Last week we talked about the in-between, the space between knowing something true about yourself and actually being able to live differently because of it. That space is hard enough on its own.
It gets harder when other people are watching.
Because when you start to change, some of the people in your life will struggle with it. And how they respond can range from a flicker of discomfort to walking away entirely. It’s tempting to make this entirely about them. Sometimes that’s fair. But not always. And the not always is where I want to spend this week.
The time I was the one who couldn’t handle someone else’s choice
A long time ago, I had a very good friend who made a choice I didn’t agree with. She was in a relationship I believed was going to hurt her. She’d been lonely for a long time, her self-esteem was low, and someone had finally come along who seemed to care about her. I could see where it was headed, and I was afraid for her.
So I told her the truth. From the safety of my marriage and my kids, I told her she deserved more, and that she was only going to get hurt.
She walked out of my life. And she never came back.
For years I told myself I’d just been honest, that I’d said something true even if it was hard to hear. And that was real. I did care. What I said was probably true.
But it wasn’t the support she needed.
She wasn’t lonely because she didn’t know her own worth in some abstract way. She was lonely in a very real, lived way, and someone had finally shown up. What she needed from a friend wasn’t an assessment of her choices, something she likely already knew on some level. She needed someone to sit with her in the difficulty of where she was. I gave her a verdict instead.
Twenty years later, I still wonder if I could have been more supportive instead of critical. I’ll never know if it would have made enough of a difference for her to still be part of my life now. That’s part of what I carry.
Here’s what that taught me: being right about the facts and being helpful are not the same thing. My discomfort with her situation, my fear for her, came out as judgment. And judgment, even accurate judgment, even loving judgment, can land as rejection. It did. And it cost me the friendship.
When the distance isn’t about a single moment
That story has a clear shape. One conversation, one response, one consequence. But not every version of this is so contained.
Sometimes the distance between two people doesn’t trace back to anything either person did wrong. It grows slowly, over years, as each person’s convictions about something that matters deeply (faith, family, identity, what love requires) move in different directions. Neither side changes their mind. Neither side is trying to hurt the other. But the gap between where they each stand gets wider, until the relationship can’t hold the shape it used to.
There’s no single conversation to point to. No moment that, handled differently, would have changed things. Just two people standing on ground that used to be shared, and isn’t anymore. Two people who have grown to the point that the space in between them seems uncrossable.
That kind of distance comes with its own grief, a quieter one. Not the grief of a single loss you eventually move past, but the grief of an absence that recurs. The empty chair at the table. The relationship that isn’t over, exactly, but is smaller than it used to be, and stays that size.
What these two situations have in common, and what’s different
In the first story, my discomfort with someone else’s choice cost the relationship. There was a version of that conversation where I could have shown up differently, and the outcome might have changed. That possibility is part of what I carry.
In the second, there often isn’t a version of any single conversation that would change the outcome. The distance grows out of something deeper than any one exchange, and no amount of grace from either side fully closes a gap like that. It can be held. It can’t always be closed.
Both are real. Both are common. I think most people carry some version of each.
What to do with this
If you’re the one who has changed, and someone in your life is struggling with it, it’s worth asking honestly whether there’s room for more grace in how you hold the relationship while someone else catches up, if they’re able to. Last week’s in-between applies here too. The other person may be in their own in-between, knowing something is shifting and not yet able to live differently because of it.
If you’re the one unsettled by someone else’s change, the harder question is whether your concern is actually about them, or whether their growth is touching something in you that you haven’t looked at. I didn’t ask myself that question twenty years ago. I wish I had.
And if you’re living with a distance that doesn’t trace back to a single moment, the kind that comes from two people’s convictions moving in different directions on something too important to split down the middle, there may not be a resolution available to you. There’s only the ongoing work of grieving what’s been lost while still loving what remains. Holding both, for as long as it takes.
None of this is simple. But all of it is worth looking at honestly, from whichever side of it you’re standing on.