I’m 44 And I’ve Finally Realized The Friends I Lost In My Thirties Weren’t The Ones Who Left — They Were The Ones I Stopped Pretending For

My friend Derek and I used to talk every week. Long, sprawling phone calls that lasted an hour, sometimes two. We’d met in our late twenties through mutual friends in Melbourne, and for the better part of a decade, he was one of the people I’d have called at 2 a.m. if something went wrong. We had the kind of friendship that felt permanent — the kind you assume will survive anything because it had already survived everything up to that point.

Then, sometime around 34, the calls started spacing out. Fortnightly. Then monthly. Then the kind of silence where you both know you should reach out but neither of you does, and the gap itself becomes a kind of answer. By 36, we hadn’t spoken in over a year. No falling out. No argument. No single identifiable moment where it broke.

For a long time, I told myself the story most people tell themselves: life got busy. Time zones, careers, the natural drift of adult friendship. It’s a clean story. Comfortable. And for years, I believed it.

I’m 44 now, and I don’t believe it anymore.

What actually happened with Derek — and with at least four or five other friendships that quietly dissolved in my thirties — wasn’t drift. It was something more honest and more uncomfortable than that. I stopped pretending. Not dramatically. Not with some grand declaration of authenticity. I just — gradually, almost imperceptibly — stopped maintaining the performance that had made those friendships feel easy. And once the performance stopped, there was nothing underneath holding us together.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, partly because I keep seeing people in their thirties and forties going through the same quiet reckoning. They talk about it like grief — I lost so many friends after 30 — and the language is always about loss, about people leaving, about abandonment. But I think the framing is wrong. The friends didn’t leave. The person those friends had befriended — the curated, agreeable, strategically easy version — is the one who left. And the real person who remained wasn’t someone those friendships were ever built for.

There’s a term in psychology I keep coming back to: self-concordance. It was developed by researcher Kennon Sheldon, who published foundational work on the concept in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The basic idea is that our goals, behaviors, and pursuits can either be concordant with our authentic self — genuinely reflecting who we are and what we value — or they can be driven by external pressure, social expectation, obligation. And that the degree to which your life is self-concordant predicts not just happiness, but the stability of your relationships, your health, your sense of meaning.

What nobody tells you is that self-concordance doesn’t just apply to career goals or life milestones. It applies to friendships too. Some friendships are concordant — they exist because the real you and the real them genuinely connect. And some friendships are maintained almost entirely by the performance. The version of you that laughs at jokes you don’t find funny. The version that shares interests you’ve outgrown. The version that agrees with opinions you’ve quietly abandoned because disagreeing would introduce friction you’re not willing to manage.

My friend Rachel — who I’ve known since my early years in Singapore — once told me something that stuck. She said, “I realized I’d been keeping friendships alive the way you keep a houseplant alive in a room with no sunlight. You can do it, technically. But the plant isn’t growing. You’re just preventing it from dying.” She’d recently let two long friendships lapse and was struggling with the guilt of it. She kept using the word selfish, like choosing not to perform was a moral failing.

That guilt is worth examining. Because I think the reason friendship loss in your thirties feels so much more painful than friendship loss in your twenties isn’t the loss itself — it’s the implication. If those friendships were held together by a performance, then admitting they’re gone means admitting the performance existed in the first place. And that’s a hard thing to sit with. It means acknowledging that you weren’t fully honest. That the person your friends loved wasn’t entirely real. That you participated in a kind of mutual fiction — sometimes for years — and the dissolution of the friendship is actually the dissolution of the fiction.

I’ve written before about the habits older generations maintained that younger people are starting to understand differently, and one of the things that comes up again and again is the way previous generations treated social obligation as non-negotiable. You showed up. You stayed in touch. You maintained the relationship regardless of whether it still served either party. There’s a discipline to that I can respect — but there’s also a cost that rarely gets named. The cost is authenticity. The cost is spending decades in friendships that require you to be someone you’re not.

