Heartbreak and unrequited feelings also happen in friendships

It’s a peculiar kind of heartbreak. One day you find out you’re not as important as you thought you were in your friend’s life, and it’s terrible. You might have been living in a fantasy, just like it happened with some of your adolescent romances. It’s okay; we’ve all been there.

It might feel uncomfortable at first, but as we move past that initial discomfort, we might reach true liberation.

Unlike romances that require a certain degree of communication and date planning, friendships can survive on remarkably little contact. Months can pass without a single conversation, sometimes even years, and you know that if that friend ever needs anything, you’ll absolutely be there like the first time, because love is unchangeable.

The thing is, that love is unchangeable for you doesn’t mean it is for others.

When we don’t have much going on in our current lives, we tend to romanticize the past and stay attached to long-gone friendships for a lot more time. Nothing is exempt from the passage of time, not even those friendships we thought were going to be eternal.

And it’s not even personal; most of the time, the end of a friendship like that is not about something that we can fix or change; it’s just about circumstances and what became more natural for the other person’s life. They might still love you, but if they are a pilot now and every day they see other pilots and live in another state, other pilots will likely become their best friends.

And perhaps we don’t need to turn every one of these realizations into a confrontation, because there is nothing to be fixed; it’s really just the passage of time and the natural movement of life. We could, instead, make room for the sadness, and say goodbye to our friendship, knowing they’ll always preserve a big space in our hearts.

After all, we deserve to have friendships that are naturally with us today, and not spend our days longing for friendships that are too far away for us to reach. People can remain dear to us even if we’re not a part of their day-to-day lives, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t move on and search for something new.

If we want to enjoy friendship, the moment is now, and it should feel just as natural as breathing.