Dear Diary,
One of the privileges I have is getting to interact with women across different generations. Through my friendships, Bible study communities, and work, I’ve had the opportunity to share spaces with women at different stages of life, and I’ve come to appreciate how much we can learn from one another.
During one of my most recent conversations, the topic of friendship came up, particularly the challenges of navigating friendship breakups and making friends as adults.
As someone who’s had her fair share of friendship breakups, I found myself a little surprised by the conversation. I suppose part of me had always assumed that by the time we reached our 40s, 50s, and beyond, we’d figured friendship out. That we would have learned how to choose our people, maintain meaningful relationships, and navigate the inevitable challenges that come with loving other human beings.
Well, apparently, there’s no age at which we automatically become experts at friendship.
And honestly, there is something comforting about that. It reminded me that friendship is something we continue learning about as we grow, and that the challenges we experience in our twenties don’t necessarily disappear just because we get older. Sometimes circumstances change, but the questions remain.
As we continued talking, I remembered an analogy about friendship that someone once shared with me. For the life of me, I can’t remember who said it, but the image has always stayed with me.
“Friendship is like a bus, and you are the driver.”
Imagine yourself driving a bus along the route of your life. At different stops, people get on. They take their seats, some near the front, others in the middle, and some toward the back. As the journey continues, some people move closer to the front, others move further back, and some eventually get off the bus altogether. And just like an actual bus, you can’t force everyone to stay on board.
The more I thought about this analogy, the more I wondered what it could teach us about the friendships we make, the ones we struggle to keep, and the ones we eventually have to let go of.
Well, here are a few things this analogy has been teaching me about friendship.
Not everyone is travelling to the same destination
One thing I appreciate about this analogy is that it reminds me not everyone who gets on our bus is travelling to the same destination.
Some people enter our lives in school, others through work, church, shared interests, or a particular season we are navigating. We connect because something brings us together, and sometimes those connections grow into friendships that last for decades. Other times, the friendship serves a purpose in a particular season, and eventually our paths begin to diverge.
I think we sometimes struggle with this because we assume that if a friendship was meaningful, it should last forever. When it doesn’t, we may find ourselves questioning whether the friendship was genuine in the first place or whether we did something wrong.
But what if the value of a friendship isn’t measured only by how long it lasts?
Some friendships teach us something about ourselves. Some introduce us to new experiences or help us navigate a difficult season. Others become the kind of relationships we carry with us through different chapters of life. Each can hold meaning, even if they don’t all have the same ending.
Of course, this doesn’t mean we should casually discard friendships whenever life gets busy, or things become uncomfortable. Meaningful friendships require effort, communication, and a willingness to grow together. Sometimes, people are not leaving our lives; they’re simply navigating a season that requires more patience and understanding from us. But sometimes people genuinely move in a different direction, and we have to learn to accept that.
And maybe part of growing in friendship is learning to appreciate the people travelling with us without assuming everyone must stay on the bus for the entire journey.
Not everyone gets the same seat
If friendship is like a bus, then the seating arrangement matters too.
Some people sit near the front, close enough to have the driver’s ear. Others sit somewhere in the middle, while some sit toward the back. Everyone is on the same bus, but they don’t all have the same proximity to the driver.
I think this is a helpful way to understand the different levels of closeness in our friendships.
We can have many friends and still recognise that not everyone will have the same access to our lives. Some we enjoy spending time with, some we share particular interests with, and some we trust with the parts of ourselves we don’t share with everyone. Some friends know our everyday experiences, while others know the stories behind them.
And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
We sometimes put unnecessary pressure on ourselves to treat every friendship equally, as though having different levels of closeness means we are somehow being unfair. But relationships naturally differ in their depth, history, and capacity for intimacy.
The important thing is to recognise that different levels of closeness do not mean different levels of human worth.
A friend sitting toward the back isn’t necessarily less valuable than someone sitting near the front. They may simply occupy a different place in your life in that season. And someone who once sat near the front may move further back as your circumstances, priorities, or relationship change.
That can be difficult, especially when the change is not mutual. You may still consider someone one of your closest friends while realising that they no longer relate to you in the same way. You may find that a friendship you once relied on has become more distant, or that the closeness you shared no longer comes as naturally.
Those changes can bring grief, even when nobody has done anything wrong.
I’m learning that friendship requires us to pay attention to what a relationship is becoming, rather than holding on to what it used to be simply because of what it once meant to us. And sometimes, the hardest part isn’t accepting that people may eventually leave our lives; it’s accepting that a friendship can change even when both people are still in it.
You can’t force anyone to stay on the bus
Perhaps this is the part of the analogy that resonates most when I think about friendship breakups.
When someone gets off the bus, you can’t force them to stay. You can ask questions, seek understanding, apologise where necessary, and try to repair what’s been damaged. But ultimately, you can’t make someone choose a relationship they no longer want to be part of.
I know, I know, that’s easier said than done.
Friendship breakups can be particularly painful because we don’t always give them the same space to grieve that we might give romantic breakups. Sometimes, a friendship ends without a clear conversation; sometimes, a disagreement never gets resolved. And other times, two people simply drift apart, and one day you realise that someone who used to be part of your everyday life is now someone you barely speak to.
You may find yourself replaying conversations, wondering what you missed, or wishing you could return to a time when things felt easier.
