The friendship that drifted

Not all friendships end with a backstab, blazing row or epic blow-up. As we get older, they simply peter out. That’s how my last friendship ended; no tears or tantrums, but a reasonable, albeit rather awkward, phone call. My friendship with Nadine* began with far more of a flourish than it had finished. We’d met just after graduation, when we both still had enough time and energy to attend the endless bottomless brunches we loved. Weekends were full of belly laughs, and the subsequent belly aches from far too much eaten and drunk the day before.

I’m never sure of whether Nadine changed, I changed, or we both did, but after a few years cracks began to form. There was her constant nit-picking about others. Her wicked wit became less for crafting in-jokes and more about making vicious, personal swipes. I will never pretend that I’m above a good bitch-sesh, but it became clear that no one, not even her nearest and dearest, would be spared the sharpest edge of her tongue. She’d regale me with intimate details of people’s lives, reeling off back-to-back bugbears about those whom she smiled sweetly at moments later. Once, she spent half a phone call attempting to get me to bad-mouth a particularly goodnatured acquaintance and huffed and puffed for the other half of the call when I wouldn’t join in. I started to become anxious when

I saw her name flash up on my screen – any attempts to challenge her incessant negativity about others was met with an eye-roll at my inability to take a joke.

I never overheard her making digs about me, or received a sneering text about me clearly meant for someone else. And because of that, I ummed and ahhed about whether pulling away was too harsh. But her willingness to throw her other friends under the bus made me question if she was someone I wanted in my life. I also wondered whether I was spared the treatment that most of her closest friends were unaware of.

When I started to distance myself, she called and asked what she’d done and I was honest – she hadn’t done anything. Her snarkiness didn’t have to be aimed at me to affect me. She saw it as a personal attack. I had just entered my mid-twenties, a period when I had started to think more intentionally about who and what was in my life and, more importantly, why. I guess that lowered my tolerance for behaviour that I might have brushed off in the past. I still don’t think she was a bad person – she didn’t have to be for our relationship to end.

If we met now, it’s unlikely we’d be friends. Bonding over the same TV shows and an availability for after-work cocktails is unlikely to last when one or both of you changes. Unlike family, we have the luxury of picking our friends and the idea that there has to be an injured party before you can go your separate ways is wrong. Moving on is not a punishment or an indictment: it’s a part of growing up.

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Slay In Your Lane: The Journal by Yomi Adegoke and Elizabeth Uviebinené is out now

“I became anxious when I saw her name flash up on my screen”