Dear Prudence,
I’ve been friends with, “Sarah,” for over a decade, but over the last year, I no longer enjoy spending time with her. We were at our closest when I had a lot of mental health issues and needed constant validation and support. I think she enjoyed being needed. After some good therapy, I no longer need this type of validation and feel uncomfortable with how much detail she expects to know about my life.
Without the minutiae of my life to talk about, we don’t seem to have much in common. Our conversation usually veers into talking about our other mutual friends, which also makes me uncomfortable since I know she is doing the same about me with them. I can’t help but feel guilty about “abandoning her now that I don’t need her,” but I feel stressed every time we hang out. I have been trying to slowly phase out the friendship by seeing her less, but she keeps hitting me up, and I feel weird completely ignoring her. Am I wrong to throw away a long friendship? Do I leave her on read, or should I explicitly ask for space? Without making plans to see each other, we would not run into each other for a long while.