A thing about friendship after about thirty that I do not think anybody warns you about. It stops happening by default. School, university and your first job all put you in a room with the same people repeatedly for years, and every friendship you have was quietly manufactured by that. Then it stops, and the machinery goes with it, and nobody tells you because the people it has already happened to have stopped noticing. What replaces it is admin. You have to want it enough to put a date in a calendar six weeks out, and then to still want it on the night, which after a full week is a genuinely different question. The friendships that survive are not the deepest ones. They are the ones where somebody was willing to do the admin. I find that slightly bleak and also I have made my peace with it. The alternative was assuming it was about me, and it took about four years to work out that it was structural. Everyone I have said this to since has said some version of yes, and then said they thought it was just them.
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The bit that took me longest was realising it is not a sign anything is wrong. Nobody fell out. The building just stopped putting us in the same room.
The admin point is the whole thing. Every long friendship I have has exactly one person in it who reliably suggests a date, and it is not always me.
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something you reckon. a gripe, a hunch, a hill you will die on. serious or not.
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what all this does to your head, and what to do about it.