“I dropped off the radar for 10 years”

“I met my closest childhood friend, Emily*, when I was 11, but we began to drift apart when we moved to different sixth forms,” Jessica* tells Stylist. “I started to make new friends, and we began to drift apart from each other fairly naturally, which heightened when I started university in London.”

While Jessica felt that she’d finally met the kind of friends that would allow her to start living truly authentically and explore her sexuality, the distance between her and Emily became increasingly noticable.

“I distanced myself for a number of reasons: my memories from high school were overwhelmingly painful and I wanted to focus on my new chapter; my new friendships were more satisfying, and I assumed that she would judge me for my same-sex relationships (this wasn’t unsubstantiated: there was and remains a lot of prejudice in the area in which I grew up),” she says. Eventually they lost contact.

“Over the next 10 years, the only times she resurfaced in my life was when she popped up on Facebook with status updates,” Jessica says. “Occasionally, my family members would bump into her in the local area, and she would pass on her good wishes, but I wasn’t ready to make contact again.”

But this summer, something changed. “I sent Emily a text asking her if she’d like to meet up while I was home. She responded straight away, and the next day, I went round to her house to see her and meet her husband and children,” Jessica explains.

Friendship ghosting: “I haven’t replied to my friends’ messages for over a year. Now I want to get back in touch”