#190: When Friendships are Complete

Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Hey there, beautiful humans. Welcome back to Your Favorite You. 

Once again, so grateful that you're here listening with me today. I want to start with one word, and I want you to notice what happens in your body when you hear it. The word is complete. Not failed, not abandoned, not lost, not broken, complete. 

Because today I want to talk about friendship. Specifically, I want to talk about the friendships that have run their course, the ones that were real and meaningful and good and that are no longer active parts of your life. 

And we're going to talk about the guilt that comes along with that, the grief, and the permission I want to give you today to let some friendships be exactly what they were, complete, without making that mean something terrible about you or about the other person. 

I have a lot of complete friendships, and I want to tell you about them. Many of my dear friendships from the years when my kids were in sports and activities, the parents I stood next to on sidelines, the families we shared weekends at hotels with, the people I genuinely loved during that season of life. 

Those friendships are complete. When the kids grew up and the shared context disappeared, it became clear that what held us together was the context. And when it was gone, the friendship quietly finished. 

I have friendships that completed because someone moved. Either I moved or they moved. And the proximity had been doing more of the work than either of us realized. I have friendships that were complete when I left a job or when a colleague left. 

We were genuinely close. We saw each other nearly every day. We knew the little nuggets of each other's lives. And then one of us walked out the door and the friendship didn't survive that transition. 

I certainly have friendships that became complete when I stopped drinking over seven years ago. Many of my people stayed. They are still here and I love them fiercely. But there are a couple of friendships where, if I'm honest, the relationship was built largely around drinking together. 

And when that was no longer something I was interested in, the thing that connected us was gone. I have friendships that completed after the 2016 election and especially after 2024 when I realized something I needed to talk about today because I'm not the only one carrying it. 

I have felt guilt about all of these. I have felt sadness. I have a part of me that genuinely misses each of the people I'm no longer friends with. And I also have come to believe truly and deeply that letting those friendships be complete made space for the people who were always going to stay. 

Let's talk about all of it. Here's something I want to name right out of the gate because I think that it is the source of so much unnecessary guilt. We are sold a fantasy about friendship, particularly those of us who identify as women. 

The fantasy goes like this. Real friendships last forever. If a friendship ends or fades or changes beyond recognition, someone failed. Someone wasn't trying hard enough. Someone wasn't a good enough friend. 

And the unspoken addendum is almost always, and that someone is probably you. As women, we're socialized to be the keepers of relationships, the ones who remember birthdays and check in and hold the emotional glue of every connection. 

So when a friendship shifts, the guilt tends to land on us. I should have called more. I should have made more effort. I let the friendship go. And I want to push back on all of that gently but firmly. 

Friendships are not failures just because they end. Some friendships are seasonal. Some are contextual. Some are deeply, genuinely real and also genuinely tied to a specific chapter of your life that is now over. 

That is not a tragedy. That is just how humans move through time. Think about it this way. You would not look at a beautiful meal and call it a failure because eventually it was finished. You would not look at an awesome vacation and call it a loss because you had to come home. 

Some things are meant to be whole and complete within a certain time and place. That doesn't have to diminish them. It just means they did what they were meant to do. Your complete friendships, they were real. 

They mattered. They shaped you. They are part of your story. They just aren't chapter 20 when you're on chapter 38. And that's okay. In thinking about this episode, I came up with five ways that friendships complete. 

And I want to walk through the versions of this that I see most often because I think it helps to name your specific flavor of grief and guilt. So let's start with the contextual friendship. This is the sideline friendship, the work friendship, the neighbor friendship. 

You were each in each other's lives constantly because of a shared context, be it a job, a neighborhood, a season of parenting, and the friendship was genuinely warm and real within that context. And then the context ended. 

These are perhaps the easiest to make peace with intellectually and still the most quietly sad because there's no villain. Nobody did anything wrong. Life just moved and you moved with it and so did they. 

And that overlap is gone. The guilt here usually sounds like I should have tried harder to maintain it. But sometimes the honest truth is that the friendship was always primarily about the context. And there's nothing wrong with that. 

Not every friendship is meant to transcend and follow into every chapter. The second is the distance friendship. Someone moved or you did and you fully intended to stay close. You said you would. Maybe you meant it. 

And then slowly the calls got further apart and the texts got more sporadic. And then one day you realized you hadn't spoken to this person in two years. Convenience had been doing more work than either of you realized at the time. 

I want to say something about this one that I think is important. Not every friendship that doesn't survive distance was a shallow friendship. Sometimes it just means that the specific form your friendship took, the coffee, the impromptu dinners, the showing up, the meeting in the cul-de-sac, required proximity. 

