Before we get into this, I want to leave something here for the woman who has been realizing that rebuilding her life may also mean reconsidering the relationships, habits, and versions of herself she has outgrown.
I created * the woman rebuilding herself*, a 30-day journal + poetry experience for the woman who has spent too much time being who everyone else needed and is ready to come back to herself. It moves through 30 days of original poems, guided prompts, reflection, release, and rebuilding… the kind of private work that helps you become more honest about what you want, what you tolerate, and what no longer deserves access to you.
If this conversation about friendship, love, and the environments we choose feels a little too familiar, this journal was created for that version of you.
Begin the woman rebuilding herself here.
Now, let’s talk about your friends.
I also want to say that this is both to men and women… to humans….okay, lets get into this shit…
There is a version of friendship that feels like loyalty but is actually built around dysfunction. These are the friendships where the deepest bonding happens when something is falling apart.
These friendships often feed themselves from your tears. When you’re confused, when you’ve been cheated on or disappointed, these friendships tend to come to life when you’re facing being ghosted, lied to, or left wondering why somebody couldn’t love you properly.
These friends know exactly what to say when your relationship is in pieces. They know how to help you investigate the tone of a text, dissect an argument, decode somebody’s behavior, and remind you why you should leave, and to be fair, they may have earned a very real place in your heart by showing up during some of the hardest seasons of your life.
These individuals have earned their stripes in the trenches with you, but there’s a question worth asking yourself…
What role do they play when your life starts working?
Because... let’s be honest... and I’m going to hold your hand when I say this... some friendships quietly derive their importance from being needed during your dysfunction.
Their value in the friendship has always been the rescue: the late-night phone calls when you’re in a dark place, those emergency meetings, the 3-hour conversation about what he did this time, the screenshots, the fucking outrage, the reassurance by any means necessary, and the rebuilding.
So…. hmmmm…. deep sigh…
So, when you finally enter a relationship that is calm, emotionally mature, reciprocal, communicative, sexually healthy, emotionally safe, and deeply intentional, something strange can happen…
There is suddenly much less for them to do.
You see, there are no fires to be put out.
No detective work required…
No dramatic ass updates..
No constant “ you won’t believe what happened…”
And if they have never even experienced a relationship at that level… you are now trying to create, they may have very little wisdom to contribute to it.
They understand surviving relationships, not thriving in one or building it.
That distinction matters because people can only fully advise you from the level of relationship they understand.
Someone who has spent their entire romantic life attempting to navigate chaos may be incredibly skilled at identifying the tropes, the betrayal, the manipulation, inconsistency, and heartbreak, but that does not automatically mean they’re skilled at recognizing healthy compromise, emotional regulation, long-term partnership, repair, intimacy, patience, or the quiet seasons that naturally exist inside mature love.
In fact…and understand this, please.. peace can sometimes look suspicious to people who are accustomed to turbulence…
They may call stability boring.
They may often interpret compromise as weakness or control.
They will often mistake vulnerability for losing yourself, and they may also encourage you to leave situations that simply require greater communication instead of an escape…
READ THAT AGAIN because I KNOW YOU… needed that.
Got it? Good.
And… without realizing it, you can begin lowering the quality of your romantic relationship to maintain the emotional language that exists in some of your friendships.
That is where things get uncomfortable, and some of the eyes reading this shit will get defensive… good because sometimes your relationship becoming healthier changes the entire ecosystem around you.
The healthier your love becomes, the less entertaining it may be to people who bonded with you through dysfunction.
The less there is to analyze…
The less there is to gossip over…
The less there is to rescue you from….
And when someone’s great contribution to your life has always been helping you survive bad relationships, your good relationship can quietly make them feel irrelevant…
And no… not necessarily because they are haters or hold malicious intent… but because they have never developed a role in your life that exists beyond a fucking crisis… which is just horrible character development in general…
You see… this is why, when I meet people and hear the history of their relationships… the partners they kept choosing, the obvious incompatibilities they kept overlooking, the situations they stayed in long after the evidence was clear, one of my first thoughts is often…
Who the fuck are your friends? Because they knew about that bull shit… right??
