurous phase in one’s life. This phase is associated with notions of freedom, aspirations, traveling, work, and personal growth. However, the twenties are also defined by uncertainty and change. One loses many friends because of a lack of proximity that used to keep those friends together. One moves to different cities, becomes part of a competitive workplace environment, faces burnout, deals with mental issues, or enters into a relationship.
An adult relationship doesn’t fall apart suddenly. It dissolves so gradually that you don’t even realize what’s happening until it’s too late. You wait three days for an answer when previously it would have taken you three minutes. Phone calls become intermittent, whereas plans no longer seem fun but necessary.
The quiet grief that comes from adult friendship is illustrated by how adulthood can affect human relations through emotional isolation, according to Jain’s 2026 work The Quiet Grief of Adult Friendship. As opposed to child friendships, adult relationships occur within an ocean of duties. Work takes effort; family takes focus; survival takes strength. Within this, emotional intimacy itself becomes another burden to carry.
Still, the normalcy of drifting apart does not make it painless.
Making things worse is the odd way that social media keeps partial relationships alive. Your former friends don’t ever fully go away. They stay around via Instagram posts, birthday wishes on Facebook, LinkedIn posts, and photos taken with people who’ve replaced you in their lives. You see their life going on without you while simultaneously holding onto all the memories of what you used to be to each other.
Smita Barooah, a journalist, made a reflection that became popular because it expressed the feelings that many people cannot express on their own (Barooah, 2026). There is always a fear that lurks behind all conversations about adult relationships – the fear of impermanence. If people we once thought were here forever can leave us, what do we really have left to hold on to?
Perhaps this fear seems especially poignant in your twenties because identity in itself can be quite fluid at this stage of life. Most people are still in the process of discovering themselves. Political views are different; emotional walls vary; priorities alter. Some people turn inward, while some maintain their emotionally closed attitude. While some people try to heal, some are caught in destructive cycles.
This leads to the unfortunate situation that friendships based on old incarnations of who we are may not last due to new incarnations of who we are. One friend might be searching for depth, while the other seeks detachment. One might start valuing openness, while the other is having difficulty communicating.
But people continue being friends for much longer than necessary, thinking that this indicates compatibility when it does not. Our society makes lifetime friendships an ideal goal, seeing long-term relations as proof of successful emotions. However, there are some relationships whose significance lies only within certain phases of life.
It is very hard to accept this since it contradicts the belief in the notion of permanence. There is a desire to have the idea that love is enough for keeping relationships. However, throughout one’s life there is the lesson that affection is not enough in most cases.
This paradoxical emotion is illustrated in The Grief of Outgrowing Friendships by reflecting on the pain of loving someone but at the same time realizing that the friendship does not enrich each other any longer (Chukwuma, 2025). While there is obviously pain associated with the loss of a friend, there is also grief regarding the loss of the possible future that goes with that friend. We subconsciously project a future with certain friends that lasts forever. We envision ourselves walking down the aisle or achieving success with our friend by our side.
Additionally, guilt is also part of losing friends as adults. There is always that question about whether you should have worked harder at the relationship. Was there anything else you could have done, such as communicating more? Was it because you were too busy, not available enough, or even too absorbed in your own troubles to make things work?
But not every ending is evidence of failure.
There are relationships that serve their purpose. There are some friends who help you get through different stages in your life. These relationships are very significant to you until they come to an end, regardless of whether they will be ending forever or not. This takes emotional maturity to comprehend.
The human essence of mourning relationships which ended not due to meanness but due to changes lies in the depths of this grief. It’s even sadder that way because no one can be blamed. Two individuals who were only trying to discover themselves and, in their attempt to do so, drifted apart.
Moving beyond friendships is an education in understanding the importance of boundaries, the requirements of our emotional needs, and the harsh reality that no amount of nostalgia can sustain our connections. We learn that our relationships need more than just shared history.
Most importantly, it reminds us that impermanence does not erase significance.
Not everyone that we care for should stay around for good. Some individuals come along to create different stages of our life and then slowly fade away to nothing but memories. This is not to say that the relationship was any less real. Rather, it is because we change so do our relationships with others.
There are many truths about adulthood that one learns during their twenties, and one of the toughest truths to face is accepting that there are people who mean the world to us but are no longer a part of our lives.
And maybe this is the greatest sorrow of all.
References
Barooah, S. (2026). X (Formerly Twitter). https://x.com/smitabarooah/status/2055887672649056532
Chukwuma, F. (2025, June 15). The Grief of Outgrowing Friendships. Medium. https://medium.com/@chiamakachukwuma20/the-grief-of-outgrowing-friendships-9f1f03ba5e31
Jain, P. (2026, May 11). The quiet grief of adult friendship. Times of India Voices; Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/civil-irony/the-quiet-grief-of-adult-friendship/
Rao, P. A. (2026, May 15). The Quiet Pain of Outgrowing People You Still Love. Medium. https://nrao-prashanthi.medium.com/the-quiet-pain-of-outgrowing-people-you-still-love-fe7689730c29
Akshita Pandey is an Undergraduate Student at FLAME University, and Moitrayee Das is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at FLAME University.