Everyone talks about the pain of an intimate relationship ending, but we hardly ever talk about the gap that’s left when a friendship ends.

Who am I going to call or text at ungodly hours with some completely random thought—and who is going to answer immediately, understand the randomness and never question the oddity of it all?

Who’s going to hype me up when I’ve been knocked down?

Who’s going to understand my silent battles and quietly sit beside me through them?

Who’s going to allow me to simply be ME? Without judgment. Without condemnation.

Pray tell, who damnit?!

Forming friendships has never been easy for me. As an adult with children, a career and incredibly lofty life goals, life gets busy. I get caught up. And sometimes potential friendships become casualties of everything else I’m trying to build and become.

So when I’ve managed to form a real friendship—one with history, secrets, laughter, tears, late-night conversations and the kind of familiarity that doesn’t require explanations—having to end it is gut-wrenching.

Gut-wrenching and necessary.

There’s a particular kind of sadness that comes with realizing the respect, loyalty, admiration and love you have for someone isn’t being reciprocated.

It hurts.

It really does.

Until it doesn’t.

Because eventually the pain gives way to honesty.

And honesty makes you confront some uncomfortable truths.

Sometimes you’ve watched your friend’s behavior for years. You’ve seen the disloyalty. You’ve watched how they treated other people. Maybe something about it bothered you. Maybe you were even disgusted by it.

But because it wasn’t directed at you, you let it slide.

Or perhaps you saw things that needed to be addressed but chose silence because addressing them might have meant losing the friendship.

So you turned a blind eye.

And eventually, the behavior you ignored found its way to your doorstep.

That’s the thing about concerns we refuse to address: they don’t disappear. They grow. They become resentment, distrust and disappointment. And sometimes they become the very reason an otherwise beautiful friendship dies.

I’ve also had to admit that sometimes we play ourselves.

We become so attached to who we believe someone is—or who we desperately want them to be—that we refuse to accept who they continuously show us they are.

History can make you do that.

Love can make you do that.

Loyalty can make you do that.

But growth has a funny way of making things impossible to unsee.

There comes a point when you become serious about your own development. You start shedding old thoughts, old behaviors, old habits and, yes, sometimes old relationships that no longer align with the person you’re becoming.

And that’s when you realize something even more painful:

Sometimes the only thing holding a friendship together is history.

That’s it.

Not shared values.

Not mutual respect.

Not who you are today.

Just memories of who you once were together.

And history, as beautiful as it may be, isn’t always enough reason to keep carrying something into your future.

So I’ve learned to release friendships.

Some I’ve had to end deliberately. Others died quietly on their own. But whichever way they ended, I’ve learned to let them go with love.

There’s no need for animosity.

No need to rewrite the entire friendship as terrible simply because it ended.

There were good times. There was love. There were lessons. And there are memories I will probably always cherish.

If they cross my mind, I send a quick prayer up for them.

I celebrate their victories, albeit from afar.

I cast their secrets into the Sea of Forgetfulness and pray they do the same with mine.

And then I keep moving.

Because I’ve learned that not everyone who was important to one chapter of my life is supposed to have a starring role in the next.

That doesn’t make the friendship fake.

It doesn’t make the love we shared meaningless.

Sometimes a relationship simply completes its assignment.

And while forging friendships has always been a challenge for me, I’m learning something else about myself:

My challenges have an interesting habit of leading me to some sinfully delicious discoveries.

Perhaps learning when to let go is one of them.