Nothing Happened. Everything Changed.

On tonight’s edition of what I can’t stop obsessing over...

Relationships. Fascinating little things, aren’t they?

They basically start out of nowhere. One minute, someone is a complete stranger. You don’t know their story. You don’t know what makes them laugh or cry, their weird habits, their family, what they order at restaurants, or the thing they’re incredibly insecure about but pretend doesn’t bother them. And then, somehow, they’re just...there.

They become part of your life. You share moments and milestones, joys and sorrows. You collect inside jokes that would make absolutely no sense to anyone else. You learn their stories. They learn yours. You laugh together and cry together and show up for each other, and eventually this person who was once a complete stranger becomes so woven into the fabric of your life that it’s difficult to remember a version of it without them.

Relationships are awesome. And relationships are weird as hell.

Because they also require work, right? We make time for each other. We call. We text. We make plans. We check in. We remember birthdays. We sit through stories we’ve already heard seventeen times. We ask how the thing went because we remembered there was a thing. We make an effort to keep our lives overlapping because, left entirely to their own devices, lives have a tendency to wander off in different directions.

At least, that’s what I’ve always thought.

Except apparently sometimes relationships don’t require nearly as much maintenance as I thought they did.

A couple recently moved into the boundaries of our church congregation. They’re people we used to see all the time years ago, but then we moved, life changed, geography changed, our circles stopped overlapping, and we just didn’t see each other anymore. Nothing happened. Nobody got mad. Nobody had a falling out. Nobody stormed dramatically from the room declaring the friendship OVER while throwing a Diet Coke in someone’s face—which, frankly, feels like a missed opportunity.

Life just...happened.

Then suddenly, there they were again. We hugged. We laughed. We started talking. Almost immediately it felt comfortable and familiar, like somebody had pressed pause years ago and then randomly wandered back into the room and hit play. They’re coming over for Cookies & Couch tonight—which is exactly what it sounds like: we eat cookies and sit on the couch because apparently at almost fifty this qualifies as an event, and I am HERE FOR IT.

While we were catching up, we started talking about work. One conversation led to another, and about an hour later I was sitting at my computer applying for a new job based on his recommendation. Someone who had essentially disappeared from my everyday life years ago reappeared, hugged me, made me laugh, and within an hour had potentially altered the trajectory of my career.

Relationships are weird, y’all.

I’ve been thinking about that interaction ever since because there was absolutely no awkwardness about the years in between. No accounting. No explanation required. No, “Well, YOU never called ME.” We just picked up where we left off. Apparently some relationships can sit untouched on a shelf for years, and when you pick them back up, they still fit your hand exactly the way you remember.

Which makes me wonder why all relationships don’t work that way.

There are people I haven’t spoken to in ten years whom I’m fairly certain I could call tomorrow and we’d talk for three hours. And there are people I talked to last Tuesday whom I suddenly don’t know how to talk to anymore. How does THAT happen? How does someone go from, “You’re one of my favorite people! You’re so fun! I love you so much!” to, “You drive me bat-shit crazy and I need you to go away”?

Seriously. There should be paperwork involved. At minimum, somebody should receive a notification:

Your status has recently been changed from CLOSE FRIEND to PERSON WHOSE NAME MAKES ME SIGH WHEN IT APPEARS ON MY PHONE.

Wouldn’t that at least make things clearer?

Because most of the time there isn’t some enormous event. Nobody cheats with somebody’s spouse. Nobody steals money. Nobody reveals some terrible secret. Nothing happens. Something just...changes.

A little tension shows up. A boundary gets crossed. Someone starts needing more than we have available to give. Maybe every conversation becomes about everything wrong in their life. Maybe they need constant reassurance. Maybe being around them starts feeling less like friendship and more like emotional labor. Maybe they’re going through something and need a level of support we simply don’t have the bandwidth to provide.

Or maybe we changed. Maybe they changed. Maybe nobody changed at all, and something that once worked between the two of us simply doesn’t anymore. Somehow we reach this strange place of thinking, I used to love spending time with you. Why am I avoiding you now?

That question is uncomfortable enough, but here’s where it gets even more annoying: sometimes the thing driving us absolutely crazy about another person is something we recognize in ourselves.

Ugh. I hate when self-awareness ruins a perfectly good opportunity to blame somebody else.

My therapist once said that the qualities we dislike most in others are often qualities we dislike in ourselves. I have no idea if that is universally true, and I would very much like to unsubscribe from this particular psychological insight, but I can admit there have been moments when someone else’s insecurity has made me want to climb the walls.

And then I remember: Oh. Hi. Have we met?

I can be incredibly insecure. I can need reassurance. I can wonder why someone hasn’t texted me back and convince myself somebody is mad at me based on approximately zero actual evidence. I can walk into a room already half-convinced nobody particularly wants me there. So perhaps I should climb down from my extremely judgmental little perch.

Maybe sometimes another person’s insecurity bothers us because we’re exhausted by it, and maybe sometimes it bothers us because we recognize it. Both things can be true.

