When you and your best friend grow apart By Sara Nelson
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 You two were inseparable-you talked on the phone for hours, you ate lunch together everyday, could finish each other's sentences. So why do you suddenly feel like strangers?
I had my share of friends when I was a teenager, but there were none so close, so important to me, as a girl who transferred to my school in the ninth grade. Her name was Becky, and she was everything I didn't think I was pretty and fearless and strong and wild and independent and this may sound silly, but it wasn't to me at the time-svelte. Practically from the day we met, we were joined at the hip. Where Becky went, I went. What Becky said, I imitated. What Becky wore, I begged my mother to buy for me. In other words, Becky and I were best friends.
Right away, we had our routine down. We'd sit together, giggling, in the back of our classrooms until some teachers got wise and issued what amounted to an edict: Becky and Sara were always to sit on opposite sides of the room. We ate lunch together every day, gossiping about kids in our classes, discussing which boys were nerds and which ones we were dying to go out with. We'd go shopping or out for pizza after school and then we'd part-reluctantly-to head to our respective homes for dinner (unless one of us had managed to wrangle an invitation for the other). But no matter whether we spent the evening together or not, we'd always talk on the phone for at least an hour before we went to sleep. "It's your girlfriend calling," my brother would say if he answered the phone when Becky called. "What are you two, in love or something?"
That wasn't the first time my brother behaved obnoxiously, but it may have been the first (and only) time he was right Becky and I were kind of in love.
Not, of course, in any physical way, but the feelings that we had for each other were as strong as anything I'd felt for any boy up to that time-or for many years afterward. I trusted her completely: we agreed on everything. She was my confidante, my buddy, my alter ego.
We were completely, totally, in sync; we were perfectly matched.
So you can imagine how I felt when my parents insisted I spend that summer away at camp. That meant away from Becky-I was devastated. But what could we do, short of burning down the camp (which we'd jokingly considered) or running away to California (also a possibility)? In the end, we opted for the path of least resistance: I'd go away, she'd stay at home, and we'd write constantly.
That was how it was supposed to be, but it didn't quite work out that way. When I got back from the dreaded camp--at which, by the way, I'd had a blast-I called Becky. We arranged to meet at the pizza parlor the next day.
When I got there, she was sitting in one of the red leather-like booths. "Hi," she said. "I ordered our usual-with extra cheese and anchovies." "Great," I said, but somehow pizza with anchovies didn't seem as appealing as it had before. "So tell me what's been going on here all summer," I asked her. "Well, I've been hanging around a lot with Heather Gardner," she said. Heather Gardner! Becky and I had always taken great pleasure in disliking Heather Gardner. "Yeah," she said. "She's not so bad after all." Ummm. Something seemed different here, all right.
The rest of the conversation wasn't much better. Becky told me she was dating a guy named Joe who went to our rival school. While I'd spent the summer learning how to make a horse jump a fence, Becky'd been learning (from Joe) how to hot-wire a car. Suddenly, we didn't have so much to say to each other. Suddenly, I wasn't sure I liked her anymore.
I left the pizza parlor as soon as I could, but the feelings I was having didn't disappear so quickly. What was wrong with me? I wondered. Becky was my best friend, and I didn't even want to be around her. Was I crazy, or just plain shallow? Was I mad because Becky made friends with people I didn't know or like? Was I jealous? Was I-horror of horrors-just a snob, disapproving of Becky's new boyfriend and interests?
I probably was all of those things, but mostly I was upset. I was upset that I was losing a friend-even if it was, I thought, my fault. But I was even more upset with myself. I felt guilty for all the awful things I was feeling about Becky. And the guiltier I felt, the harder I tried to pretend that our "breakup" wasn't happening. After every few days of silence (other than polite chitchat in the hall at school), I'd pick up the phone and call her. It was like, Maybe I'll get the feeling back if I just try hard enough.
