In an earlier article I explained Five Ways to be a Great Friend; however, following the Dubar Principle, you can only have five best friends and up to fifty good friends following this social principle. Anyone beyond those fifty good friends becomes varying degrees of acquaintance. Friendship is fluid and for this reason your social circles of friends will continue to change throughout your life, despite remaining “Friends” with old friends and acquaintances on social media. Given that friendship is always fluctuating, there will come a time where you may need to end some friendships. That can be done directly, but will most commonly be done indirectly as each people go their separate ways in life and lose touch with each other. Here are seven signs that your friendship is ending.
One-Sided Conversations
This is where you contact a friend over through a phone call, text, or social media and initiate the conversation. Once you do this a few times and look through your messages, you will probably see a pattern that you were the one asking the questions or asking to catch up and the friend gave a short response to be polite. However, they only gave surface answers to questions that you asked where they could have gone deeper. Eventually, you start to send messages that receive no response and there is only silence. This is the process and devolution of the one-sided conversation when it comes to friendships that are ending.
No Longer A Priority in Their Life
Signs that you can recognize when you are no longer a priority in someone’s life is when you ask to set up a time to talk to catch up. Initially, they tell you that they are interested but that they are busy—insert life circumstance– so that they are unable to make a time to talk. This may be true, or they are slowly pushing you away since you are no longer a priority in their life. If you ask one or two more times after a period of time has passed and receive the same response, or no response, then take it as a signal that they are no longer interested in maintaining a real friendship with you.
Social Media Updates
If all your updates are from what they publish on their social media feed instead of over the phone, video call, or messaging to get real life updates, you are only receiving the fabricated version of their life instead of their actual life. All your news about their life is from social media instead of from them personally.
There is Nothing to Discuss When You Try to Talk
The bond that both of you once shared is now fading and may even be gone. After you have talked about what they are immediately doing with their life, you both are unable to go deeper. In fact, it is difficult to keep a conversation going even if you try your best.
Lost Trust
The consequence of the above signs are that a friendship is dying such as one-sided conversations and that the other person is no longer a priority results in lost trust. They have hurt you by telling you that they want to catch up. They never do. This hurts you and damages whatever trust the friendship may have had left to salvage that could have grown if the issues were fixed. However, those problems or discussions that you hoped to have, never happened and you only separated and lost confidence in your friend.
Using Each Other Instead of Deepening Your Friendship
They only contact you if they are in your city or want your help with something. They no longer want a relationship with you as a friend. They merely want your assistance with something that will help them while taking time away from your life.
What Do They Bring to Your Life?
The question that you should ask about all your friendships is, what do they bring to your life? If the answer is negative or does not help you in the direction of your life goals, it may be time for you to consider ending some of your friendships.
