Confronting My Ex - Friends

Can you revive a friendship that ended because you drifted apart? What about if you slept with her ex-boyfriend? Alley Pascoe decided to revisit the people who left her life to find out if you can ever be friends again

Friendships end for a reason. Sometimes they die natural deaths: people move away, you lose touch and then eventually unfriend each other on Facebook. Other times – guilty, your Honour – you sleep with your best mate’s ex and never speak again.

I didn’t think my lost friendships affected me too much – it’s all part of the natural cycle, right? Then I found a card under my bed from 2008 signed, “Love you always, Nicholas”. He was my teenage BFF who I hadn’t spoken to in seven years. The pang I felt in my heart made me think I wasn’t as at peace with my ex-friends as I thought.

I moved around a lot when I was a kid, which research shows can be associated with shallower relationships. It might explain why I’ve always felt deep friendship connections were something that happened to other people. Just as worrying, a shrinking friendship group increases your risk of mortality. By a lot. Almost as much as smoking.

So coupled with these two depressing facts, I set out to reconnect with the people who once knew me best, to see if we could pick things up again – or if the wounds were too deep to heal.

FRIENDSHIP YEARS: Aged 18 to 25. When I first met Dani during an awkward icebreaker in a media studies class at university, I thought she was a bit of a snob – she had a posh accent and was always impeccably dressed. But after a few Thursday afternoons at the uni bar, I realised she was actually the most genuine and down-to-earth person I’d met.

Dani became my closest friend at uni, and when we both moved away we stayed in touch in the usual ways. Until one day I tried to contact her on a work trip to her hometown in Melbourne.