The Silent Grief of Losing Friends in Your Twenties

You expect heartbreak from love, but the real ache comes when you lose the friend who knew everything.

Listening: “Earthstar” by Hannah Cohen

There’s a strange loneliness in losing someone who once knew you so completely. You catch yourself mid-story, realizing they were the only one who would have understood the reference. You scroll past a meme you would have sent them in seconds. The impulse to share doesn’t disappear just because the friendship did.

Nobody prepares you for a friendship breakup. Nobody prepares you for the emotions that come with that kind of loss.

What hits hardest in your twenties is how the people who once knew you best—the ones you thought would stay beside you through every version of adulthood, can become the furthest strangers. You take different jobs, move to different cities, fall into new routines, and meet your romantic partners. We change so frequently and so deeply in our twenties that who we were at 23 is nowhere near who we are at 28. Sometimes the people who loved us at 23 no longer recognize the version we have grown into. That’s the quiet heartbreak of it all.

I find friendship breakups far more difficult than romantic ones. With romantic breakups, you can usually see the clear conclusion that two people aren’t meant to be partners. The relationship was built on romantic obligation. But friendships carry no obligation. These are the people who choose to stay beside you regardless of who you are as a partner. They are the ones you turn to when you need to express how you see and feel the world, without judgment.

The boundaries of a romantic relationship are clear: you are either in it or you are not. But friendship exists on a spectrum. That’s what makes friendship breakups so painful. There is rarely a clean break or a conversation that wraps everything up. More often, it is a slow unraveling. A drift. Texts go unanswered. Calls get postponed indefinitely. Birthdays pass without acknowledgment. And because we lack rituals or language to process the loss of a friend, we carry the grief quietly. Alone. That kind of grief can spill into every part of your life.

The weight feels heavier because friendships are supposed to be safe places. They are our chosen family. They are not meant to have an expiration date. The hardest part is coming to terms with knowing someone so intimately once and later finding yourself a stranger to them. When a friendship ends, you start questioning everything: your judgment, your ability to maintain closeness, your part in what went wrong. You grieve the person and also the version of yourself that existed in that friendship. You say goodbye not just to them, but to the person you were with them. And sometimes, that is the most difficult part.

Still, even in the ache, there is space for gratitude. Gratitude for the season they were in your life. For the laughs that made your stomach hurt. For the advice that helped you survive your hardest moments. For the memories that still live quietly in the corners of your mind. You can honor what was without needing to bring it back in the same form.

Lately, I’ve been pulling old skeletons out of my closet, and one particular friendship breakup has stood out. I hadn’t realized how much it shaped me. There is always the urge to run back, to try to return to how things used to be. But too much time has passed. Both of us have changed. We live different lives now with different people in them.

Part of growing up is learning that some people are only meant to walk beside you for a while. Their impact doesn’t vanish with their absence. They leave an imprint on your life. And love, even when it changes shape or fades entirely, was still real. It still is. And it was always worth it.

And maybe, just maybe, there is hope. Hope that one day you will meet again, not as who you were, but as who you have become. In a gentle and entirely new way.