I found our text thread last Tuesday. I wasn’t looking for it. I was scrolling back through an old phone to find a photo of a receipt, and there it was, frozen in amber at a message from me that said haha yeah all good mate, sent at 11.47pm on a Thursday in what would have been the worst month of my life. You’d replied with a thumbs up. That was the last real exchange we had, and neither of us knew it at the time.
I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately. Not in the acute way grief arrives in the first months after something ends, but in that slower, stranger register where someone you haven’t spoken to in years starts appearing in the edges of your week. A song. A turn of phrase. The particular way a stranger in a Melbourne cafe laughed at her own joke before she’d finished telling it. You used to do that. I’d forgotten until I hadn’t.
That’s the thing that undid me. I’d forgotten.
The conventional story about lost friendships goes like this: someone betrays someone, or someone moves, or life just happens, jobs, marriages, babies, the slow centrifugal pull of adulthood that flings people to the outer rings of each other’s lives. That story is tidy. It lets both parties off. Nobody failed, exactly. Life did.
That isn’t what happened to us.
What happened to us was quieter and more damning. We kept showing up. We kept texting. We kept having dinner when one of us was in town. And somewhere in there, without either of us noticing the moment it began, we stopped telling each other the truth. Not in dramatic ways. In the small ways. The ways that matter.
The moment honesty becomes optional
You asked me once, maybe seven years ago, if I was happy. I said yes. I wasn’t. I was in the warehouse years, the anxiety years, the lost years, and I couldn’t find a way to say it that didn’t feel like asking you for something I wasn’t sure you had to give. So I said yes. And you, I think, heard the lie and decided not to press. That was the first brick. And look, I’ve been turning this over for a while, because honesty between two adult men is a weird animal to begin with. It isn’t the kind of thing you schedule. It arrives sideways, in a pause in a conversation, in the moment after a joke lands wrong, in the second someone asks are you good and you have a half-second window to either tell the truth or paper over it with a reflex. We papered over it. We papered over it so many times that eventually the paper became the wall, and neither of us could remember what was underneath anymore, and honestly I think we both preferred it that way because pulling the paper off would have meant admitting how long we’d been keeping it up.
Every friendship is built on a series of very small decisions about what you’re willing to say out loud. When you’re young, you default to saying everything. You don’t have the skill yet to curate. You dump your worst self onto your closest people because you haven’t learned that other people’s patience is finite, or that your inner life might, occasionally, be a burden. This is what makes adolescent friendships feel so total. There’s no editor yet.
Then the editor arrives. And the editor, once installed, doesn’t know how to leave.
There’s a video I keep returning to about dreams and the unguarded mind, the idea that during waking life, we run an endless calibration, deciding what to show, what to suppress, which emotions belong in which rooms. The piece explores how dreaming might be one of the few states where that filter relaxes, and what comes through feels like the most honest material the mind produces all day. I want to share it here because it frames something I’ve been trying to name about us.
Watch it and you’ll see why I can’t stop thinking about it in the context of a letter to you. The same mechanism that makes adult life socially functional, the filter, the performance, the quiet curation of self, is the exact mechanism that rots friendships from the inside. We don’t lose each other because we stop caring. We lose each other because we get too good at editing.
The performance we didn’t know we were giving
Here’s what I mean by editing, in our specific case. You started a company. I threw myself into building Hack Spirit. Both of these were, on paper, good news. Both of these also came with secret ledgers, the parts we didn’t tell each other. The investor who humiliated you. The nights I sat at my desk convinced I’d made every wrong choice a man could make. Neither of us brought those ledgers to dinner. We brought the highlight reels. We told each other the versions of our lives that sounded like answers.
Erving Goffman wrote about this decades ago, the idea that social life is a kind of theatre, and that we all maintain front-stage selves for the audiences we think we’re performing to. What Goffman didn’t fully explore, or what I’ve come to think about since, is what happens when the front stage migrates into the places that used to be backstage. When your oldest friend becomes an audience. When the version of you he gets is the version you’d give a colleague, or a stranger on a plane, or anyone whose opinion of you matters enough to manage.
That’s the erosion. Not distance. Not betrayal. Front-staging.
And the cruel part is that both of us, I’m fairly sure, were doing it out of care. You didn’t want to burden me with the company stuff because I was in my own hole. I didn’t want to burden you with my struggles because you’d just had your second kid. Each withholding was an act of consideration. Each one took a brick out of the wall.
What the research actually says about this
Adult friendships are a specific kind of fragile. Researchers who study social connection have noted that peer relationships, unlike romantic or family ones, have almost no structural scaffolding to hold them in place. No shared mortgage, no custody arrangement, no legal vocabulary for what a broken friendship is. They exist entirely on maintenance, and maintenance requires a kind of honest check-in that most of us, by our mid-thirties, have quietly stopped being willing to do.
A psychologist writing in Forbes in October 2025 discussed the importance of small, repeated disclosures in adult friendships, practices of sharing incrementally that signal you’re still willing to be seen. Without that practice, the relationship calcifies into something that looks like friendship from the outside but functions more like a professional association with shared history. I read that and thought about you.
We had the shared history. We lost the practice.
