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Maintaining and Ending Friendships

Page history last edited by Holly Swyers 6 years, 4 months ago

How do you decide which friendships to maintain, and what are ways you can grow apart that might mean you need to cut ties with someone?

 

To answer this question the interviewees had many different opinions on friendships. However, there were common themes, there are times where you get to choose what friendships to keep and then there are times where you don’t choose and the relationship dissolves naturally.

 

Negative feelings

If you ever have negative feelings toward the relationship where you can no longer be around that person, the ties should be cut off. People can be great friends when they first meet, and many things may occur in which your feelings toward that person may change over time. An argument may have happened where you have a disagreement that may cause a change in the way you view that person. When unfavorable feelings occur, it is best to decide whether to end the friendship there before things get worse or keep fighting for that friendship and see if it can be fixed. 

   

Priorities and values 

Naturally people grow into different experiences, priorities, and values.  It can cause friendships to become distant in which the relationship dissolves on its own. Growing up everyone’s life is different, there are friends who have children sooner than others. When people have children, those people tend to gravitate toward those who also have children in which old friendships that do not have children or different priorities cannot relate to one another and dissolve. There are people who get married before anyone else and they also tend to gravitate toward people who are also married. There are other whom their career is their priority and therefore sometimes they do not have time for friendships.  

The different paths people may follow can lead to different experiences that may cause values to change. What they thought mattered a year ago may not matter to them anymore and vice versa things that did not matter years ago suddenly matter now. As people's values change we gravitate toward those who share common values. 

  

Compatibility 

There is a compatibility aspect to a relationship and if there is just nothing in common and it is forcing a relationship that just does not fit then ties could be cut of naturally or not. Like mentioned before we tend to gravitate toward those who share common interest and values as we do. It only makes sense that friendships may last longer with those whom have similar interests as us such as, hobbies, sports, job interests, goals, and priorities. In most of the interviews conducted there was in some way or another a mention of common interest. That is not be said that everything within the friendship must be exactly the same but when the amount of difference is greater than the amount of similarities the friendship may not last as long as one may have hoped.   

  

Effort 

The amount of effort that goes into a relationship is important if only one person is putting in effort than there is no reason to keep the relationship going. There are some friendships that require very minimum amount of effort where a phone call once a year is sufficient. There are other friendships that may require a little more effort to resume both parties that the friendship still exists. Then there are other friendships that require no effort at all and when they do finally see each other they can pick up right where they left off. 

First, you must assess what type of friend you are. Then after figuring how much effort you would like in a friendship you must see how much effort you are willing to give. After establishing that then there is where you can decide to cut ties off or not.

  

 

Geography

With that there is also a geographical component in where you tend to gravitate to people you live around and when one moves distance can affect all the aspect that I have just mention in which the relationship could dissolve over time as well. There are times where life takes you in different directions it may be a new job which requires you to move to a new place, or being closer to family.  Being far apart from friendships can cause them to dissolve on their own depending on the effort that is needed to keep it going. You may move out somewhere and it may happen where you create new friends and the old ones become a distant memory. There are ways around this, in today's society social media friends are very common and it is easy to communicate to people. There are sites such as, TwitterFacebookInstagram, and Snapchat just to name a few.  

 

This page was developed from interviews with:

Fiona Lovecraft, Harvey Percy, Karl Salinger, Gustav Lowry, Earl Roth, Colin Lowry, Felix Golding, Igor O'Hara, Larry Conrad, Vicky Lewis

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