So recently a friend of mine tweeted that he hated when people bragged about being able to drop people. They held it akin to not being able to communicate or maintain relationships. This made me frustrated and angry. However, knowing the person I also know that if I said that I needed to drop someone he would be super agreeable and supportive.

For me dropping people is a feat of social endurance. It is infinitely easier to stay friends with someone to keep a crappy person in your life than to take the step to remove them from your life. It is not a lack of social skills but in fact a leveling up. For so long we just fall into habits of expecting so little from the people in your life. I remember when I started hanging out with a group of friends my sophomore year of college I found one of them to be kind of abrasive and selfish. When I brought it up they just all went “Oh that’s how he is” or “oh that’s how he’s always been you can’t expect him to change now.”

These mentalities to keeping friends is detrimental to someone’s social and emotional well being. Thinking you don’t deserve to be treated well or that you should have friends that aren’t good wears on a person. A friend is one of the only connections a person truly gets to choose. You don’t pick your family or your neighbors or co-workers. If you don’t say this is not what I want than you are settling.

So yes a friend break up suck and it sucks that those connections don’t always work out. But it’s far better to be able to drop someone than to be stuck in a situation where you feel that you owe your friendship even if it’s not the friendship you want,