Friendships in Your 30s and 40s: Loving, Losing, and Letting Be

PodcastMindset

May 12

Episode 951: Show Notes

I don’t know a single person in their 30s and 40s who doesn’t want deeper and more meaningful friendships. The last place I expected to get friendship advice was from Mel Robbins’ new book, The Let Them Theory, but today, I want to share the unexpected ways this book shifted how I think about making, retaining, and even releasing friendships, especially in the complicated season of adulthood that is your 30s and 40s. There is an entire section in this book that talks about adult friendships. So, what is the ‘let them theory’ in relation to relationships? It’s all about relinquishing control instead of chasing, convincing, or over-managing relationships. It’s not about being cold or cutting people off, it’s about allowing people to be who they are without letting that affect your worth.

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The Great Scattering and How Friendships Naturally Change

I don’t know about you, but I had the easiest time making friends in college because I befriended an extrovert who wanted to help me make friends! A huge part of that is because of how much time you spend together in college. In order for someone to become a close friend, it’s said that you need to spend 200 hours together! In college, that’s really easy, but in adulthood, when we have families, spouses, work, and distance between us and our friends, that becomes so much harder. In Mel’s book, she discusses an experience that we all go through typically after high school or college called ‘the great scattering’. This is a period of time when we all grow apart from our friends because of natural progressions in life.

During college, you tend to be moving through life at the same pace as your friends. But that all changes when you graduate, move away, start working, get married, and start families. I think we often fight these changes for obvious reasons. For me, the first time I started to fight back was when people were starting to have kids, and my husband and I couldn’t. I just remembered feeling so out of place amongst my friends starting families. I want you to know that friendships are allowed to change and evolve without it being a big betrayal! It’s just a natural part of life.

How ‘Letting Them,’ ‘Lets You’

Mel said, “When you let them, you let yourself.” Letting your friends be the friend they are now instead of the friend they once were is so freeing. Instead of feeling rejected, I want you to try to embrace the lightness of embracing the natural seasons of friendships. When I first experienced this, I was really crushed by the fact that I wasn’t as close to some of my friends as I once was before, because our lives were so different, especially when kids came into the picture. It’s not just about letting them, it’s also about letting yourself! Letting yourself grow, letting yourself need different kinds of friendships, and letting yourself be unapologetic about outgrowing certain dynamics.” By trying to prevent other people from changing, you don’t allow yourself to change. Life is constantly changing, and shifts in friendships are inevitable. When you stop fighting these changes, you find opportunities to make more friends!

Fostering New Relationships

After I resigned from the non-profit I was working at, I really struggled to find new relationships, and after a bit of an awkward gym encounter, I decided that the best thing to do was actually to work on myself! I had been so focused on finding friends to validate something within myself, and I realized that if I wasn’t okay within myself, this strategy wasn’t going to work. I ended up applying to a leadership class with a group trip at the end of it. At the end of class, we all started hanging out, and I spent so much time getting to know individual people, and eventually, I felt like I had meaningless friendships. I also knew that if I didn’t invest in these relationships, they would fizzle out. Now, I have a fairly large group of friends who live close to me, and we all have so many threads holding us together. I have been so touched by these people that I may have written off because I didn’t think we had enough in common.

Yes, you need to click with people and have similarities with them for things to work long-term. But you’re not going to know what those things are unless you put yourself in front of people consistently. I think, in your 30s and 40s, it’s easy to think that friendships are harder or somehow worse when the truth is, they’re just different and they take more intention, but they’re also wiser. I want to ask you some questions that you can reflect on: Where are you holding on too tightly? Who is not there for you in the way they used to be? Who needs to be let go? Where might it be freeing to ‘let them’ or to ‘let yourself’? Where can you spend time to expose yourself to new people? How can you invest in your relationships while finding ones that are reciprocal? Adult friendships take longer to foster because you simply can’t spend as much time together. It’s going to take time, but it’s worth it. Having people in your life is worth it! I can’t wait to see what new relationships pop up for you!