For many of us, there will be a specific moment in our late twenties in which we post something meaningful, something “big”. This can be an engagement, a graduation, a new home, or a win you worked hard for. It doesn’t take long before the first likes and comments appear, and before you know it, a familiar name pops up in the list. A person who once knew your daily routines, your inside jokes, your late-night thoughts and your dreams of the future, but also a person who is no longer part of your life; one of the friends you’ve lost in your twenties. They leave a like and then they disappear back into the scroll.
This all might sound pretty dramatic and that may indeed be how it feels for some people. But it is also natural to notice that you are losing friends in your twenties and there is a lot of science behind it.
When Friendship Was Built into the Day
In our early twenties, connection often happens without much effort. Friendship is literally woven into the structure of life itself. Classes, shared houses, part-time jobs, long lunches, late nights; the environment does a lot of the work for us. Seeing the same people again and again naturally deepens bonds. Psychologists call this propinquity: the simple truth that closeness in space and time makes closeness in relationships more likely. During these years, friendships often feel effortless because, in many ways, they are.
On top of that, many of us go through the same struggles and life events during this phase. Topics like exams, boyfriends, dating disasters, ambitious dreams, budget difficulties, parties and run-down student houses are top of mind for almost all your peers. This creates a shared reality in which connection comes easily.
The Restructure in Your Late Twenties
Then life begins to rearrange itself. Work becomes more demanding, relationships become more serious, some people move cities, and some even start building families. As a result, schedules that once overlapped start to pull in different directions.
Research on social networks shows that these major life transitions tend to reshape not just our routines, but our entire social circles. At the same time, the markers that once formed a fertile ground for connection begin to diverge. Some may have found the love of their life and are thinking about children, while others are still single and ready to mingle. Income gaps also tend to grow, which in many cases affects relationships in subtle or not-so-subtle ways.
Social psychology shows that people naturally evaluate themselves in relation to others. When someone close seems to move into a different social or economic world, it can quietly trigger questions like: “Do I still belong in their life?” or “Do we still have things in common?”. For people with less assertive personalities, this can even result in untested assumptions such as, “Oh, they must have changed,” which may be accepted without ever daring to challenge them.
How Do We Handle These Shifting Friendship Dynamics?
Some people feel more at ease with these changes and the fact they are slowly losing friends than others. One might still reminisce about all the adventures and secrets they shared, while the other simply closes the chapter and moves on to the next.
This is not something you have complete control over, as it is also related to how you are wired. Some people view their life as one continuous story and relationships as storylines within it. This means that the past is directly connected to the present. They see how old memories have shaped who they are now. For these people, when something meaningful happens today, it naturally belongs to the same emotional narrative as what happened years ago. They often have a stronger memory for past events, conversations, and feelings. Research on attachment and relational schemas even suggests that they tend to integrate past and present relationships into a stable sense of identity; friendships become part of “who I am,” not just “who I was with.”
The other group sees life more as a series of albums or eras, with less focus on how those chapters connect. When someone belongs to a previous chapter, they are simply not part of the current one. This doesn’t mean the connection or friendship wasn’t real, it often was very real and very intense, but it was also tied to a specific time and context. As a result, memories resurface less frequently, emotions are often buried more quickly, and the relationship becomes psychologically archived. This latter group is, for example, much more capable of ending a friendship by ghosting a former best friend than the former group, and to be much less emotionally bothered when they are experiencing the “losing friends in your twenties” phenomenon.
The Friends who Stay
Losing friends in your twenties is something natural, but not all your friends go; some of them stay. If we look at long-term friendship through a scientific lens, what tends to keep relationships alive across life stages isn’t perfect similarity or constant availability. It is something deeper:
- Reciprocity: true friends reach out and make an effort. This doesn’t have to be perfectly balanced, just authentic and intentional.
- Curiosity: true friends don’t make assumptions about each other without checking whether they are correct. You stay curious about who the other person is becoming, not just who they were, and you don’t value the friendship solely by how similar they are to you.
- Emotional safety: true friends trust that difference doesn’t automatically mean distance. They don’t judge you, your decisions, or the other people in your life. They listen, are empathetic and respectful.
- Repair: true friends find the courage to have difficult conversations, because the relationship is worth more than the discomfort of awkwardness. They don’t simply disappear without a fight or a moment of closure.
The friendships that survive your twenties are the friendships that don’t depend entirely on shared circumstances. They adapt as circumstances change.
That being said, this doesn’t mean that friendships that only last for a season cannot be real. They can be deeply meaningful in that moment. It simply means they may be based on something more context-dependent or slightly more superficial. And that naturally entails that the friendship might not be here for a lifetime, even if it feels like that right now.
Losing Friends in Your Twenties Is Part of Life
Not every friendship is meant to follow us through every chapter of life. Some are very real but deeply tied to a specific season. They belong to a version of us that existed in a certain place, with a certain rhythm, under a certain sky.
So the next time you see a familiar name popping up, it is okay to feel nostalgic, confused or nothing at all. There is no wrong way to cope with the changes life throws at you. Letting those friendships become memories doesn’t mean they were meaningless. It is just a sign you are getting older and progressing through life, which naturally forces people to make decisions. Losing friends in your twenties is a result of those decisions. It means that at least one or maybe both of you have revealed your true intentions when it came to that specific relationship for the long run.
Sources
Wrzus, C., Hänel, M., Wagner, J., & Neyer, F. J. (2013). Social network changes and life events across the life span: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22642230/
Mollenhorst, G., Völker, B., & Flap, H. (2014). Changes in personal relationships: How social contexts affect the emergence and discontinuation of relationships. Social Networks. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260028362_Changes_in_personal_relationships_How_social_contexts_affect_the_emergence_and_discontinuation_of_relationships
American Psychological Association. (2023). The science of why friendships keep us healthy. Monitor on Psychology. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2023/06/cover-story-science-friendship
Dunbar, R. I. M. (2016). Do online social media cut through the constraints that limit the size of offline social networks? Royal Society open science https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article/3/1/150292/36407/Do-online-social-media-cut-through-the-constraints
Ajrouch, K. J., Blandon, A. Y., & Antonucci, T. C. (2023). Friendship trajectories and health across the life span. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10872903/
Afifi, W. A., & Metts, S. (1998). Characteristics and consequences of expectation violations in close relationships. Sage Journals. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0265407598153004