There’s that damn “and” again!

All of this has led me to another question that might be even more uncomfortable: If someone really was one of my closest friends, why can’t I just tell them they’re driving me crazy?

Not necessarily, “YOU’RE ANNOYING AS SHIT. KNOCK IT OFF.” Although, honestly, that would save everybody a considerable amount of time.

But why is it so difficult to say, “Hey, something feels different between us lately,” or, “I love you, but I don’t have the emotional bandwidth for this right now”? Why can’t we say, “When this keeps happening, I find myself pulling away,” or simply ask, “Are we okay? Because this doesn’t feel like us”?

If this person really is—or really was—someone I loved and trusted, shouldn’t we be able to have that conversation?

You’d think.

Instead, I think a lot of us ghost people in slow motion.

We don’t disappear overnight. We just take a little longer to respond. Eight minutes becomes eight hours. Eight hours becomes a day. A day becomes three. Sorry! Crazy week! We stop initiating. We decline an invitation, then another. We don’t include them in something we ordinarily would have. We think, I should really call them, and then we don’t. Next week becomes next month, next month becomes six months, and eventually the relationship isn’t exactly over. It’s just...not there anymore.

Neither person can necessarily point to the moment it happened. Nobody broke up. Nobody said goodbye. Nobody officially decided the friendship had run its course.

We just drifted apart.

Except...did we?

Or is “drifting apart” sometimes just conflict avoidance stretched over a long enough timeline?

Because there’s another part of relationships I’ve been thinking about lately: how often we need something from another person and never actually tell them. We assume they should know.

If they cared, they’d check on me. If I mattered, they’d make the effort. If they loved me, they’d say it. If they were proud of me, they’d show it. If they really knew me, they would know I need this.

And maybe those needs are completely legitimate. Maybe we really do need more reassurance, more encouragement, more effort, more reciprocity, more evidence that we matter to someone who matters deeply to us. There’s nothing wrong with needing those things.

But sometimes we begin resenting someone for failing a test we never told them they were taking.

Oof!

I don’t particularly care for that realization either.

How often do we quietly withdraw from someone because they aren’t giving us what we need without ever actually telling them what we need? How often do we build an entire narrative around somebody else’s behavior without ever asking them what it means? How often do we decide we’re unwanted, unimportant, annoying, burdensome, forgotten, or simply not worth the effort—and then start behaving accordingly?

We pull away. They notice, so maybe they pull away too. We interpret their distance as confirmation of what we already feared while they interpret ours however they interpret it. Suddenly two people who once loved each other very much are standing on opposite sides of a canyon neither one remembers digging.

Then, years later, somebody asks, “What happened between you two?”

“I don’t really know.”

Nothing happened.

And somehow, everything changed.

Maybe that’s what fascinates me so much about seeing these old friends again, because nothing happened with them either. But in this case, nothing changed. Life moved us into different circles for a while. Geography separated us. Circumstances changed. Years passed. Apparently the relationship itself was just sitting there, waiting. No resentment. No scorekeeping. No explanation required. Just, “HEY! There you are!”

And I love that.

It also makes me wonder about everybody else—the people who disappeared and stayed gone, the people I miss and the people I don’t, the people I’ve pulled away from and the people who have pulled away from me. There are probably people I could call tomorrow and pick up exactly where we left off, and others with whom something has shifted so much that I’m not sure either of us knows how to get back to where we were.

Maybe not every relationship is supposed to last forever. I believe that. Some people are seasonal. Some relationships belong to a particular chapter of our lives, and when the chapter ends, so does the relationship. Some people leave and probably shouldn’t come back. Sometimes distance is healthy and boundaries are necessary. Sometimes another person needs more than we are capable of giving them, and sometimes we need more than they are capable of giving us. Sometimes people grow in different directions. Sometimes we simply stop fitting.

And maybe that’s okay.

But I also wonder how many relationships we lose because we mistake discomfort for incompatibility. How many friendships could survive if somebody were simply willing to say the scary thing? How many people are currently pulling away from each other because both are waiting for the other person to reach out? How many relationships end not because something terrible happened, but because something small happened over and over again—and nobody talked about it?

I don’t know. That’s the irritating thing about most of the stuff I write about. I usually arrive with questions and leave with more questions.

But tonight, I’m going to sit on my couch and eat cookies with people I haven’t really spent time with in years. Apparently we’re friends again.

Or maybe we never stopped being friends.

Maybe life just moved us out of each other’s way for a while.

I kinda like that thought.

Maybe that’s the part I can’t stop obsessing over tonight. Some people can disappear for years and walk back into our lives like they were gone for a weekend, while others can sit right beside us and somehow become strangers. Sometimes something happens. Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes life moves us into different circles. Sometimes somebody gets hurt or tired. Sometimes one person needs more than the other can give. And sometimes two people who genuinely love each other slowly create distance because neither one knows how to say, “Hey...something feels different. Can we talk about it?”

Maybe I’m not really wondering why relationships end.

Maybe I’m wondering why some survive the distance...

and others don’t.