My oldest friend has grown distant with me and I'm devastated

What do you do when a friend who felt like a soulmate enters a new phase of life and starts to pull away? Read the advice of our resident sage Maddy Phillipps – and see the foot of the story for where to email your own problems for Maddy.

DEAR MADDY: I’m worried that my best friend (we'll call her Kat) and I are growing apart. We’re both 39-year-old women who met at university nearly 20 years ago when we immediately bonded over our weirdly similar childhoods (both of us grew up in small towns and had abusive, religious parents). Then we bonded even more over drinking and trying and failing to get into med school, then moved to Auckland together when we graduated. Then we spent most of our twenties and thirties partying and dating dysfunctional men together. Our lives were high drama to say the least, but we found it so comforting that the other person was always dealing with the same sh*t.

A couple of years ago I was really worried about her because after her dad died, she started going on massive drug benders. We always dabbled some weekends but this was another level. But then a year ago she met a “normal” guy who she started dating. Three months in they got engaged with an elaborate proposal which she put all over social media, then three months ago she announced she was pregnant. She says she’s happy and I really hope she is, but I feel like ever since she met him she barely talks to me. She posted the social media announcements before she even told me about the pregnancy and the engagement. And when I do see her she’s judgmental that I enjoy a wine and am casually dating, compares my relationships to hers, and tells me that I’ll definitely meet someone soon. It feels so patronising and like we have nothing in common anymore. I’m honestly devastated. How do I save this friendship? Thanks, Charlotte

MADDY WRITES: Charlotte, I’m sorry. This is such a painful situation. It sounds like Kat has been your “person” – the one you call at any time, in any state, cause you know that no matter what the problem is, they’ll understand – for the last two decades. Of course it’s devastating to feel tangible distance between you and someone who represents solace, comfort, connection, and 20 years’ worth of shared experiences and anecdotes and in-jokes. So, I completely understand why you want to do everything in your power to save the friendship. But when you ask how to save the friendship, I think what you’re really asking is how you can recreate the kind of friendship you had in years gone by, and that simply isn’t possible.

To understand why, let’s consider your relationship dynamic with Kat, the foundations of which were laid before you even met each other. For people with abusive and emotionally chaotic childhoods, the subconscious temptation is to recreate that same level of chaos in adult experiences and relationships. When you’re forged in the fire, often getting burned feels comforting even when it hurts, and only pyrotechnically intense experiences make you feel truly alive. Clearly both you and Kat are fire babies, and I think this explains the strength and intensity of your bond with one another in two ways.

First, until recently, you’ve both coped with the same sh*t in the same way – via the pursuit of chaos. Highs, comedowns, dysfunctional boyfriends, that demented trip to Sydney where you met a guy off Craiglist, went round to “his” house, and discovered that not only did the house “belong to a friend who had left the key out,” but the bedroom was chillingly scrutinised by various Australian reptiles in lush terraria, including a particularly judgmental monitor lizard… When your life is imbued with drama which isn’t exactly the kind of thing you can mull over with your colleagues at morning tea, knowing that you can spill every detail to your best friend, and she won’t judge you for a second but instead will lob a messed-up anecdote of her own straight back, is the most validating and comforting thing ever.

Second, relationships where you’re so ultra-connected with another person that you feel their emotions as acutely as they feel yours often feel normal and familiar when you grew up in an abusive household, because being abused goes hand-in-hand with feeling responsible for other people’s emotions and needs. I’d bet money that you and Kat grew up in that kind of family, so you were both primed to recreate that same level of identity-blurring hyper-connection in your friendship. I’d bet even more money that before Kat met her fiancé, you two were engaged in full-on, 24/7, million-streams-of-consciousness comms on WhatsApp and iMessage and Messenger all at once, processing any and all life developments via one another.

Until recently you were both living similar lifestyles, so this relationship dynamic worked. But now Kat’s life is more bassinet selection than basement bass-fuelled dancefloor seduction, your lifestyles have diverged, extinguishing that dynamic for good. Now if you share a wild R18 anecdote she can’t reciprocate, so the days of her validating your choices by emulating them are over. And because any stream-of-consciousness story-sharing is now decidedly one-sided, your former pattern of communication with one another has become impossible to sustain.

But I think the situation is even more complex than that. It sounds like Kat was deeply unhappy just before she met her fiancé, and I wonder if leaning hard into her new identity as a wife and mother is a way to distance herself from just how bad she felt when her life revolved around unwholesome hedonism. Maybe, I’m sorry to say, in her mind you’re inextricably linked to that period of her life, so seeing you – and hearing you talk about drinking and dating – triggers a cascade of painful memories. Maybe not telling you about the engagement and baby pre-announcement wasn’t intentionally rude, but instead reflects her inability or unwillingness to grapple with what those changes really mean for a 20-year friendship. Maybe you still mean a lot to her, but the thought of renegotiating the terms of friendship after so long is overwhelming, so it’s easier to encourage you to change your lifestyle to match hers via “patronising” comments.

What all this means is that if you want to save the friendship, you need to accept that what the two of you once had is gone, no matter how sad that makes you, and if you want to stay friends going forward things need to evolve. Then you need to consider just what that “different” might look like – whether there might be a new type of friendship that bridges, rather than broadens, the gap between the two of you. If you think that’s possible and can come up with some ideas, the next step is talking to Kat. Start by explaining your perspective, making sure you emphasise how carefully you’ve thought about the situation, and including your thoughts about how the friendship might evolve as you both enter your 40s. Next, ask for Kat’s honest take on whether she wants to stay friends, and if so, what in her view needs to change to make things work. It won’t be an easy discussion, but without getting Kat’s view you’ll never truly know what the way forward looks like, if indeed there is one. And if the conversation goes well, then you have the building blocks for the next era of your friendship.

Charlotte, my heart goes out to you, but I’m confident that no matter what happens to the friendship, you’re going to be OK. You’ve already been through so much, and while it might feel like Kat has carried you through it, I’m sure much of that strength really came from you all along.

Maddy Phillipps is a barrister, freelance writer and clinical psychology student. EMAIL your life problems to dearmaddy@tvnz.co.nz.