Being the friendspert that I claim to be; I once had a friend ask me what I thought about ditching friends.  Truth be told, I think most friendships have an expiration date.  While there are definitely moments in life that we have to “dump” friends, very rare are the moments that we have to brush off our “it’s not you, it’s me” speech so practiced with lovers past.  Friendships more than likely just seem to phase themselves out. Breaking off a friendship often ends without much effort at all, unless of course there’s an argument, friends just seem to vanish from our lives when they no longer seem to fit into our lifestyles.

A recent study has been released to make you feel less asshole-tastic.  Most people replace half of their friends every seven years.Huh, that’s interesting, that’s about the same time it takes for us to replace our tastebuds.  Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst at Utrecht University in the Netherlands studied the friendships of 1,007 people between the ages of 18 to 65.  What he found was that while the number of friendships in our inner sanctum seems to remain fairly constant, our core group of friends seems to be on a seven-year rotation cycle.

Now, having been the kind of person who has had the same BFFs her entire life, I think that there is a limit to the truth of this study.  I can’t help but notice, however, that while my closest friends haven’t changed much since the days of training bras and crushing on varying members of The New Kids on the Block, my close friends outside that small select group, do seem to ebb and flow in favor.

None of this is particularly shocking, seven years is a long time.  In seven years you can leave high school and end up with a masters degree; you can fall in love, get married, have oodles of babies; you can move to another country, change careers, change genders!  Our priorities and circumstances change as our lifestyles change, it only seems natural that with that will bring new friending opportunities.

I’ve decided to take the optimistic approach to this study.  While we may lose (or demote) half of our close friends in seven years, we continue to maintain and nurture the other half.  Just think how rich our lives can be if we’re forever nurturing old friendships, while continuing to foster and create new ones.

I’m a firm believer that people are in your life for as long as they need to be.  Some people need to be forever, and some for a little while.  Each person in our life fills a different role.  Some of those roles exist solely for a transitory moment in time. Wouldn’t it be nice if our romantic relationships could end the way many of our friendships end, just fade out without yelling or crying, just the memory of someone you loved being with for a moment in time?