Friendship.

We all remember our first friend, usually the girl/boy at nursery who shared their yellow crayon with you, offered you a bite of their jam sandwich and who helped you up onto the climbing frame. There’s the friend who would plait your hair and borrow you their favourite Barbie doll in exchange for your pair of sparkly inch high heels you got for your birthday.

The one who’d knock on for you after school and ask if you were going out to play. Who years later would listen to you sniffle and snot your way through the retelling of your latest heartache and sooth your tears with a roll of tissue and a tub of ice cream. Who held your hair back whilst you vomited into the toilet after one too many tequilas and an evening of dancing to Pitbull and telling you you like crap because that’s what friends do.

Friendships make up a large proportion of who we grow into being, their guidance and advice helps to mould us as people. They’re a massive friendluence to some of the life decisions we make, especially after we fly the nest and begin to make monumental decisions by ourself. Friends can encourage and grow you as a person, we all have that one friend who pushes us to be a better person or promotes a healthy rivalry. Even the biggest stars of today owe a lot of their success to their friendship groups.

Pop Princess Taylor Swift is well known for her high profile friendships. As well as featuring her nearest and dearest in her Bad Blood music video, she’s renowned for her Instagram snaps of her and her “girls”, so it makes sense that when asked to what does she owe her success, Taylor answered “sisterhood.”

“I surround myself with smart, beautiful, passionate, driven, ambitious women,” Swift said.

Friendships are extremely important. Not only do they provide you provide you with someone to share the good times with and to console you on the not so good times but they’re integral to your success and state of mind. Like Taylor, I find it imperative to surround yourself with people who build you up rather than tear you down.

But as much as it’s important to be surrounded by friends, it’s also not a bad thing to allow a friendship you once held dear to you to come to an end.

When it comes down to us our relationships with our friends are very much like the relationships we have with our significant others (without all the sex, cuddles, orgasms and pillow talk). All of the aspects of a loving relationship is there with purely platonic inclinations and as much as ending a friendship seems like a daunting task that makes you seem like you failed as a human, it’s no different to ending a relationship with a boyfriend/girlfriend.

You wouldn’t dream of not ending a relationship with someone where you were both constantly unhappy or you were bickering all the time, the kind of relationship that passes its sell by day and turns sour like a 3 week old bottle of milk.

With this in my, why do we cling onto friendships that have clearly passed their expiry date and begun to curdle?

There is such a thing as a poisonous friendship. One that clearly embodies an unhealthy competitiveness that can leave you feeling bitter and jealous of one anothers achievements, that makes you paranoid of their intentions and honesty in the friendship. If you tend to find that your friendship is making you frown more than its making you smile then it’s a good indicator that the friendship has (in true Boyz 2 Men style) “come to the end of the road”.

It doesn’t mean that your friendship was a failure or that either of you did anything particularly wrong. It doesn’t even mean that you’re bad people as a singular, it’s simply that perhaps your relationship reached its natural progression or you grew apart as people. Over the years people change as people, our personalities are constantly evolving based on our experiences and social interractions and the dissolution of this bond that was once there can be as simple as that with relationship, you just aren’t the same people as you were when you first met. It doesn’t overshadow the affect you had on one anothers lives nor should you forget what you once meant to eachother because friendship can never be truly under or overestimated.