Needless to say, I didn't. Our conversations got more and more tense, and I found myself baiting her with remarks about Heather and Joe and taunting her with descriptions of my new, cooler friends. I'd find myself appraising her looks, her vocabulary, her behavior, and I'd compare her unfavorably to myself. Then I' d feel guilty about that.
I was tortured by my own disloyalty. "It's not my fault she's a geek," I'd tell myself when I was feeling strong. "But what kind of friend suddenly decides that her best friend's a geek?" another voice would answer.
lt was a long time before I realized that my falling-out with Becky wasn't a question of somebody being good and somebody being bad. It was about people outgrowing each other: The three months Becky and I had spent apart had given us both a chance to discover new things about ourselves and to meet new people, and these experiences had weakened our old bond to each other.
"This happens in friendships all the time," says Elaine Schwartz, Ph.D., a psychotherapist in practice in Wilton, Connecticut. "People change and grow apart. Sometimes they come back together again-in a different kind of relationship. But when you're a teenager, the friendship bond is a particularly intimate, strong one, and breaking it can be very painful." You don't have to tell that to Kathy Hunter, seventeen, of Chicago. "I was best friends with a girl named Jennifer," she says.
"We did everything together-it was like we were sisters or something. We hung out together for all of tenth grade and that summer, and then, suddenly, when we start- "I tried to change my relationship with my friend Jeannine," says Laurie Richardson, a sophomore from Chicago. "I told her I'd be spending more time with my sister because we were taking dance lessons together. I tried to be gentle about it, but she kept pushing me. 'You just don't like me anymore, right?' she kept saying. I'd say, 'No, that's not it,' but she was so pushy I finally said, 'Yeah, okay, that's it-I just don't like hanging out with you anymore.' My mom always tells me to tell people the truth, but I really didn't want to. I was trying so hard not to because the truth was simple: I just didn't like her anymore."
Nobody-not even Laurie's mother-is suggesting that you tell your friend she's a jerk. Even if you now think it's true, it's just plain mean to say so. And some friends like Jeannine-have such shaky self-confidence that they'll hear those words no matter what you say. All you can do is try to get out of on outgrown friendship as gracefully as possible, maybe by using an external break-a vacation from school, for example, or a weekend you "have to" spend with your family-as a way of breaking the cycle and putting the relationship on different terms. You may find, too, that your friend is not heartbroken about the change after all.
Maybe she's growing in a different direction as well and will welcome the opportunity to spend time with other people. And then there's the approach I call the Drift Theory, which is that you simply do nothing. No accusation. No confrontation. No anything. You simply let the relationship go a little bit and ride out the awkwardness that mav result. Because, two months or two years later, you may find that you have more in common with this friend than you thought. You may want to have her back-in a slightly different way. "There aren't always clear transitions in friendship," says Dr. Tower. "They can ebb and flow."
That's happened to me with a lot of best friends I've had over the years; we've gone in and out of each other's lives. And maybe we've never gotten as close as we once were, but still, they're there and they're my friends. I wish I could say that happened with Becky-that we went our separate ways for a while, me to my horses and her to her Joe, until we hooked up again. I'm sorry to say, though, that that didn't happen. In fact, after a couple more uncomfortable pizza parlor lunches and phone calls, Becky and I stopped talking altogether. I became good friends with another girl at my school; Becky transferred to Joe's. Eventually I went away to college, and except for an occasional sighting of Becky by my mother, I knew nothing about her.
I still feel sad about it sometimes. I still iry to imagine what kind of person she's become and what she's doing. I still wonder, too, what happened to me that summer and why Becky and I will never live next door to each other and send our kids to the same school. But I also know that there are parts of me-parts of me that I like-that can be directly traced to having known her. In that sense, she's still my best friend, and I have no doubt if I were to run into her on the street today, we'd have a lot of history in common and, therefore, a lot of things to talk about. I bet we would even have a pizza together. With anchovies.
Source: Seventeen Magazine
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