how friendships change in adulthood: growing apart & finding our way back in life partners (2014)
Here we are, my last post in my four-part series about love. Great job, me, I made it! To re-cap, here’s where we’ve been:
Week 1: Hunt for the Wilderpeople tells us we’re all worthy of love
Week 2: The Lovebirds gives us some tips on how to remain connected in a long-term relationship
Week 3: Someone Great helps us process breakups and heartbreak
And today we’re talking Life Partners – directed by Susanna Fogel – and we’re talking friendship and how friendships change in adulthood. This film was suggested to me by my oldest friend (we went to kindergarten together!), so it’s pretty close to my heart. I’ve watched it so many times that I was able to write most of this post without re-watching it – but of course I did end up watching it again because it’s awesome.
the friendship at the center of life partners
This film centers around two best friends: Sasha and Paige. These two are the attached-at-the-hip type of best friends. They do everything together, and they spend all their free time together. Both of them are actively poking around in the dating world, Sasha with women and Paige with men. After the pair get drunk together and swipe right on their respective dating apps, they both end up with a date on the same night.
Sasha’s is a bust. Paige’s date with Tim, however, is a resounding success. It’s such a success that she eventually becomes engaged to him. And here we come to the crux of the film: Sasha and Paige’s beautifully enmeshed connection must now change as a result of Paige’s new relationship status.
This movie is one where many viewers connect with one or the other of the two friends and experience the film through her eyes. Like many of the best pairings, there are significant personality differences between them, so each of their frustrations and heartaches come from a different place.
Sasha is perceived by most people as a free-spirited artist: she’s a singer-songwriter with an expensive degree from a private arts school after all. Privately, Sasha is floundering. She doesn’t know what she wants or where she’s going. She hates her day job working as a receptionist, and she sucks at it because she doesn’t care about the job at all. But she also doesn’t play or write music anymore. Her parents, ever supportive and waiting for her big break, send her money when she struggles to make ends meet. Everyone knows she’ll be a big star one day…everyone except Sasha, that is.
Paige, on the other hand, is very proud of the fact that she totally has her shit together. An environmental lawyer, she has a multitude of recycling bins in her kitchen, obviously drives a Prius, and now she’s landed a stable, reliable partner in Tim, who is an dermatologist. He’s not a great dresser, but not to worry: she’s “subtly” replacing his entire wardrobe. She also prides herself on how mature she is. In one scene Sasha suggests Paige try on an outfit while they’re shopping together. “It’s cute, but can you really wear a jumper after 30?” Paige says. She’s 28.
when life changes, friendship changes, too
Their lives are incredibly different. The main overlap is their friendship, so unsurprisingly, when Paige becomes less and less available to Sasha because of her new relationship, they begin to drift from each other – which is a common experience as friendships change during major life transitions. Without intentional shared time, the quality of the connection suffers. Sasha’s suddenly only able to keep up with Paige’s life by following her Instagram posts, and when they spend time together, Paige behaves as though she’s above Sasha’s petty dating drama. Drama that Paige would have been eating up before she began dating Tim.
Three’s a crowd when Tim joins Sasha & Paige for America’s Top Model night. Awkward vibes abound.
Don’t misunderstand. Tim’s kind of the best. He’s a great partner, and he and Paige complement each other well. And Paige hasn’t totally moved to boyfriend island, she’s still around. But logistically, realistically, there is only so much time in the day. When we enter a committed relationship, the slice of our free time that’s devoted to connecting with the people we love now must be divided up differently. No harm intended, that’s just life, that’s just one of the ways friendships change in adulthood.
the grief of growing apart
But just because it’s normal doesn’t mean it’s easy. There’s often still a significant grieving process when close friendships change.
“just because it’s normal doesn’t mean it’s easy”
Sasha and Paige eventually experience a significant rupture due to this growing distance. Paige is a fixer and a problem-solver, even if you don’t ask for help. It makes her a great friend, but also a friend who occasionally oversteps. After an awkward and unsuccessful attempt by Paige to set Sasha up on a date – a date that Sasha didn’t ask for and with someone Paige sees as more age-appropriate and more mature than the women Sasha normally dates – Paige says, “I don’t even know why I try….Just be honest with me, if you don’t want to change anything about your life, just say that….Stop calling me every day, complaining about your life and not do anything about it.”
