This experience even made me question the growing normalcy of friendship breakups. Occasionally, they can be warranted. But, so often, friends think they’ve irreversibly grown apart when they haven’t become different people at all — they’ve just started showing up differently. That can be fixed if both parties are able to look within and willing to fight for the relationship. She’s since admit she should have done a lot of things differently. So have I. Had Kristi and I written each other off forever, we would have missed out on so much.
It took courage and vulnerability to risk opening ourselves back up — to trust each other not to shatter a sacred piece of our hearts (again). Sure, we both made mistakes, but none were so egregious that the relationship had to end. Life has a way of teaching us that things are both way more nuanced and nowhere near as complicated as we want to make them.
I think we had to meet each other again — wiser and more grown — to say, “I’m sorry,” “I love you,” “This is stupid, “Let’s do better,” and, most importantly, “Let’s move on.”
I’m so grateful we did.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost in April 2026.