Reply to Formally very close friendship dying, do you say something or just move on?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I met a woman when our sons were both new to 9th grade. Our sons were best friends in high school are now freshmen at 2 different colleges.  
They remain close friends but something has happened to the relationship I have with this woman.

We hit it off almost immediately when we met and she would text me all the time: to walk together, have lunch, dinner with our husbands, chats, random texts about mundane stuff. I hadn't been looking for a new friend but this relationship was easy and effortless.[b] We talked about vacationing together, we shared some pretty serious stuff with each other. We had the type of friendship where we would meet for coffee and then end up spending the day together.[/b]  If anything I was not the driver of the friendship--she was.  We both had other friends outside of each other but neither of us are "friend collectors", meaning we don't have super wide circles and value quality over quantity. We reflected on several occasions on how lovely it was to have met each other (when we weren't looking and at a time of life--high school--when you don't expect to) and [b]how we hoped to be close for a long time to come. [/b]

Well our sons graduated this year and things have been weird and distant ever since. I thought I imagined it at first (or assumed it was just logistics) but it's become very clear over the past 7-8 months. She doesn't reach out anymore and when I reach out it becomes a "one off" until I reach out again. There is no more back-and-forth exchange. As mentioned above, our boys remain friends. They saw each other over winter break, supported each through breakups with high school girlfriends, and also just hung out doing stupid fun stuff.

This week I saw the friend at a gathering and it was weird. She chatted a bit and said "i'd love to see you again in month or so after X or Y" and I said "oh yes, me too" and that was about it. Then things felt awkward and I said "are you ok?" and she said "yes" and I replied, 'Oh good!" and that was about it. It's been similar to this for the past few times I've seen her.

So my thoughts are: 
-in her mind we were close friends for a season and she's moved on. Kind of weird to me because our kids remain friends and our friendship didn't really revolve around our status as fellow parents. We didn't see each other at school (our sons played different sports, etc). 
-i misread the place of our friendship in her life all along.
-i did or said something offensive or hurtful that i can't recall (or maybe my son did?)
-as DCUM likes to say: "she's just not that into you" 
-she's depressed or sick or...
-she has other hard things going on in life that i don't know about. Could be anything.

For the purpose of this post, let's not debate what is doing on here. It could be any of the above and they would all be valid. The point is that this very close friendship of 4 years is dying. It's fading off into the sunset of life. it bothers me so I guess I want to know what to do. Do I just let this fade away and count it as a brief interlude of close friendship or do I reach out and when I see her next say: "hey, Did i do something to offend you?  I miss you and value our friendship and just wonder wanted to put this out there."  I guess I want the best chance of rescuing things if that is a possibility.  Maybe it's not good to lead with "did I offend you?"  Maybe I just say "I really miss you."

Thoughts?  Thank you so much. 
[/quote]

Ok. Tough love.

I had a couple friendships like this and I did start "slow fading" them at some point because the women both started asking way too much from me and seemed dependent on our friendship in a stifling way. I found myself saying no all the time, because their asks were increasingly extreme.

After a few years of family trauma and therapy I have realized that they both had Borderline tendencies (hallmark of which is intense fear of abandonment) and that because I grew up with a borderline mother, this felt natural to me, until it felt unbearable.

I think the intensity you mention in the OP is actually not healthy. I'm sure you did something at some point that triggered a suffocating feeling in your friend and that's why she backed away. She is not coming back, and you should absolutely not message her asking why, because that will trigger her guardedness even more.[/quote]

OP here and while I appreciate you taking the time to write this out, but I'm confident that I'm not borderline.  I have a long history of healthy friendships with good boundaries and in this particular one the invites, texts, etc were always 60/40 or 70/30 her.  I did not start asking anything of increasing intensity of her-- or really much at all.  I don't know what caused this shift (and I'll likely never know) but I can say with 100% certainty it wasn't because I became suffocating, inappropriate or asked too much of things.

Thank you to all for taking the time to comment.  I think the act of writing this out was what I needed to do. I was trying to explain things to my husband  and he doesn't get really get it so that's why I put my thoughts into words.  I think I'm not going to say anything, I'm going to reach out in a few weeks for a lunch (and I'm confident she'll say yes) and then keep reaching out at a new interval and give it the rest of 2026 to settle into whatever it will settle into.  Ironically I recently had a couple of new friends fall into my path.  I met one through a mutual friend and again there is such an ease (no pressure, no awkwardness) to our friendship and we have a lot of interests in common.  So I'm grateful for the timing of this and will keep on keeping on.

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