And it’s not because friends are responsible for another person’s decisions but because I wonder whether anyone in that person’s life was speaking to the highest version of them….
Did anyone challenge what they were normalizing?
Did anyone remind them that loneliness is not a reason to attach yourself to someone who consistently diminishes you?
Did anyone speak up and speak life into them in a way that made settling feel beneath who they were becoming…or was everyone simply relating….?
Listen… or stare closely at this damn screen…THERE is a difference between someone understanding your pain and someone being equipped to help you rise above the pattern creating it…
and… I think we confuse those two things all the fucking time…
Sometimes…and I mean, some of the time… the reason your friends cannot build you up in a productive way is that they are making the exact same decisions in their own lives.
They’ve been choosing emotionally unavailable people too.
They’ve been ignoring obvious incompatibilities too…
Accepting inconsistent behavior too...
They’ve been returning to people who repeatedly disappoint them too…
(and I definitely want to unfold the ways in which people give you a line of advice that completely goes against everything they genuinely believe just out of an attempt to have some level of control over your life or to keep you from experiencing something that is outside of what they can even conceive for themselves, but that’s a post for another time..)
So... when you bring your situation to them, what you receive isn’t rooted in elevation; it’s just recognition.
They understand you because they are living some version of the same story and there can be comfort in that but that comfort and growth are not the same thing…
A sounding board can mirror your pain perfectly and still have absolutely no idea how to lead you out of it. That is why so many friendships become endless cycles of...
you deserve better…
Everybody says it…
Everybody agrees…
Everybody shakes their head at what happened…
Everybody reminds you that you are beautiful, worthy, and deserving…
But very few people ever define what better actually is…or means…
So, I’ll tell you since you may not even understand what that means in totality…
Better boundaries…
Better discernment..
Better partner selection..
Better self-respect…
Better emotional regulation…
Better standards…
Better decisions before the relationship ever gets serious enough to destroy you because telling someone they deserve better without helping them develop the awareness required to choose better is often just emotional reassurance, and reassurance feels good as fuck. Still, reassurance does not necessarily change your life..
There is also something extremely hard about receiving advice from someone whose own life consistently contradicts it, and you won’t call them out because you’re just being a “good friend…”
A friend can tell you a hundred times that you should never tolerate inconsistency, but if you watch them repeatedly chase inconsistent people, some part of you registers the contradiction. They can say to you… don’t accept crumbs, but if crumbs are the foundation of every relationship they enter, the words lose weight… not because they do not love you..
They may love you deeply! But people teach with their lives long before they teach with their mouths, and subconsciously, it becomes difficult to fully believe someone telling you that you deserve a level of love they have never demonstrated that they believe they deserve themselves.
This matters more than any of us would ever admit because being surrounded by people who can relate to your dysfunction is very different from being surrounded by people who expand your imagination beyond it.
On one side, you get company in the pattern; on the other, someone who helps you outgrow it…
One side knows exactly how you feel when everything falls apart…
The other helps shape your standards, your thinking, and your self-respect so that fewer things have to fall apart in the first fucking place.
And there is another uncomfortable part of this conversation that deserves to be said…
And boy… do I love the uncomfortable parts written or said out loud…
Sometimes, when a person finally gets into a healthy, happy relationship, the people around them start making them feel guilty for having less time…
They claim you disappeared…
Damn… you changed…
You never come around anymore…
You only care about your relationship now…
And sometimes, yes, people absolutely abandon their friendships when they get into relationships…that happens.. but that is not always what is going on…
Sometimes you simply found a space that feels better…
When you are loved well, when the connection is good and healthy, when the conversation is fulfilling, when the laughter is effortless, when the affection is consistent, and your nervous system is not constantly being activated, you naturally want to spend more time there…
Why wouldn’t you?
