12 Friends You Need To Let Go Of Before Turning 30

1. The friend you only keep around because she goes to parties at cool people’s house.

This isn’t your friend, this is your guilty pleasure thirst trap. If you actually like them as a person and hang out with them outside of the Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous parties, that’s fine. If not, you’re just exploiting their likely-mediocre social connections.

2. The friend who makes you feel like you’re behind.

This isn’t so much indicative of your friend being in a different place than you, it just shows that your friend wants to rub it in when they are accomplishing things left, right, and center. You should be happy for your friends, and you should want them to excel beyond any of your wildest dreams. But you don’t need to keep the friend who just got engaged and won’t stop bugging you about meeting “someone special.” You shouldn’t need the friend who keeps getting promotions and is making snarky remarks about your job.

3. The friend who makes passive aggressive comments for no apparent reason.

I’m honestly not sure why we all keep one of these people around, but somehow we do. You don’t actually need snide comments in your life — at least not nearly as much as you need positive reinforcement.

4. The friend who doesn’t listen to you, at all, ever.

Friendship is a conversation, not a one-sided monologue where one person talks, and the other person listens. As people get busier, the practice of “faux-listening” becomes too common. Yes, we all have other commitments, work to do, bills to pay, and significant others to not ignore, but every friend is capable of giving someone they care about time to talk, and giving them their undivided attention. If your friend can’t afford you that courtesy, how close are you?

5. The friend who reschedules plans more often than she/he actually shows up for those plans.

Truth be told, I’ve been this friend, and it has definitely worn on new friendships. Old friends will stick with you through a flaky phase, but it definitely takes a toll on a new friendship, and that’s understandable. Generally, if you’re trying to make good, new friends — especially in a new place where you don’t know many people — you don’t want someone who is completely unreliable.

6. Obligation friends from college who happen to live in your city.

The fact that you both went to the same college and now live in the same city IS NOT REMARKABLE. And it never will be. The number of people who went to school in the Northeast and now live in NYC is astronomically high. There are too many to count. You don’t need to have drinks once every three months with the girl you were in advertising club with sophomore year.

7. The can’t-feel-my-face-when-I’m-with-you friend.

Hey, if you’re a drug person and you want to be on ~something~ with your drug friends, absolutely no judgment. But if you’re over your experimental phase, and you still have that one friend who texts you about a mollie hook up every Friday at midnight, you don’t necessarily need to answer their texts all the time.

8. The friend who morphs into one blob with their significant other every single time they start dating someone knew.

See also: the friend who always brings their S.O. along and only answers questions using words like “we” and “us,” but never saying “I”

9. The one you’re only friends with because they have a dog.

Just kidding. Definitely keep them around. Get rid of the cat friend, though.

10. The subtweeters, passive aggressive Facebook commenters, and the ones who exclusively Instagram photos where they look flawless and everyone else looks asleep/drunk/like they just got out of a car after driving for seven hours.

11. All of your exes.

Yes, exes can be friends, but they don’t have to be. There isn’t an overarching rule that says people who used to be in love need to talk on the phone for 15 minutes at least once a month. I honestly believe that you can care for someone long after you get over them, after you fall for other people, and so on. But that doesn’t mean you need to be thick as thieves. You’re allowed to just check in every couple of years, or not; it doesn’t need to a consistent friendship, or any kind of friendship, if you don’t want it to be.

12. Friends you used to work retail with seven years ago.

In an ideal world, we would keep every friend we ever made. In an ideal world, I would still be friends with the girl who was nice to me when I wet my pants at the sandbox when I was three. But in reality, something’s gotta give, and it’s hard to keep up with eight different friend groups. By the time you hit 30, you could very well have a group of friends from high school, from your hometown, from college, from your first post-grad job, from your current job, from study abroad, from your side job, from a high school job, from a niche high school activity, from specific activities or jobs you worked in college, and so on. If you tried to keep up with every single person, you’d never get anything done, because you’d be g-chatting, Facebook messaging, and skyping people 24 hours a day.