How did you lose your best friend and how did you get over them?

How did you deal with losing your best friend? Why did you lose your best friend? How do you handle losing a best friend?
Losing them, not in a deathly way, but just losing the friendship to a change in lifestyle, or just drifting apart. How do you cope with losing your only friend? Have you ever been dumped by a best friend?
I'm curious as to how other redditors have dealt with losing their best buddy. How did you feel? Did you wonder/think/know if it was your fault or not? How did you make friends after the fact? Share your stories, let it out! Have you ever lost your best friend (who was a guy) because he had feelings for you?
He had strong feelings but you did not feel the same and he eventually had to separate himself from you (flat out told you he could not be in your life anymore). How did you act afterwords? Did you understand where he was coming from? Would you respect his need for space or would you try and regain the friendship (still just as friends)? Have you ever lost your best friend for any reason? I lost contact with my best friend due to going to jail and owing him money, I owe it all to a drug addiction...But I'm clean now and hit my 9 months today, I sent him a text saying his name, and he asked who's this, and I said my name and he never text me back. I feel like shit, has anyone ever lost their best friend who was like a brother to them?

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kimmy159 · F

so here’s a story:

On the 11th of August in the year of 1991, a babyboy named Kevin was born in the hospital of Roeselare.
9 days later, me myself and I joined the wonders of life.
Both our mothers were still in the hospital. Coincidence as may be, apparently my grandparents were the neighbors of Kevin’s parents. So we all got introduced to eachother.
My parents worked a lot of weekends, and so I stayed at my grandparents place quite often.
It wasn’t before long that we became absolute best pals. My love for gaming, and later, online gaming and communities, rock music all started with Kevin.
We trusted eachother with everything and he has been my best friend forever.
Until of course, teenage years approached and he got feelings for me.
I wouldn’t claim that I never had any feelings. But I told him I didn’t want to risk our lifelong friendship over a relationship.
Back in my teenage years, I was quite emotionally unstable and my first relationships didn’t last very long cause I grew tired of them (lol), so I just thought it was a bad idea.

Turns out, making that choice was the reason why we grew apart. I got a boyfriend whom I did click with, I started spending less weekends over at my grandparents place,… Later he got a girlfriend and that’s when he stopped talking to me. I assume his mother must have told her about what a close friend I was and she might have told him not to contact me anymore.

Either way, I’m still grateful for the 19 or so years of friendship that we’ve had, I still miss him to this day, consider it to be a bond I’ll never have with someone else again, but also respect him and his family too much to ‘butt in’ for the sake of friendship.

Sometimes I wonder if I just should’ve tried the relationship, but if it would have went bad, I would probably feel worse about it than I do now :-))