I’ve never felt this way toward my own friends because I’m either pursuing someone, pursuing my career, or pursuing myself, so I don’t really notice a change outside of an actual romantic relationship…
People will always gravitate toward the places where they feel most alive, and sometimes that reveals something uncomfortable about the friendships you came from….
And of course you’ll do the thing where you promise to talk more, hang out more often, but that eventually tapers off because you want to feel what you want to feel despite what you’re willing to say out loud…
Maybe those friendships felt most valuable when something was going wrong, when there’s tea… when somebody needed to be discussed or when a relationship was falling apart… when there’s drama to consume, a story to dissect, a betrayal to analyze, or a person to collectively dislike for a week or so…
There was always something to talk about because something was always burning… but when you enter a relationship where nothing is burning, you begin discovering another kind of connection…
You discover what it feels like to sit somewhere and simply exist.. to laugh louder, to be weird without becoming the joke… to be soft without someone making you feel corn for it…
The number of times I’ve heard someone refer to love and softness as corny is always how I know what types of people get their time and energy, or how vulnerability is seen as a form of weakness or loss of control….
You finally find a place to be affectionate, ambitions, spiritual, silly, sensual, emotional or compeletely unguarded without constantly adjusting yourself to fit the energy of the room… and once you experience that corner of life where your whole self is welcome, it becomes difficult to keep spending the majority of your time in spaces where some version of you has to be edited because come on… it has to get boring as fuck to just sit at a baseline that in some ways is just a lower vibration that who you truly are…
That does not automatically mean your partner has replaced your friends…
It may just mean your relationship has introduced you to a quality of emotional safety you did not realize you were missing…and naturally, you begin gravitating towards it…
There is something so powerful about being with someone around whom you do not have to perform for….you don’t have to force yourself to relate… You don’t have to pretend something is funny because everyone else thinks it is…. You don’t have to participate in conversations that no longer interest you just to maintain a level of belonging.
You don’t have to make yourself smaller, harder, more cynical, or more detached so that nobody accuses you of changing…
A good relationship can give you permission to experience parts of yourself that some friendships never created room for.
And sometimes that is what people are really reacting to…
Not simply that you are spending less time with them… but that you have found somewhere you can exist in a way that no longer requires the version of you they are accustomed to….and damn, that can feel like rejection to people who benefited from your old availability, especially if much of the friendship was built around a fucking crisis.
When you were heartbroken, you needed them constantly. When you were confused, they had a role. When somebody hurt you, they became more important.
When there was drama, everyone had something to contribute, but when you are loved well, when you are peaceful, when you are busy building something healthy… there may simply be less emotional labor for the friendship to perform.
And for some people… this reduction in necessity can feel like a reduction in love. Those are not the same thing… You can love someone deeply and need them less desperately. In truth, healthy relationships of every kind should make room for that.
A good friendship should not require your unhappiness in order to feel significant. It should not need you to be broken enough to constantly call.
It should not make you feel guilt because your life has become fuller. It should be able to celebrate the fact that you have found a place where you feel safe, loved, and important. And I want to be clear here because this is not an argument against friendship, nor is it an argument that every friend who questions your relationship is jealous, bitter, or incapable of understanding you. Not every friendship operates this way, and most people, if fortunate, have at least one or two friends who understand love differently.
These people are often the ones who are already experiencing healthy relationships themselves, or people who have developed enough self-love and emotional awareness that they are thoughtful about how they interact with love, intimacy, and partnership.
They don’t need your relationship to fail in order to feel close to you, and they don’t compete with your happiness. They don’t turn your partner into an enemy simply because your time has shifted.
They don’t encourage you to abandon yourself for love, but they also don’t encourage you to sabotage something beautiful just to prove your independence or that the friendship still matters.
Listen... they hold you accountable…
They tell you when you are actually settling…
They tell you when you are being unreasonable…
They remin…
