I accidentally ruined my own day this morning after stumbling upon the “five-year stranger theory.” According to the viral concept, most of the people currently in your life—colleagues, neighbors, casual friends, that hookup buddy who won’t commit to you—will turn into strangers within just five years. Of course, this doesn’t include family and close friends, but the idea that our casual social circle might one day vanish is a bit…well, depressing.
However, after taking some time to reflect, I realized this theory is as comforting as it is saddening. For years, I’ve wondered whether something was wrong with me for outgrowing certain friendships or no longer resonating with certain groups. But this shift is a completely normal part of getting older—and the main premise of the five-year stranger theory.
What Is the Five-Year Stranger Theory?
According to Amanda Burback, a licensed marriage and family therapist and founder of Mellow Therapy in Los Angeles, “The five-year stranger theory is the concept that, due to natural personal growth, changing priorities, life transitions, and just how people evolve, most of the people who are very central to our life today will be strangers in five years’ time, and vice versa.”
Many people experience guilt, grief, and even shame for growing apart from or losing friends, but this is a common pattern throughout our lives. While sure, some friends are meant to last a lifetime, others are only meant to stick around for a season. That doesn’t make these relationships any less significant or worthy.
“The framing across the internet is that this drifting apart is a natural evolution of friendship and part of personal growth,” Burback says. “It’s not a failure of friendship by any means; it’s more the natural evolution of personal growth and personal relationships.”
Redefining Friendships and Loss
Losing a friend, or even an acquaintance, can feel destabilizing. As someone who spends too much time reminiscing, I often long for the company of old friends or even coworkers I no longer speak to. Most of those losses didn’t come with dramatic endings or entirely closed doors; rather, they were gradual and, for lack of a better word, practical.
“A lot of that is because friendships are often tied to a shared context of where you are in your life at that moment, whether you’re working the same job, living in the same city or neighborhood, maybe you both recently had children, or both got puppies, whatever it might be,” says Burback. “When the context changes, the friendship can often change with it, not because anyone did anything wrong. It’s just natural growth and different life transitions.”
When relationships/friendships are built from proximity or shared context rather than deep connection or long-term compatibility, they’re bound to fade when it’s no longer convenient. For example, I had a great group of coworkers at my first journalism job in Manhattan, all of whom I loved seeing and talking to every day. But once we all left the company, moved states, etc., we naturally spoke less and less. We didn’t have our Slack group chat (shoutout “kiddos”) to keep us connected, nor did we have convenient happy hours or post-work walks to the train together.
I still wonder about each of them, as they were all beautiful, kind people with incredible talent and passion. And sometimes, I’ll even send a check-in message for a quick catch-up. But they’re no longer part of my regular life and have since become more like strangers than friends.
“Relationships are more seasonal than we’re taught to expect, and a lot of what we see in the room is people blaming themselves, being hypercritical of themselves, or grieving a friendship that fades, when in reality it was just two people growing in different directions,” says Burback. “The healthy way to apply this is to hold friendships a bit more openly and invest where there’s mutual effort on both ends, and to stop measuring every friendship against a forever timeline.”
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