Friends play a part in people’s lives — some more than others. There are those who seem to run on friendship, always surrounded, always connected, as if being alone might short-circuit something essential. Then there are the rest of us who can go quite happily with less of it, maybe one or two people in the background, the occasional call, a coffee now and then.
And yes, friends can also be a pest — the constant calls, the “come over,” and then you arrive and wonder why you came at all. Often they just want an audience to tell you about all the wonderful things they’ve done, the money they’ve spent, how their investments have grown, how happy they are and how well they’ve done in life — and if they haven’t done well, they’ll tell you how well their children and grandchildren have done instead. That’s not friendship, that’s punishment. But we’ll get to that.
The idea of “situational friends” came to me through a remark someone made in passing — that the people she’d been mixing with a year ago were just that, situational. She’d more or less erased that chapter. Wiped it clean. As if those people only existed because of where she happened to be at the time.
It stayed with me, because there’s something slightly convenient about that kind of rewriting. As if the situation was the problem, not the choices made inside it.
People do get pulled along by the current. A job, a social circle, a phase of life — and suddenly you’re in deeper than you planned, doing things you might not otherwise have done, surrounded by people who feel like friends until they don’t. Sometimes you see it early. Sometimes you only see it when you’re already on the way out.
We all know the old warning about friends leading you astray. It’s been around forever because there’s truth in it. But it also raises the question — who, exactly, counts as a friend?
Because if you look at it honestly, every friendship starts somewhere specific. A neighbourhood. A workplace. A shared interest. A moment in time. Strip it down and they’re all situational in the beginning. Every single one.
So why do people use the term as if it’s something lesser? A way of dismissing people who no longer fit the current version of their lives?
By the time you get older — as the saying goes — you can count your friends on one hand. Even that might be generous. People drift. Priorities shift. The ones you thought would always be there become people you once knew well. Not enemies, not strangers, just… no longer part of the picture.
Which makes you wonder whether the difference isn’t between “real” friends and “situational” ones at all, but simply between those who stayed when the situation changed… and those who didn’t.
