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You swore you would be "Best Friends Forever", soulmates, intimates. Something has changed and life has moved on. When our lives change sometimes so do our friendships or at least the make-up of our friendships. Heartbreaking at times and others a relief. Still when we outgrow our friendships it should be a time of reflection since they sustain us and help to keep us connected in ways that other relationships don't.

Friendships are based on shared interests, at least in the beginning. As they progress we build history, shared stories, even drama both comedy and tragedy. Over the course of our lives most of us will have many people come and go through our lives, some we will name friends others will be passing acquaintances. Usually with those we name friends we enjoy an intimacy that allows us to let down our hair and be at ease. Sharing secret hopes, dreams, along with our success and failures; these are the bonds of friendship. Outgrowing these bonds, this sense of intimacy and comfort can be as painful as divorce or even death.

Most of us don't outgrow friendships overnight; instead it is a process that we go through as we mature and change. Some of the reasons can be healthy such as when our friendships are destructive or one-sided. Destructive friendships may include drugs or other external forces that when you finally decide to move on you will also leave those friendships that enabled or even encouraged your behavior. One-sided friendships are those that ultimately only benefit one person, usually because one person is needier or demands center stage. These also can ultimately be destructive to the person who is on the giving side of the friendship and eventually most of us will walk away if for no other reason than self-preservation.

But finally we come to the crux of the issue, where we simply outgrow our "Best Friends Forever". Certainly these are more difficult to analyze as there may be no single reason why we drift apart; simply one day we look back and realize we haven't spoken to our friend for awhile, maybe it is a week maybe more. Then the time between calls or visits increases to months and finally we simply realize that the person who had played such a large role in our life for so long is no longer an integral part of our existence. The causes for the slow drift of a friendship into oblivion are to numerous to evaluate in this article, but some of the most obvious reasons are;

Change in physical location, one of you move away;
Marriage of

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