How distance destroys friendship

Deep inside your heart, you hope that it's just a matter of distance. Unlike an "actual relationship", how could a friendship be broken just like that?

First time working abroad, you feel the strong urge to perform. You want to prove yourself to the company that you are not a mistake and that they've made the right investment on you. So you do everything you could to show your commitment: you work long hours and over the weekend, you are active in the company, and you build good relationship with your team leader and colleagues.

Now the hard work has paid off. You've built a stable career in foreign land and you've proven your worth. You lead a team at a young age and you're indispensable. But on the journey to be where you are right now, you have neglected a lot of people and moments that should actually be more important than work. Then again your judgment was clouded with the pressure to perform.

You promised yourself and your friends that you will stay in contact - that you are one chat away and that you would do regular Skype every weekend. But as you go along, you find it hard to balance the time for work, your current colleagues, and your friends back at home. It started off with being difficult to reach when they need advice - whether they should break up with that lame boyfriend, if they should take up master or apply for job, if they better move to another company, etc.

You initially committed to go back to your home country every now and then but work gets in the way. That first client presentation overlaps with your friend's birthday so you couldn't be there and celebrate. You are overwhelmed with deadlines so even if low-cost airlines are around, you find it hard to leave for just a couple of days to celebrate small meaningful events with them like their first promotion and engagement, or simply to be there when they are depressed and cry for help. You feel like you could never be off the grid at work, especially when you are just starting, so you hope that your friends could understand your situation.

Sometimes, it is simply hard to connect because you feel irrelevant, your status quo and theirs have become completely different. You are in the group chat where everyone else is planning to meet up in that new hippie cafe in town and you do not know what to respond. Suddenly they have an inside joke that you don't quite understand because you were not there when it happened. Next thing you know, the chat has stopped coming and the group has gone silent. They have created a new group without you.

Before you realize it, those small moments that you missed have completely changed the face of your friendship. It was never your intention, but you have traded off the friendship that you've built for years with your career ego and ambition.

You feel guilty every time you go back to your hometown because you feel like you are forcing a meetup when the bond has been broken by you. You still want to call it friendship but you fear that the feeling is no longer mutual. So you keep it hush hush every time you go back because you are afraid to get hurt. But it also makes you feel guilty because you think the worst of your friends.

You didn't foresee that people would progress differently in other friendship. You thought that when you return, everything will be like how it used to be - just like when you left. But they found new relationship. It has deepened, and to make room for that, you have to be out of the equation.

Deep inside your heart, you hope that it's just a matter of distance. Unlike an "actual relationship", how could a friendship be broken just like that? More often than not, we take friendship for granted. We don't invest "that much" time and effort in it thinking that friendship would last forever. The truth is, friendship requires the same degree of commitment - just like any other type of relationship. Unfortunately, for some of us, we realize it too late.