There’s an old saying about how friends come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.
But what about habit?
Although some friendships may seem close, especially if they last for several decades, you may find yourself wondering whether you actually have a strong connection with this person, or if their presence in your life has simply become a habit.
If you’re not sure, here are some signs that the friendship you have with someone may fall into the latter category rather than the former one.
1. You’ve always been furniture in each other’s lives.
Whereas adults often make friends at work, through spiritual communities, and so on, kids usually make friends via proximity.
For example, they’ll befriend the kids they go to school with, or the neighborhood children they see every day. If their families never move, they often maintain those friendships well into adulthood.
As a result, these friendships are usually as familiar to them as their own families. After all, they’ve known these individuals as long as they’ve known their parents, and even longer than they’ve known their younger siblings.
That said, aside from the connections forged by childhood closeness, there may not be any shared interests or values now.
In fact, your personalities might even clash, but since these people have been fixtures in your life for so long, you’ve never questioned how you actually feel about them.
2. Even though you’ve spent a lot of time with this person, you don’t actually know each other well.
Your conversations might remain quite superficial, rather than sharing deep contemplations or personal information. Oh, you’ll spend hours talking about different things, but those chats might revolve around an interest you share or details about other people you know.
You may not even know each other’s birthdays.
Furthermore, any gaps in conversation leave you both feeling a bit awkward. You can’t share comfortable silence together, but instead quickly fill it with gossip, jokes, or other hollow-feeling exchanges.
3. They aren’t particularly nice to you.
I had a friend for nearly 20 years who was almost like a sister to me. We lived in different cities, so we travelled to see each other, but it always felt like something was missing or wrong in our relationship.
It was only after we grew apart and stopped talking as often that I realized what it was: I had spent years remaining silent as she cut me down and made fun of various aspects of my life, and she always said that I was overreacting when I called her out for doing so.
This was a person who used me as an emotional punching bag every time one of her relationships fell apart, during family crises, and so on, but would invalidate every struggle I went through in turn.
What I had thought was a decades-long close friendship was in fact a one-sided support system that drained me on a regular basis.
If you’ve experienced anything like this, you can probably relate to that experience, but you don’t have to stick with it just because it’s what you’re used to.
4. When they aren’t around, you don’t think about them.
When the two of you get together, you might enjoy each other’s company and have plenty to talk about, but once you’ve parted ways again, you barely think about them at all.
If they aren’t texting or calling you, they simply don’t come to mind.
This is a key way to tell whether what you’re experiencing is a habit or a real friendship.
Most of us don’t think about going to the gym or showering when we aren’t actively doing so, because they’re simply habits for us.
In contrast, we think of our true friends on a regular basis, picking up trinkets we think they’d like or sending them terrible memes simply because they came to mind.
5. You’ve always been dependent upon each other for emotional regulation.
It’s possible that you’ve always reached out to one another when you were dealing with personal problems, so you’ve become integral emotional support pillars for each other.
You’ve been almost like therapists for each other, been on call for health issues and emergencies, and helped each other through losses and relationship issues.
If there isn’t a crisis or a devastating personal issue going on, however, you may find you don’t really have anything to talk about.
In fact, you may come to realize that your entire relationship is based on mutual support rather than sincere bonds and kinship.
Furthermore, this person may thrive on the drama you share with them, and get a thrill from sharing their issues with you as well, but that’s all there is to the relationship.
6. Time together has become an integral part of your life’s rhythm, but you don’t actually enjoy it.
Wednesday afternoon coffee. Friday evening dinner. Sunday brunch.
You’ve kept these scheduled get-togethers with this person for years, to the point where it’s a foundational pillar of your social life that renews automatically rather than being discussed.
You might even schedule family get-togethers around these meet-ups so you don’t risk upsetting your friend.
Do you actually enjoy these get-togethers, though? Or do you adhere to them out of a sense of loyalty and obligation?
When something (or someone) has been as much a part of your life as your own limbs, you may feel that you have no choice but to continue the same rhythms and routines that you always have.
It has never occurred to you that you had the option to change this dynamic, any more than changing your own heartbeat.
7. The only things you have in common are things from your distant past.
You may find that this person and you only really reminisce about things that happened several years ago.
For example, when you get together for drinks on the weekend, they may invariably bring up the same stories about the glory days you shared back in high school or the trip to Thailand you took during your gap year.
You don’t have anything in common with this person now. They don’t ask anything about your current life, nor do they make any plans with you for the future.
Essentially, your friendship is based on ghosts rather than current reality.
You’ve changed exponentially over the years since your friendship was established, but they seem to have stagnated at a particular age.
Look at this person with fresh eyes and ask yourself whether you would choose to be their friend if you didn’t have a shared history with them. If the answer is “no”, that tells you that your kinship is based far more on habit than camaraderie.
8. You feel relief when they cancel plans.
When and if this particular person cancels plans with you, do you feel disappointed that you won’t be able to spend time with them?
Or is it immense relief that you won’t have to pretend that you’re delighted to see them and are interested in all the issues they’re going to unload on you?
If it’s the latter, then this is a huge sign that this supposed “friendship” is draining and damaging you rather than bringing you joy or solace.
An easy, sincere friendship doesn’t inspire anxiety in people. In a true friendship, both individuals look forward to spending time together, and generally leave feeling happy and replenished.
You may feel obligated to spend time with this person because you’ve been part of each other’s lives for so long, but if the thought of hanging out with them fills you with dread, that’s something you need to take into consideration as you move forward.
Final thoughts…
Recognizing that what you thought was a friendship is simply a habit can be both devastating and frightening to negotiate.
This is especially true if you don’t have close family or many other friends in your life. Losing someone who has been a pillar to you for as long as you can remember may cause you real distress.
Keep in mind that you don’t need to cut people out of your life just because you’ve realized that your friendship wasn’t what you thought it was. Instead, you can simply renegotiate the relationship with this newfound awareness.
