I don’t want to be friends with someone I met 4 years ago anymore. I mean, I don’t, like, hate him o

Dear Anonymous,

Ah, friend drama. It happens to everyone, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to deal with. I can understand your concern for your friend, and I can say from experience that I’ve gone through a situation like this before as well. If you think you’ve lost the person you first became friends with, you can try just plain talking to them. If you see him making one of those “bad decisions” when you’re around, maybe try to tell him that that wasn’t cool. If you don’t really sit with him, or hang out with his friends at this point in time, that’s fine, too. Maybe you can slowly start to hang out with different people, people who seem a little bit more fit to your criteria of a friend. Don’t sever your friendship bond completely, but sit with different people more often. Make some new friends. Talk to different people in the hallway. If he asks why you don’t hang out as much anymore, tell him that you think he’s changed a little bit, and you have started to make new friends. If he can accept this, maybe he’ll start working to change, so he can be a better friend to you again. However, if he likes who he is now, you know you have other friends to fall back to. Seeing friends change for the worse isn’t easy, but it’s better to step back and look at your friendship and how you can fix it then to say nothing, and risk being a bad friend to him, or worse, picking up back habits.

Sincerely, STEMmie