And without it, neither of you quite knew how to translate it into something else. That is a loss worth grieving, although it doesn't have to be a failure. The third way that I think that friendship's complete is what I want to call the growth gap friendship. 

This one is hardest to talk about because it can feel the most loaded with judgment. Maybe you've done some work on yourself. That might be therapy, coaching, recovery, some combination of all three, and you've changed. 

You've genuinely changed. And some friendships can hold that new version of you, and some simply can't. Sometimes the friendship was built on a shared dynamic that's no longer serving you, commiserating, complaining, numbing out and self-medicating together. 

And when you step out of that dynamic, the friendship doesn't have a foundation to stand on anymore. Sometimes a friend loved a version of you that needed her in a certain way. And when you stop needing her that way, she doesn't know who you are to each other anymore. 

And neither do you. Sometimes, and this is one that a lot of people don't like to say out loud, a friendship was built on you being smaller than you are. And when you stopped being small, you stepped into your own amazingness, it stopped working. 

Like I said before, I had friendships that were built around drinking, evenings out, wine with dinner, that particular looseness that comes and laughter that comes with that. And when I stopped drinking seven years ago, some of those friends stayed. 

They adjusted. They showed up. They loved me while I was drinking my water or my iced tea. And a couple didn't. And I won't pretend that that didn't hurt, but I also know with absolute clarity that I made the right choice for my life. 

And some friendships were not going to survive that choice. And I'm okay with that. Next is the one-sided friendship. So maybe you were always the one calling, always the one checking in, always the one going to them, adjusting your schedule, making room for their needs. 

And then at some point you realized, wait, this isn't a friendship. This is a service that I'm providing to this person. This one can come with the most guilt because ending it can feel like abandonment. 

But I want to ask you something. If you imagine your best friend telling you she was exhausted by a relationship that only ever flowed one direction, would you tell her to keep pouring herself into that relationship? 

Or would you tell her that she deserves some reciprocity? You definitely deserve reciprocity, especially in friendship. And then the last one is what I'm going to call the values chasm friendship. This one I suspect many of you have been sitting with since 2016 and maybe especially since 2024. 

And I want to give it its own name, its own space, its own honest treatment, because it's different from all the others. This is not a friendship that faded because of distance or circumstance. This is a friendship where something happened, an election, a conversation, a social media post, a moment where you saw quite clearly what someone actually believes, and you realized this is not a difference of opinion. 

This is a chasm in values, a chasm in morality, in the most fundamental convictions about what it means to be a decent human being in the world. And that is a different kind of loss entirely. Because with the contextual friendship, the distance friendship, even the growth gap friendship, there's no villain. 

Nobody did anything wrong exactly. But with the values chasm, there is a reckoning. There's a grief of realizing that someone you loved, someone you laughed with and trusted and chose, holds beliefs that are fundamentally incompatible with who you are and what you stand for. 

I want to be honest with you about this. I, of course, lost friendships after 2016, and I lost more after 2024, not because we disagreed about a policy in the abstract way that reasonable people can disagree, but because I looked at what certain people were willing to accept, willing to vote for, willing to defend. 

And I understood that we were not operating from the same moral foundation, that the things I consider non-negotiable, basic decency and the equal worth of every person, were apparently negotiable to them. 

That is not a difference of opinion. Again, that is a values chasm. And you cannot bridge a values chasm by trying harder or being more understanding or agreeing to disagree. Fuck that. You can only decide whether you can live with it. 

I want to say something specifically to the women who have been contorting themselves, pretzeling themselves, trying to keep these friendships intact. Those of you who have been biting your tongues at family dinners and muting accounts on social media and telling yourselves that the relationship matters more than the disagreement. 

I see you and I want you to know you are allowed to decide that you cannot. Choosing not to maintain a friendship across a values chasm is not intolerance. It is not closed-mindedness. It is not the same as refusing to engage with different perspectives. 

It is the recognition that some differences go deeper than opinion, all the way down to the question of whose humanity you are willing to defend. And you are allowed to need the people in your inner circle to be on the same side of the question that you are. 

The grief here is real and specific. You are not just grieving the friendship. You are grieving the version of the person you thought you knew. You are grieving the years you shared with someone who turns out to see the world in a way you find genuinely troubling. 

That is a complicated, layered loss, and it deserves to be acknowledged as such. It is also, in my experience, one of the clearest examples of a friendship that is not just complete, but that needed to be complete for your integrity, for your peace, for your ability to show up fully in the world as the person you actually are. 

Okay, moving on. I want to talk about making space for what stays. I want to tell you about two friendships of mine that are not complete, that I believe with everything in me will never be complete. 

