This originally appeared on Mamamia Out Loud's substack. You can sign up here .

Sometimes the guilt of not being a better friend is absolutely justified.

There are people I've allowed to fade from my life for no good reason. People I once saw or spoke to every day.

Watch: The hosts of Mamamia Out Loud discuss whether it's ever okay to be late. Post continues below.

Faces in photos from significant birthdays, wedding parties and weekends away who it would have been impossible to imagine wouldn't be in today's frame.

I mourn them, I miss them. But often, I don't reach out to them.

I have no idea what that's about, other than life charging on as it does, expanding to fill space. Work and family colouring in all the clear gaps. The phones that are meant to connect us constantly distracting us with worse ideas. Distance, in both time and geography. Nerves, about rejection, confrontation, diverging recollections of how things ended.

The awfulness of the phrase "We Must Catch Up!"

We're all a bit weird about friendship, now. We've shuffled female friendship up the priority list – just like pop culture told us to – because we've always known, deep down, that it was where we may be the most understood. And now we pathologise it like we do romantic love. Fretting about how good at it, we are. Wondering if we're doing it right. Suspecting everyone else is doing it better.

Sometimes, you're right.

There's the worry that it's you who let things go. And then there's the gnawing angst that it's you who's fading, in the eyes of someone who saw you as essential, you thought. As a sharp-focus friend, a weekly diary-date friend, a daily digital-contact friend.

And it feels a lot like those moments when you sense the body in bed beside you no longer welcomes your hand, like an unwelcome reality jolt: Oh, they're just not that into me any more.

There's just so much friendship noise.

Some people (see below, the four styles of friendship) will buzz around any social setting drawing energy from all the fluttering wings. The person who knows enough about every single person at the netball sidelines, gym class, office drinks, to make them feel important and seen, but has no need to convert those interactions into anything deeper.

There are others who will obsess over every interaction, hunt for exclusion clues, for perceived slights, for any petty judgement and betrayals. That's the friend who's been burned.

Then there's the heightened chatter around an old friendship group – from school, from uni, from that first, formative job – where you sense your bond is about to be tested by the first great Scattering. Because of work, because of kids, because of literal distance.

Maybe learning that all this is "normal", that there are different stripes of friends for different settings and different seasons, is freeing. Releases pressure, lets us off the hooks we've hung ourselves on.

Listen to the hosts of Mamamia Out Loud chat about the four styles of friendship. Post continues below.

And maybe it will free some of us enough to stop overthinking, and pick up the actual phone.

This originally appeared on Mamamia Out Loud's substack. You can sign up here .

Feature image: HBO.