The Friendships We Lose While Life Is Happening

I read something this week that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. It began with something Steven Bartlett wrote in Behind the Diary about friendships that quietly disappear as our lives become busier. Steven's reflection was prompted by an article written by Indian columnist Pranav Jain for The Times of India called The Quiet Grief of Adult Friendship.

Jain's article begins with a phone call at 1:40 in the morning. Like most of us probably would, he immediately thought something was wrong. Instead, a friend had been driving home, heard a song they used to love and called because she missed him. They spent the next half hour talking about ordinary things happening in their lives.

There was something about that story that immediately caught my attention. His friend didn't wait until she had important news or a reason to call. She thought of someone who had once been an important part of her everyday life and picked up the phone.

Jain went on to write about what happens to many of our friendships as we get older. When we are young, so much of friendship happens naturally because we are regularly in the same places with the same people. We see each other at school or work, live in the same neighborhoods, know many of the same people and share the ordinary details of our lives without having to make much effort to do it. As we get older, people move, careers and families take more of our time, and maintaining those relationships becomes something we have to do intentionally.

Steven Bartlett recognized himself in Jain's article. He was writing from a hotel room in Manchester in the middle of the night while filming Dragons' Den. His schedule had become overwhelming, and he realized that the things in his life with deadlines somehow continued to get done while other parts of his life were receiving less and less attention. Among them were some of his friendships.

He wrote about a woman named Faye who had once been one of his closest friends. They had traveled the world together when they were younger, and she believed in him long before he became successful. When he won his first Entrepreneur of the Year award, he gave her the trophy. Later, when she left her job to pursue art, she gave him the first piece she created. She still has his trophy, he still has her drawing, and yet they hadn't spoken in seven years.

There hadn't been an argument or some terrible event that ended their friendship. Their lives had simply moved in different directions, and by the time Steven realized how much he missed her, so much time had passed that he didn't know how to begin again.

As I read both of their stories, I realized how much I understood what they were describing, and my experience with it began long before my husband was diagnosed with cancer.

I grew up and lived in the same city for 43 years. When you spend that much of your life in one place, you don't always realize how much simply being there helps you maintain relationships. I had people in my life from different periods and different places, and we shared years of history. We knew many of the same people, remembered the same places and knew stories about one another that didn't require an explanation.

Then I moved, and although I intended to stay in touch with many of those people, I eventually lost track of some of them. I am sure many of us meant it when we said we would keep in touch, but distance changed the way we were part of one another's lives. Phone calls were put off, families and jobs changed, people moved again, and months gradually became years.

I didn't stop caring about those people, and I don't believe they stopped caring about me. What disappeared was the regular contact that had once allowed us to know what was happening in one another's lives.

After moving, I established a few friendships where I live now, and I have tried to maintain them. Then my husband was diagnosed with prostate cancer and I became his caregiver, and I discovered how difficult maintaining even the friendships close to home could become.

I still cared about my friends and wanted them in my life. In fact, there were times when I probably needed those friendships more than I had before. At the same time, caregiving required so much of my attention that keeping up with other people wasn't always easy. An invitation could come during a difficult week, a phone call could arrive when something else needed to be handled, or I could simply be too tired to have much of a conversation.

I don't think caregivers always recognize what is happening to their friendships while they are in the middle of it. Sometimes friends really do disappear when someone becomes seriously ill. I have written about cancer ghosting before because that experience is real and painful. But I don't think every friendship that becomes distant during illness belongs in that category.

Sometimes the caregiver becomes less available too. A friend may hesitate to call because she doesn't want to bother you, while you may wonder why you haven't heard from her. You turn down several invitations because you really can't go, and eventually the invitations become less frequent. Neither person intended to end the friendship, but little by little you know less about what is happening in each other's lives.

That is why another part of Steven's story interested me so much. He has two longtime friends, Dominic and Ashley, and one of the things that has helped keep them connected is a WhatsApp group largely devoted to football. They talk about Manchester United, argue about players and apparently have their own ridiculous system for settling disagreements.

What struck me wasn't the football. It was the fact that they had never stopped sharing the ordinary things. They didn't need a reason to contact one another because the friendship had remained part of their everyday lives. When something important happened, they didn't have years of silence to get through first.

That made me think about how we communicate now. We have more ways to stay connected than any generation before us, yet I agree with Steven that we have become a very lonely culture. I can know that someone I haven't spoken with in years went on vacation, became a grandmother, bought a house or celebrated an anniversary because I saw it on Facebook. I can click a heart under her photograph, and she can do the same under mine, and we can continue doing that for years without ever having a real conversation.

I don't think social media is necessarily the problem. It has allowed me to find people I might otherwise have lost completely and to remain connected with people who live far away. But I do wonder whether it has made it easier for us to confuse knowing about someone's life with actually being part of it.

There is a difference. We can see the vacation photographs and birthday celebrations without knowing that the person is frightened about something, having problems in a marriage, caring for a spouse, worried about an adult child or simply lonely. They may know just as little about what is happening behind the photographs we post.

For caregivers, that distance can become even greater because so much of our attention is focused on the person we are caring for. We may still love our friends and miss spending time with them, but there may be very little energy left for maintaining the relationships that once came easily. By the time life gives us enough room to look around again, we may discover that some of those friendships have changed.

Steven described typing messages to Faye and deleting them because he didn't know what to say after seven years. I understood why. Once enough time has passed, you begin to feel as though you need to explain everything that has happened before you can simply talk to each other again. The longer you wait, the more difficult that first contact can become.

Eventually, sitting in that hotel room in Manchester, Steven sent Faye a voice message. I don't know what happened between them after that, but his story made me think about people from those first 43 years of my own life.

There are people I once knew very well who remember a younger version of me that the people in my life today never knew. They remember places that may no longer exist, people who are gone, things we did together and parts of my life I haven't thought about in years. Some of them once knew what was happening in my life without having to ask because they were there while it was happening, and today I may know very little about what is happening in theirs.

I think there is a sadness in that which we don't talk about very often. We recognize the loneliness that can come with losing a spouse, moving away from family or becoming a caregiver, but there is also a quieter loss that can accumulate over the years as people who once knew us well gradually disappear from our everyday lives.

I don't believe every friendship is meant to last forever, and I don't believe every relationship that changes during caregiving needs to be repaired. Illness can show us things about people and relationships that are difficult to forget. But when I think about the people I have lost touch with over the years, I also know that not everyone left because something went wrong between us.

Some of us simply lost each other while life was happening.

Pranav Jain's friend heard an old song at 1:40 in the morning and called because she missed him. Steven Bartlett sat in a Manchester hotel room years after losing touch with someone he had once loved dearly as a friend and finally sent the message he had been putting off.

Their stories made me think about the people I have lost along the way, the friendships I have worked to maintain, and how much harder that became when I was a caregiver. They also made me wonder how many people are carrying around the same memories of friendships that once mattered enormously to them.

And somewhere among those memories, there may be someone who still thinks about us too.

Sources & Further Reading

Pranav Jain, “The Quiet Grief of Adult Friendship”
The Times of India, May 11, 2026
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/civil-irony/the-quiet-grief-of-adult-friendship/

Steven Bartlett, Behind the Diary
Steven Bartlett's reflection on adult friendships and his experience reconnecting with his longtime friend Faye.
https://www.behindthediary.com/