5 Signs It’s Time To Leave Your High School Friends Behind

By the time you graduate, you’ll begin to see the realities of friendship when you’re no longer spending 6 hours a day, 5 days a week with the same people. You’ll have less to talk about, and even the stuff that was once common ground will be unfamiliar.

You might not feel that same comfortable feeling of wholly knowing someone and as your life changes and alters, so does the friendship. Until, maybe…it just drifts completely. You promised you would be friends forever but how do you know when it’s worth hanging on to a nostalgic relationship and when it’s time to let go?

1. They cancel on you but don’t ever reschedule plans

Regardless of how many times you try and match up your schedules it doesn’t seem to work. If you ever do manage to agree on a date or time its sure to be disrupted by a text with an excuse- ‘I’m feeling sick’, ‘caught in traffic’, ‘bad day at work’ or ‘can we postpone?’ This would be fine; everyone has stuff going on and sometimes plans don’t work out.

But your friend is always the one cancelling and they never make the effort to find another time to see you. An out of the blue message will exclaim how much they miss you but it’s never followed up by any real effort to see you, catch up phone calls get further and further apart.

2. When you finally see each other you have nothing to talk about

Gone are the days of discussing the latest assignment or what your mate said in class the other day. You don’t have source material on your teachers, or gossip about the girls in your year to share and you slowly realise you don’t have much to talk about at all. Once, you could spend hours giggling about who was hooking up with who, or what that person did at the party on the weekend.

But all of a sudden familiar conversations and rants are dry and stagnant, the whole situation feels like an awkward first date, and everything feels like a filler until you can haul ass out of the cafe or restaurant and leave the dead conversation behind.

3. Catch up’s are spent wishing you could leave

Every time you go to see your friend, you find yourself counting the minutes until you hit an acceptable time to get out of there. It’s not that you hate their company, but you can’t stop thinking about other things you’d rather do- the uni readings you really should catch up on or the Netflix series you want to binge watch.

The seconds seem to pass incredibly slow and you’re trying to hide the fact that you’re desperately praying for an interruption, a phone call or a fire alarm to go off, so you can escape.

4. You both spend the whole time on the phone

It’s gotten to the point where all you two do is look at your phone, a few half baked conversations here and there with a slurp of the drink you ordered breaking the silence.

Back in the highschool days you could spend all day laying in bed, on your phones, not talking and occasionally tagging each other in a funny video and it was chill, but now? The silence is painful and staring at your phone seems to be the only acceptable thing to do.

5. You can’t share experiences

You want to talk about some fresh and new- how you drove up the coast with some uni mates, how you’ve landed an internship, how you’ve finally quit your sh**ty job- except…you can’t.

The words don’t flow and you can tell the conversation is one sided- your friend can’t contribute and you don’t know how to include them. There’s a disconnect. You’ve changed and they probably have as well. In the highschool days it would have been fine but now? You’ve changed and grown like always… but you haven’t done it together.

Here’s the goss. Year13 is running an online careers exhibition designed to help you find your passion and plan your future!

Whether you’re dazed and confused when it comes to your future plans, or you’re keen to learn how to land your dream job, this expo has something for everyone! Running from May 17-19, you’ll hear from 30+ red hot speakers and over a hundred exhibitors exploring work, study and travel.

RSVP here so you don’t miss any of the speakers (like The Inspired Unemployed, Dr Karl or Kath Ebbs, to name drop a few). Get keen!