The One-Sided Friendship I Kept Making Excuses For

Aditya and I had been close since we were teenagers. He was funny and sharp and had the kind of charisma that made being around him feel like being inside something interesting.

We had the history that makes friendships feel irreplaceable - years of shared references, the kind of shorthand that develops only through sustained proximity, the memory of showing up for each other at important moments. So when the dynamic started shifting in our late twenties, I did not notice it cleanly.

I noticed it in fragments and explained each one away. He stopped asking how things were going with me - I told myself he was distracted by his own problems. He regularly cancelled plans at the last minute - I told myself he had a lot going on.

He reached out mainly when he needed something - advice, a favour, someone to vent to - and disappeared when things were going well for him - I told myself that was just how some people processed difficulty, leaning on their closest friends when they needed them most. Each individual explanation was plausible.

The pattern, when I finally allowed myself to see it as a pattern, was less so. Over four years of friendship, I calculated - actually calculated, because I needed to see it clearly - that I could not remember the last time Aditya had asked me a genuine question about my life and stayed present for the answer.

I could not remember a time he had shown up for something that was important to me. I had been to significant events in his life, had fielded his calls at inconvenient hours, had lent him money once that was never directly acknowledged again.

The friendship was operating entirely in one direction and I had been too attached to the history of it to face that honestly. The conversation I eventually had with him was uncomfortable and did not produce the reflection I had hoped for.

He was defensive, then distant, and the friendship has existed at a polite remove ever since. That hurt. What hurt more was recognising how long I had stayed out of loyalty to a version of the friendship that had not existed for years.

There is a particular kind of grief in losing a friendship you had already half-lost without realising it. I am more attentive now to reciprocity - not as a ledger I obsessively track, but as a general sense of whether energy in a relationship flows both ways. Friendships can survive periods of imbalance.

They cannot survive becoming structurally imbalanced. The difference matters.