Sasha responds, “Guess I should’ve known that as soon as you found someone else to couple up with that you’d be done with me.” This comment leads into Paige making the observation that things were never going to stay as they were. The late-nights talking on the phone until 2am always had an expiration date. Once you have a committed relationship, “you stop needing that” Paige says. To which Sasha responds, “But you still have that….You still talk to someone at two in the morning, it’s just Tim now. Nothing changed for you. It just changed for me. Can you acknowledge that, please?” In this moment, Sasha articulates so well why friendships change when one person enters a serious relationship.
The tricky part about this situation is that Paige was carrying on as though nothing had changed. She was still living as though the depth of intimacy in their friendship were preserved, which meant that she did not tread carefully in making assumptions about Sasha’s needs and wants. Her efforts at helping Sasha were no longer coming from a place of connection and knowing, but instead from a place of assumption and misreading. Sasha could feel the difference.
The final straw for Sasha as she grieves her changing friendship with Paige…the fast-food restaurant is out of cheese sticks. Very relatable.
It’s tough for both of them. Sasha knows she’s lost something. Paige hasn’t let herself acknowledge it yet. Consciously, I’m pretty sure we all know that our best friends cannot be replaced by a new partner, no matter how good the partner. But subconsciously, it can be challenging to let ourselves see that by gaining something truly wonderful – a loving partnership – closeness is almost certainly sacrificed in other areas in some way or another, whether it’s time spent or emotional intimacy. By pretending otherwise, we miss the opportunity to grieve change together. Instead you and BFF are both mourning solo.
repair, adaptation, & choosing friendship
Change is hard. Even good change can be a little sad. Life Partners is a film with an accurate portrayal of the bittersweet complexity of friendship. Sometimes the plot of the movies I write about can take a back-burner because you don’t need to know how a murder mystery is solved in order to understand the mental health and relationship issues I’m commenting on. But this movie is about relationships, so I think it’s important that I tell you the end.
Paige and Sasha are able to repair their rupture. They have a clear moment of unsaid “we’re letting this conflict go,” and lightness returns to their connection with each other. We don’t know much about what comes next.
what life partners teaches us about friendship in adulthood
We know that Paige and Tim intend to have kids someday soon, and we know this isn’t on the menu for Sasha for the foreseeable future. Life will continue to change, and if they want to keep what they have, they’ll have to continue adapting and navigating their friendship as their life paths diverge. It probably won’t always be easy because things will never be the same as they were. These efforts at sticking together come what may are at the heart of maintaining long-term friendships in adulthood.
Their reconnection is real – but not guaranteed. Sharing the ending of this film felt important to me because they could have just as easily let the rupture remain, and it would have been a realistic, though quite sad, ending. Friendship is a type of relationship many of us aren’t taught to foster and grow the way we’re taught to do with romantic partners or with family. But many of the same principles apply here: if you want to keep it, you have to keep choosing it and being willing to adapt as life changes. It’s honestly not that different from what I talked about a couple of weeks ago in my post about long-term relationships in the movie The Lovebirds.
So here’s to my BFFs. Thanks for sticking with me through all of the seasons we’ve experienced together and separately. I’m glad to have been there with you through yours. I’m looking forward to choosing our friendship for years to come, whatever life tosses at us.
That’s a wrap on my series about love this month. I enjoyed writing about it, and I hope you enjoyed reading! Happy month of love to you and yours.
Thank you for reading! I’m Trina, and I’m a therapist in Austin, Texas. I write about movies, TV shows, & other media that reflect the kinds of patterns, relationships, and questions my clients are exploring in therapy.
I wrote this post myself, drawing on my own ideas and clinical perspective. I occasionally use AI to help me with things like titles, keywords, and SEO. But the reflections are always mine.
If you’re in Texas and looking for therapy, I’d love to connect and hear more about your story.
