Many of us pick up different friends along our individual paths through college, different jobs, and sometimes different cities. Sometimes, we know these friends will be around for a lifetime and sometimes, they are an important but not permanent part of our journey.
Experts have called this process of deselecting friends as we age socioemotional selectivity theory. At different points in our lives, we decide that a friend is on a divergent path from our own or is creating too much negative energy to keep around.
In that situation, many take the passive approach—declining every request to hang out repeatedly. But experts recommend a more direct tact, one you might apply to a romantic relationship: having a heart-to-heart talk, writing a letter or even an email. Anything but a text.
Ultimately breaking up with a friend in real life is harder than defriending them on Facebook.
Read more at The New York Times.
About Adriana Villavicencio
