Dom

It’s okay to outgrow friends – you deserve to be surrounded by people who understand and appreciate you for who you are. Life is too short to spend time with people you really don’t enjoy spending time with. You shouldn’t have to feel guilty about this. Friendships should be a two-way street about support and bringing people up, not keeping them down.

I’ve had some really crummy friends over the years, and this year I came to the end of a one-sided, very toxic friendship. I soon realised that we just didn’t gel together any more. It’s okay to be friends with somebody who holds different aspirations in life but the toxic friendship I mentioned didn’t seem to understand this – he wanted to stay stuck in the past, he was too critical of the fact I wanted to make more of an effort to become healthy and he would bad-mouth me to my other friend about this. I’ve learned not to spend too much time with people who are too critical of other people and those who gossip and talk about people behind their back – they will only drag you down into their drama and into their level.

As for making new friends – what are your interests and hobbies? Could you make friends from volunteering for some community or charity project? You could also check out meetup – I believe it’s a site where a group of people with the same interests arrange meet-ups and other fun stuff like that (I haven’t checked it out yet).