This is Enzo Mackmain. Alvin and Enzo were in the academy together. They used to spend a lot of time together.

But... not for a while...

They each got Space Marshal jobs at the same time, but while the work itself isn't solitary, it required them to work on separate planets most of the time.

They'd be dispatched to a community who needed their help, and would interact with often a dozen or more local citizens, but interacting with many people for a short period of time, is very different from interacting with the same person for long enough that the friendship grows.

So...

How can they become friends again?

It's not important why the friendship stopped growing.

In this case the reason was their jobs took them away from one another, but it could have been any number of reasons.

It's important to remember that Alvin and Enzo are fictional. I'm making their lives less complex than our own. It allows teaching of these principles, but remember, your own life and the lives of your friends will be far more complex.

So when you are examining why your friendships fell apart, so long as the reason wasn't "A Fight" then this process should work the same regardless of why the friendship fell apart. If the reason a friendship fell apart was because of a fight, this process can bring people back together, but it can't be forced, and the energy of the fight can lie in wait, looking for the opportunity to pounce and re-instigate the fight. Further courses are required to cover the topic of fights, they fall outside of the scope of this course.

Assuming your friendship didn't fall asleep because of a fight, rejoice!

Remember that you didn't fight and break up your friendship, it just stopped growing.

Remembering that no one is at fault is a big part of the model we'll use for this process.

Even when no one is at fault...

It's awkward though...

Why is it awkward?

Steve Pavlina once said relationships don't just need the absence of lies, they also need fresh truths.

Unless one or both parties in a friendship are unusually trusting toward all living beings, the people we are not in communication with start to fade into stranger-ness the longer we are apart.

Some friendships are immune to this, they operate on the assumption that, "we don't see each other more than once a year but we pick right up where we left off."

People with those kinds of friendships tend not to buy courses on rebuilding friendships because their friendship is working. We'll assume your friendship didn't pick up where it last left off.

And that's the problem:

Most people try to pick up where they last left off, even though most friendships aren't that kind of friendship.

You've grown.

They've grown too.

I once ran into someone from high school who I didn't talk to very much, and they brought up something from our class that I hadn't thought about in over a decade and couldn't remember.

It wasn't part of my now-life.

When rebuilding friendships you cannot go back in time.

You cannot become less than you already are. And they cannot become less than they've become either.

So don't treat them that way.

The biggest thing you're going to learn in friendship skills today is:

Figure out who they are THESE DAYS