My best friend and I became best friends in 1987. Luckily, P was close to R and our lockers were next to each other. And for those of you counting at home, that is 39 years. Alicia and I have not lived in the same city since 1991. 

So that's 34 years of long-distance friendship. And every single time we get together, it feels like no time has passed at all, every single time. Our closest friend from medical school has been in our life since 1995. 

Greg hasn't lived in the same city as us since the early 2000s, and we still make time for each other. Lots of time. We still show up. We still know the intricate nuggets of each other's lives. These friendships have survived distance, life changes, career changes, family changes, my sobriety, a global pandemic, two politically destabilizing elections, and every other thing that life has thrown at us. 

Because they were never dependent on context or convenience or the comfortable illusion that we all see the world the same way. They were built on something that doesn't require proximity or pretending to survive. 

And here's what I've come to understand. The complete friendships have made space for me to have these ones. Every friendship that ran its course cleared some room in my schedule, in my emotional bandwidth, in my heart for the people who were always going to stay. 

I hear from women all the time who feel guilty about a friendship that has faded. And when I ask them about the friendships that are still thriving, their whole demeanor changes, their whole face changes, because those are the ones that matter. 

A client of mine spent years feeling guilty about a friendship that had slowly faded after a major life transition. She kept trying to revive it, kept feeling like a bad person for not trying harder, kept carrying this low-grade shame about it. 

When we worked through it together, what she found was that she'd been spending so much energy on the guilt that she hadn't fully invested in the relationships and friendships that were right in front of her waiting. 

The complete friendship had been taking up space that belonged to something that was still living. Letting that friendship be complete freed her. And if this is calling to you and you start to complete some friendships, it might free you too. 

Okay, here's your permission slip for today, my beautiful humans. Some friendships are complete. That doesn't make them failures. It doesn't make you a bad friend. It doesn't mean the friendship wasn't real or that it didn't matter or that you should have done something differently. 

It means it did what it was meant to do. In the season, it was meant to do it. And now it is finished. Like a good book, like a perfect meal, like a chapter of your life that you would not trade, even though it's over. 

You're allowed to feel sad about that. The part of you that misses the people you've grown away from, that part deserves to be acknowledged. Grief and gratitude can coexist at the same time. You can be grateful for what a friendship was and sad that it isn't anymore all at once. 

That's not contradiction. That's being human. And for the friendships that ended because of a values chasm, you're allowed to feel something more complicated than just sadness. You're allowed to feel the loss of the person you thought you knew. 

You're allowed to feel angry and confused and quietly heartbroken that the world sorted itself out this way. All of that is real. All of that makes sense. And you're also allowed to feel relief, relief that you know, relief that you no longer have to perform comfort you don't feel. 

Relief that your inner circle now contains only people who share your most fundamental convictions about what it means to be a human being in the world. And you're allowed to feel hopeful because here is what I know to be true about myself at 53 years old. 

And I believe it's probably true for you too. I have not even come close to meeting all of the people who will love me and all of the people whom I will love in this lifetime. There are friendships waiting for you that you cannot yet imagine. 

People who will know the version of you that you are still becoming. People who will love you in ways you haven't experienced yet. But they need room. They need you to not be so full of guilt about friendships that are complete that you have no space left for what's coming. 

Let some friendships be complete. Say thank you for what they were and keep your heart open for what's next. I love you all so much. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.

Hey - It’s still me. Since you are listening to this podcast, you very likely have followed all the rules and ticked off all the boxes but you still feel like something's missing! If you're ready to learn the skills and gain the tools you need to tiptoe into putting yourself first and treating yourself as you would your own best friend, I'm here to support you. As a general life coach for women, I provide a safe space, compassionate guidance, and practical tools to help you navigate life's challenges as you start to get to know and embrace your authentic self.

When we work together, you begin to develop a deeper understanding of your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. You learn effective communication strategies, boundary-setting techniques, and self-care practices that will help you cultivate a more loving and supportive relationship with yourself and others.

While, of course, I can't guarantee specific outcomes, as everyone's journey is brilliantly unique, what I can promise is my unwavering commitment to providing you with the skills, tools, support, and guidance you need to create lasting changes in your life. With humor and a ton of compassion, I'll be available to mentor you as you do the work to become a favorite version of yourself.

You're ready to invest in yourself and embark on this journey, so head over to melissaparsonscoaching.com, go to the work with me page, and book a consultation call. We can chat about all the support I can provide you with as we work together.

I am welcoming one-on-one coaching clients at this time, and, of course, I am also going to be offering the next round of group coaching soon. 

Thanks for tuning in. Go be amazing!