I think we should give ourselves permission to grieve those relationships. Just because a friendship wasn’t romantic doesn’t mean the loss is insignificant. These are people we may have prayed with, laughed with, shared our dreams with, and trusted with parts of our lives. When that connection changes or ends, it is okay to acknowledge what it meant to us.
At the same time, we have to be careful not to spend the entire journey trying to convince someone to remain on our bus.
There is a difference between fighting for a friendship that’s going through a difficult season and exhausting ourselves trying to sustain a relationship that only one person wants to maintain. We can reach out, initiate conversations, and communicate our desire to repair things. But we can’t carry the relationship alone.
Sometimes, the kindest thing we can do for ourselves is accept that a person has chosen a different route.
That doesn’t mean we stop caring about them, pretend the friendship never mattered, or become bitter about the time we shared. It simply means we let the relationship be what it is, rather than keep trying to make it what it used to be.
Sometimes, we have to accept that we can love someone, value what we shared, and still recognise that we cannot make the friendship work on our own.
You are the driver, too
The final part of this analogy that deserves our attention is that the driver has some responsibility for the journey.
In the original image, the driver can ask someone to leave the bus if their behaviour makes the journey uncomfortable or unsafe; think of a real-life bus scenario. And this speaks to something important about boundaries in friendship.
We can spend so much time worrying about whether other people will choose us that we forget we also have a choice in the relationships we maintain.
We’re allowed to recognise when a friendship has become consistently hurtful, when our boundaries are repeatedly disregarded, or when the relationship requires us to keep abandoning our well-being to preserve it. We’re allowed to have difficult conversations, communicate what needs to change, and decide when continuing the relationship is no longer healthy for us.
Having boundaries doesn’t mean we expect our friends to be perfect. We’ll all disappoint one another at some point; we’ll misunderstand each other, get things wrong, and occasionally need to have conversations that neither person particularly wants to have.
The question is whether we're willing to listen, take responsibility, and make things right.
Being the driver doesn’t mean we get to control everyone on the bus, decide how they should live, or expect every friendship to revolve around us. It means recognising that while we can’t control who stays, who leaves, or how others choose to show up, we do have agency over our own choices and the relationships we continue to nurture.
Boundaries aren’t about punishing people for disappointing us; they’re about recognising that love and friendship don’t require us to accept every behaviour indefinitely.
And perhaps this is just as important as learning to let people go: learning when a friendship deserves patience, when it needs an honest conversation, and when it is time to step away.
What kind of passenger have you been?
As I reflect on this analogy, I keep coming back to the fact that we’re not only the drivers of our own buses. We’re also passengers on other people’s journeys.
We’re the friend someone else has welcomed into their life. We occupy a seat on someone else’s bus, and our presence affects their experience of the journey, too.
So, while we think about the people we want around us, perhaps we should also ask ourselves what kind of friends we have been.
Are we intentional about checking in on the people we say we care about? Do we make an effort to celebrate their milestones, show up when life gets difficult, and create space for them to be honest with us? When we hurt someone, are we willing to listen and take responsibility, or do we become so focused on defending our intentions that we dismiss their experience? Are we expecting our friends to initiate every conversation, make every plan, and carry the emotional weight of maintaining the relationship?
These are questions I think we all need to sit with, myself included.
It is easy to focus on finding good friends, but being a good friend also requires intention. It means recognising that people have needs, responsibilities, and difficult seasons of their own. It means offering grace without using it as an excuse to be careless, and extending understanding while still being willing to communicate what we need.
Friendship is not sustained by proximity alone. It requires participation.
And as much as we hope to find people who will stay with us through different seasons of life, we also have a responsibility to show up for the people who have made room for us in theirs.
Perhaps we won’t get every friendship right. Perhaps there will be times when we will misjudge a relationship, struggle to communicate, or have to learn a difficult lesson about ourselves. Growing in friendship means being willing to reflect on those experiences, rather than focusing only on what other people did or failed to do.
Because sometimes, we may be the ones who need to move to a different seat. Sometimes, we may need to apologise. And sometimes, we may need to acknowledge that we’ve been holding on to a friendship without giving it the care it needs.
There is room for grace in all of this, we’re all learning.
Friendship is a journey
I began this reflection thinking about how surprised I was that women across generations still experience challenges in friendship. But perhaps I was looking at it the wrong way.
Maybe growing older doesn’t mean we eventually figure friendship out once and for all. Maybe it means we become more aware of what friendship asks of us, more honest about what we need, and more willing to recognise when a relationship needs care, a change in expectations, or a different kind of ending.
The bus analogy reminds me that our friendships will not all look the same. Some people will travel with us for a long time, while others will join us for a particular stretch of the journey. Some relationships will grow closer, others will change, and a few may end in ways we never expected.
Part of the journey is learning to recognise the difference between a friendship that needs patience and one we can no longer sustain on our own. It’s learning to give people room to be human without ignoring what hurts us, and to accept change without assuming that everything meaningful must last forever.
And perhaps, just as importantly, it’s remembering that we’re not only looking for people who’ll be good friends to us, we’re also learning how to be good friends to the people who’ve made room for us in their lives.
Because friendship is like a bus. People will get on, people will get off, and the journey will keep moving.
We may not get to decide who travels with us for the entire route, but we can be intentional about how we love the people who do.
From my heart to yours,
Love Nandi.
