It’s not often each of us experiences these break-ups, and it is even less often that there’s any discussion leading up to the break-up, or in post break-up. But it goes further, sadly not even in the support side of communications are there honest conversations when it comes to the end of a friendship. That is definitely not because there aren’t enough people that either are experiencing or have experienced this, if that was the case, we wouldn’t be such an isolated and socially stunted society. The fact is that
friendships are ending all over the world every single day for any old reason, or even no reason at all.

I’ll be honest when I originally began writing this my thoughts were lined up to go in a completely different direction. But the shocking discoveries during my research and recon immediately changed the
course of my thoughts, and most certainly broke my heart a little. No matter what way you split the findings it is quite clear that the ways we are disconnected and disjointed have left us with so many versions of the definition of friendship that now basically nobody knows what it was, is, or should be anymore. And it shows. Technology and social media gave us such wonderful opportunities as far as communicating with others who most closely matched your interests, now no matter the distance you could share those with others halfway around the planet in the blink of an eye. But the dynamic it introduced into friendships and to the future of making and maintaining them- I don’t think people were expecting and now I think we are left here really not knowing what to do in order to course correct.

I’m obviously not the first person to bring up the divides that exist in the modern world, whether that be those of gender, race, political affiliation, sexual orientation, income bracket, religion, favorite sports teams, paper or plastic, coffee or tea, over or under when it’s time to replace the roll…( No, I do not think those are all the same type of divide), the point however is that whether it’s very big and contrasting subjects or it’s silly personal preferences there are still clear divides present and friendship is no different. Except the divides in friendship take all of those divides above mixes in every other one that individual people each come with, and then multiplies them by the handful of additional divides that are specific
just to friendships.

I looked up how to make friends, how to keep friends, why people stop being friends, how many people are ending friendships and for what reasons, how long friendships last, what, makes friendship last,
what makes friends stop talking, how do adults make friends. The results were so contrasting every search result just seemed to expand the scope of what I was searching for and made it seem like people, as a collective, don’t have any idea what to do when it comes to the uncertainties that friendships in todays
day to day life bring. But having kids on the autism spectrum, being married to someone on the spectrum, and being neurodivergent myself I couldn’t help but realize that one of the key conflicting responses I was finding in a largely negative pool of blame and name calling or good riddance remarks that were left
in the comments sections discussing friend breakups, were the honest questions and desperate confusion of why people can’t seem to make friends or keep them and every single one of those comments came from users that are members of the neurodivergent community in some way or another. So, I revisited every previous question I had read into but included “neurodivergent” to my search and was met with a completely different sort of result.

Not only is there a continually different, and increasingly difficult version of what friendship should look like going around thanks to the unfortunate side of social media, and the overall climate change society experienced when  we faced uncertainty as a world during COVID-19, the foundation of friendship has had little to no time to recover a means forward from one massive change to the next. But there is also a major gap in the actual definition being used to define friendship from one study to another, or one article to another. One of the most surprising things that I found was that there is now a standard instead of a connection. I found a recommended formula that Medium magazine based a study on that concluded “in order to turn an acquaintance into a true friend you need a minimum of 11 meetings of at least three hours in
a period of six months.” While in a PubMed Central study the term friendship is defined as “emotional relationships people form with another. Characterized by mutual affection, companionship, and reciprocal support and interaction.”  I don’t know about you but one of those sounds a lot more like a requirements list than a definition, and one sound like the description of multiple relationships I can think of quickly. Even if you’re not trying to investigate why people don’t have friends anymore and why people are continually dropping long term friends, it shouldn’t sound like you have to qualify to be able to call yourself or someone else a friend. And lastly and to my surprise possibly, one of the biggest contributing factors I think, is that
there are 15-20 percent of the population trying to be friends in a way that is completely and totally different than the way the remaining population have until recently accepted as the only way to make and maintain friendships.

If there isn’t a shift in the way we socialize and better yet treat the relationships we form with other individuals, then there’s going to be even graver consequences than we can already see. What may seem
like an insignificant social issue, was once the cornerstone of forming organized civilizations and functioning societies. The harsh reality is that the current models of friendship are not conducive to a successfully,
long-term, reconnected society. It was discouraging to find that there are still A LOT of misunderstanding and misguided judgements when it comes to the neurodivergent community largely made by those of the neurotypical sort. Whether it’s welcomed or not it doesn’t change the fact that neurodivergence has become a regular conversation point and it’s likely going to continue if not increase. What doesn’t seem to be mentioned (or maybe it’s ignored on purpose) though is that it’s not an increase of people picking up a trend out of nowhere, it’s an increase of individuals of all kinds gaining awareness and understanding of the experience they have in the world we live. The more people become informed the more they become impowered and most of the neurodivergent and disabled community members have spent far long enough having little to no voice, let alone power.

Change is inevitable but the type of change that we go through has a lot to do with how we bring change about, a lot of things have changed in the last ten years, the last five, the last three and most of that change has been uncomfortable and inauthentic when it comes to keeping up with the Jones online. Continuing to change in the way we’re headed would be worse catastrophic, elephants and Orca whales, and wolves are doing better than the human race at remaining a species that thrives on the relations and bonds and depends on communication and connection to flourish.

Now that I’ve talked that out…( for now)… what are you thoughts? What are your experiences?