Psychologist Laura Carstensen’s socioemotional selectivity theory offers a framework for what’s happening here. Her research at Stanford found that as people age and begin to perceive time as more limited, they naturally prioritize emotionally meaningful relationships over expansive social networks. It’s not that you become antisocial or selfish. It’s that your tolerance for relationships that require performance — what I’d call emotional maintenance costs — drops. You start doing the math, even unconsciously. You start asking: does this friendship ask me to be someone I actually am, or someone I used to pretend to be?

And here’s what’s uncomfortable: most of us don’t do this math consciously. We don’t sit down and evaluate our friendships with a spreadsheet. What happens is subtler. You stop initiating. You take longer to reply. You feel a low-grade relief when plans cancel. And then one day, you realize you haven’t spoken to someone in eighteen months and the dominant feeling isn’t sadness — it’s a strange, quiet peace.

That peace is the tell. That peace is your nervous system acknowledging that a performance has ended.

My friend Marcus went through something similar around 40. He’d had this tight group of guys from university — five of them — and they’d done everything together for nearly two decades. Holidays, weddings, the whole infrastructure. But Marcus told me that somewhere in his mid-thirties, he started dreading their group trips. Not the logistics, not the expense. The pretending. He said, “I’d spend three days being the version of myself they remembered from when we were 22, and then I’d come home and feel like I needed a week to recover — not from the travel, but from the acting.” He didn’t leave the group. He just stopped performing. And within two years, three of the five friendships had essentially ended. The two that survived? They were the ones where the real Marcus — the quieter, more introspective, occasionally disagreeable Marcus — was actually welcome.

There’s a concept I’ve started calling relational authenticity debt. It works like financial debt — you borrow against your real self to maintain the relationship, and for a while, the interest is manageable. But it compounds. Every year you maintain the performance, the gap between who you are and who the friendship requires you to be grows wider. And eventually, the cost of servicing that debt becomes greater than the cost of default. So you default. Not with a dramatic confrontation, but with silence. With slow withdrawal. With the kind of fade that looks like drift but is actually a reckoning.

A 2013 review published in Social and Personality Psychology Compass examined authenticity in close relationships and found that perceived authenticity — the feeling that you can be your genuine self around someone — was one of the strongest predictors of relationship satisfaction and longevity. Stronger than shared interests. Stronger than frequency of contact. Stronger even than the length of the friendship. The research essentially confirms what most of us already suspect but struggle to act on: the relationships that survive aren’t the ones where you have the most in common. They’re the ones where you have the least to hide.

I think about Derek sometimes. Not with regret, exactly. More with a kind of clear-eyed recognition. The Justin he was friends with was real — partially. That version of me existed. But it was a selected, curated version. The version that was always upbeat, always available, always easy. And when I stopped being that — when I got quieter, more boundaried, less willing to perform engagement I didn’t feel — the friendship simply couldn’t metabolize the change. Not because Derek was a bad person. He wasn’t. But because the friendship’s foundation was the performance, and I removed the foundation.

So here’s the direct message — the thing I wish someone had told me at 34 instead of letting me spend a decade thinking I’d been abandoned: the friends you lose in your thirties aren’t the ones who left. They’re the ones you stopped pretending for. And the grief you feel isn’t for the relationship. It’s for the version of yourself you retired — the easy, agreeable, low-friction version that made those friendships possible in the first place.

That version served you once. It kept you connected during years when connection felt more important than authenticity. But it was always temporary. It was always going to expire.

The friendships that remain at 44 — the three or four people I’d still call at 2 a.m. — they aren’t the ones where I’m the most fun, the most agreeable, or the most entertaining. They’re the ones where I’m the most recognizable. Where the person they know is actually the person I am. No borrowed self. No compounding debt. No performance to maintain.

And if that means the circle is smaller, then the circle is smaller.

It turns out that’s not a loss. It’s the first honest thing I’ve done in years.

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