When Friends Move

On coping and freaking out and half-acceptance

I counted and realized five close friends of mine have moved or are about to move this year.

When I am feeling weak and pessimistic, it genuinely shakes my faith in what I’m doing with my life and where I’m doing it, which feels silly to say. But like every other feeling that comes with community, maybe it’s an important one to talk about. 

So much of the current thinking on community (including mine) centers on building and nurturing and staying which avoids the inevitable second half of many relationship arcs – the fracturing, the shrinking, the leaving. Or even just the plateau-ing. Contraction is just as much a part of friendship as expansion is even if we insist on their separateness. 

Still, I surprise myself smashing into my own heartbreak about it all. My most lizard expectations still go something like: we’ll all become friends and like it so much we’ll stay near each other forever.

If our relationships are the load-bearing center of our sense of place, how is that shaken when our friends move away? How might we develop individual and collective resilience to meet that inevitability? 

Maybe it starts by talking honestly about how much it sucks?

Here’s a go at that!!

When Friends Move

• You read the pieces or see the apps about moving to live near friends and feel something congeal in you

• It becomes contagious; you wonder if you should move somewhere else too

• Think about how stupid of a choice they’re making

• Wish you were them

• Quietly make a list of the people you love who are still here

• Make promises to try new forms of communicating – voice memos, photo dumping on WhatsApp – even though you don’t really want one more person to text

• Hang out with them slightly less so as to stave off the hurt, inadvertently or vertently

• Have a friend tell you they hang out with people leaving even more in the weeks before they move and wonder what type of blastproof shield their heart is made of

• Blame the forces that make moving so common - jobs, school, cost of living, better dance parties in the new place

• Vow to hang out with the new friend you’ve been meaning to reach out to

• Feel the coming void of birthday parties they usually planned or cookies they usually baked or precious backyard barbecues they usually hosted, this sits on your chest in the night

• You think about having kids just to have someone be relatively certain in your life even though you firmly do not want to have kids

• Romanticize when people in your parents’ generation decided to settle somewhere because there was basically just a highway nearby or an uncle also lived there

• Meet new friends, get very excited about them and feel the light in your eyes die when they say they too will be moving in a year

• Try to tone down the frantic edge in your voice when you begin asking new people right away if they are planning to stay but accidentally corner someone in a stairwell and do this exact thing

• Search the eyes of others for signs that they’re thinking of jumping ship too

• Wish we could ban The Goodbye Party or at least distribute extremely nice goodie bags to the friends left behind 

• Have someone tell you “on a long enough timeline all friendships change drastically - they could move or you could fight and not make up or they could die” 

• Try to loosen your idea of what an ideal friendship is

• Wonder if you can fast track intimacy within the typical 2 year grad school window that brings most people your age here

• Begin to hate the little walk around your neighborhood that you liked so much just the other day

• Be grateful that you have friends that you can be sad about in the first place

• Realize that so many love songs can double as devastated songs about friendship

• Wonder where you’d move if you had the chance 

• Remember that most places are basically the same 

• Somehow feel more swirl after that little thought exercise 

• Remember that you’re part of someone else’s reason why they like it here

• And that they’re part of yours too 

• Remember that you’d want the same freedom to make this choice without hurting others if you did indeed decide to move

• And that you have been the Friend That Moved before too

• And that people aren’t fixed certainties but your commitment to a place can be

• Wonder if that is a bit pollyanna honestly

• Admit that it is very sad, doesn’t have to mean anything but can also mean something, is an inseparable feature of all relationships, try to scare people a little less when you ask them if they plan on sticking around

• Make new friends that will move