Growing Up and Growing Apart

I have been meaning to write about this for a while now, and recently I came across an article that brought all these thoughts rushing back. I often wonder what it is about adult friendships that feels so different from the friendships we once knew in school and college.

There was a time when your friend’s house felt so familiar that you treated it like your own. Everyday calls, endless texting. I still remember when prepaid Airtel plans gave us 100 free texts and 100 free call minutes, and we would ration them carefully throughout the month. Every message mattered.

Sometimes you had to choose between talking to your best friend or your crush that day. And then eventually, you would meet your best friend and give them a complete download of everything that happened.

Back then, friendship lived in the smallest things.

The kitchen was always filled with the smell of filter coffee. And we really didn’t care about aesthetics or how the surrounding looked, what we wore, it was just pure conversation with that one friend who would cook and the other sitting on the kitchen slab morally supporting them. 

We experimented with different ways to eat Maggi or Top Ramen Curry, convinced we were inventing something revolutionary. We would sit around speaking about college, assignments, films, books, random plots we wanted to write, stories we wanted to tell, and the people we hoped we would become someday.

Since I studied media, conversations somehow always drifted into cinema. We would discuss camera angles like we were already filmmakers, imagine scenes in our heads, debate over music in movies, or spend hours trying to shoot aesthetic videos with terrible lighting and unlimited confidence.

Life felt slower then.

Even school friendships had their own innocence. It was all about cycles, sports periods, exams, gossip, birthday slam books, and passing notes in class. Gossip, funnily enough, glued so many friendships together and honestly, it still does.

Sometimes talking endlessly about people, life, crushes, and chaos really was the best form of therapy.

Back then, friendship was not something you scheduled. It simply existed around you all the time.

And then adulthood arrives quietly.

People say adulting is amazing. Some say it is exhausting. I think it is somehow both. 

There are parts of it I genuinely love. The freedom of having your own money, buying the groceries you want, watching television without fighting for the remote, deciding your own routines. I thought I missed having siblings around until my sister had a child, and now that little human behaves exactly like the sibling chaos I grew up with.

But somewhere between growing up and building lives for ourselves, friendships begin to change shape too.

Now I realise how much distance and circumstance matter in maintaining closeness. Life moves so quickly around us that the people who once felt deeply familiar slowly begin to feel like memories attached to another version of ourselves.

Some friendships become entirely nostalgic.

“Remember when we used to do that?”

“Remember when we stayed up all night watching horror movies and then went to college half asleep the next morning?”

“Remember when we thought our biggest problem was an assignment deadline?”

And sometimes I wonder, why can’t we hold onto that same closeness? Why do childhood friends slowly become people we love deeply but speak to occasionally? Why do the people geographically closer to us eventually become the ones who know our day-to-day lives better?

Of course, deep down, I know the answer.

Life takes us places we never expected. Suddenly you fall in love with someone your old friends may barely know. Your routines change. Your priorities shift. Your days become filled with work, responsibilities, errands, bills, partners, social batteries, exhaustion, and trying to survive adulthood with some level of sanity intact.

And then, unknowingly, your “work besties” become the people who know the details of your life the most, simply because they witness it daily.

And I realised something recently.

Maybe friendship has always been about proximity.

School friends became family because we spent entire days together.

College friends became soulmates because we were growing into ourselves together.

Work friendships happen because adulthood leaves us spending 8 to 10 hours a day side by side with the same people.

Time creates intimacy.

Shared routines create attachment.

Shared struggles create closeness.

Maybe that has always been the formula.

Still, there is a quiet grief in knowing that I now learn about my school and college friends through Instagram stories instead of random midnight conversations. I know where they travel, what cafés they visit, what food they eat, and sometimes even what they are emotionally going through, all through social media updates instead of hearing it directly from them.

That part hurts a little.

Not because the love is gone, but because life no longer allows the same access to each other.

And maybe that is the difference between childhood friendships and adult friendships.

One was built from innocence, mischief, boredom, and growing up together.

The other is built from circumstance, schedules, convenience, emotional capacity, shared workplaces, changing preferences, distance, and whatever remains of our social battery after surviving the week.

Neither is less meaningful.

But there is something deeply irreplaceable about the friendships that witnessed us before the world asked us to become practical.

The friends who knew us before we became careful.

Before calendars.

Before responsibilities.

Before burnout.

Before we started saying, “Let’s catch up soon,” and actually meaning it.

Before the acceptance of our dependance on social media and the lethargy that sets in due to ease of access. 

And maybe growing up is slowly learning that friendship does not always disappear loudly. Sometimes it simply changes form.

Sometimes love remains, even in silence.

Even in delayed replies.

Even in birthdays remembered after years.

Even in sending each other reels instead of spending entire evenings together.

So maybe we cannot blame it entirely on “adulting.” Maybe it is also the reality of adulting in this time and age. A time where we no longer stand in queues at STD/ISD booths just to hear someone’s voice for five minutes, wait around near the landline hoping a friend would call, or casually take our cycles and show up at someone’s doorstep unannounced.

Maybe friendships feel different now because the world itself has changed.

Everything has become immediate. We can reach anyone within seconds, and somehow, because of that same ease, we can also ignore, mute, unfollow, or slowly erase people from our lives just as quickly.

Perhaps distance today is no longer only geographical. Sometimes it exists even while we are constantly connected.

But even then, there are moments. A random song, a late-night Maggi, or just simple cycling in the hills, the smell of burnt milk, an old movie quote, an inside joke no one else understands, and suddenly, for a few seconds, you are sixteen again.

And perhaps that is how old friendships stay alive.

Not always in daily conversations, but quietly, inside the versions of ourselves they helped create.