- It’s normal to change how close you feel to friends at different points in your life.
- A psychologist shared why a friendship reshuffle can be better than breaking up or quiet-quitting.
- A reshuffle keeps a friend in your life, while allowing you to branch out and focus on new people.
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If a friend or friend group annoys you lately, the internet proposes a few ways to deal with it. You can formally break up with them, texting them paragraphs of therapy-speak. Or you can quiet-quit the friendship, if you feel that ghosting is too harsh.
All of these options can deeply hurt your friend and even you, if you end up regretting the breakup.
Luckily, there’s another, less permanent option for needing some space: a friendship reshuffle.
“There can be a difference between a full withdrawal and a downgrading of the connection,” Miriam Kirmayer, a clinical psychologist, told Business Insider. A downgrade means you still want to stay in each other’s lives, but maybe change up the frequency.
In general, there are many benefits to having multiple close friends and widening your social circle, in that it helps you grow and gives you a broader support network. It also takes the pressure off of one best friend or group to be everything.
Kirmayer shared how to reinvigorate your social life with a reshuffle — and leave room for reconnection later on.
1. Be real about your grievances
The most important thing to ask yourself before you reshuffle: do you actually want to stay friends in the long run? Or is there a genuine issue that makes you want to pull away?
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“If the friendship chronically makes you feel unsafe, unseen, or unappreciated, then it may be worth questioning why you feel compelled to hang on to it,” Kirmayer said. If your friend has done something, like make you feel used or put you down out of jealousy, it might not be a relationship worth preserving.
A reshuffle, however, is more about you and what you want out of your social interactions. For example, Kirmayer said you might wish to make new friends through shared hobbies because your current friends don’t have the same interests.
2. Rebalance — but don’t withdraw
Sometimes, your reason for a reshuffle might come from the friendship dynamic itself, Kirmayer said. If you feel a friendship is a little one-sided — and you’ve already addressed it — you might want to adjust how much you put into the relationship.
“You’ve accepted that they are not putting in as much effort or attention into the friendship as you are, and you want to create a bit more balance to reduce feelings of resentment in order to stay close,” she said.
In those cases, you can just cut down on how many texts and phone calls you answer, using the time to connect with other people or do something that brings you more joy.
3. Stay in touch in smaller ways
As you encounter various life changes, a reshuffle may be in order just to avoid being overwhelmed. “Sometimes this has less to do with the friendship itself and more to do with life circumstances, misaligned schedules, physical distance,” Kirmayer said.
Kirmayer said you still need to make an effort, whether you’re investing time in new relationships or taking a breather from old ones.
“Our friendships are fluid, and staying peripherally connected can allow for that reconnection at a later point,” she said. “We just want to make sure we are tending to that relationship in small ways over time — checking in, sending small updates, saying ‘happy birthday,’ remembering important dates.”
Life is full of surprises: in a few years, you might end up closer than ever to your old friends — all because you took the time to reconnect with yourself.