Two years ago, my partner Sam and I bought our first home together. This is always a big milestone in any relationship, but for us, it meant so much more.

Prior to buying this house in eastern Scotland, we had been going through an incredibly difficult time. I had been dealing with a serious health decline at 32, and had to leave my job as an NHS nurse as a result. We discovered it was early-stage cervical cancer. Then, as if things couldn’t get much worse, we found ourselves without a home. 

Sam had moved in with me about a year into our relationship, and although that was lovely, it was always “my” house. We made the decision to buy a new house – our house – but the place fell through. We suddenly searched for somewhere to rent – filled in endless amounts of paperwork, collected references and years’ worth of tax returns – yet we were declined every single time. We ended up living out of a studio apartment we found on Airbnb because it was the only thing we could get accepted for. Half our life was in storage, the other half in boxes. 

But we turned things around. I became self-employed, running a successful photography and female empowerment brand, and a few months later, in March 2024, we completed the sale of the home we now live in. 

My friends knew what I had been dealing with over the last 18 months, so we were both incredibly excited to be able to invite them over to celebrate our new home. Little did I know that this was going to end up being one of the most heartbreaking experiences of my life.

As the day of the housewarming rolled around, so did the pings on my phone from friends saying they weren’t going to be able to make it anymore, but they “hoped the night was fabulous”. By the time the celebrations were due to commence, I’d already had eight cancellations. I was still in high spirits though, because I still believed that 16 of my incredible friends were due to arrive.

As the night progressed, each knock at the door was one of Sam’s friends (often with their partners and children in tow). As more of his friends arrived, the more alone and disappointed I felt. 

As the night went on, more texts came from friends cancelling. Inside, I was completely crushed, but I tried to hold it together. Although I was incredibly thankful for the guests who did come, it made the pain of my own friends not showing up for me even worse. I sat in our living room smiling, laughing and nodding along to stories;  accepting gifts of flowers and prosecco and thanking them for the compliments on our new home, even though all I could think about was how not one person I invited was here.

Over half of them contacted me to cancel at the last minute, and the other half just didn’t bother to reach out at all. 

I have always been the friend that showed up – the baby shower, the birthday, the house move, the wedding, the breakup, the “can you come and give my car a jump start”. Yet not a single person could find the time, reason or motivation to show up for a huge part of mine and Sam’s lives. It was devastating. 

I went to bed that night and cried. Suddenly I was revisiting every single friendship, every interaction, everything I’d ever done for them, every time they’d shown up for me or not shown up, trying to figure out if it had always been so one-sided or if things had changed between us over time. 

I’ll admit my life had changed. In the space of a few years, I’d gone from NHS nurse to unemployed to successful business owner. Relationships are hard when someone is incredibly unwell and barely leaves the house, or has no money to socialise as they did before. I tried not to blame myself.

I have done my healing about this experience, but I recently shared the story on my social media platforms. I had no idea just how many people would connect with it. Within the first hour of posting, the comments were flooding in from women who had their own experiences of friends and last-minute cancellations. The post now has over a million views.

This shouldn’t have been a surprise. A recent survey from the Marmalade Trust found that around 65 per cent of young people (aged 18–29) have cancelled social plans to spend time online instead, while another survey found that 47 per cent of social plans discussed in group chats never actually happen in real life. It is a growing problem – we are increasingly too inconvenienced to show up for our community. 

But why are friends not showing up? Why are last-minute dropouts and complete no-shows so common? One of the glaring reasons is social media. We are living in a time where it’s easy to feel like we are connected with people because we see their posts, their stories, all in real time. It feels like we are involved in other people’s lives, while actually not being physically present at all. They post a success, a fail, a random everyday thing, a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and we respond with an emoji or a tap of a heart. We were present. We witnessed it. We invest in this relationship. Right?

But now the bar is so low on what we need to do to stay connected with one another that when something actually takes a bit of effort, a bit of energy, we struggle to follow through. It sounded great two weeks ago when you were invited and accepted, but now the nights are here, and it’s been a long week; you can’t be bothered to wash your hair, you don’t have the energy to socialise, and you’ve got a nice warm sofa and a takeaway calling your name. You tell yourself there will be another time, that other people will show up so they won’t even notice that you’re missing and that when they post tomorrow about it you’ll comment or DM to say that it looked amazing and you hope they had the best time. 

But relationships can’t be sustained by micro-interactions through the internet. We need to make an effort, and sometimes the sofa and the takeaway are calling, but you still show up anyway because that’s what friends do. 

And if you’re wondering what happened following this experience, not very much. I sent out a few messages, and it was never discussed again. The majority of those 24 friends became more like “someone I once knew”, with the odd engagement on socials now and then. I absolutely stopped pulling my weight when it came to being the person who always showed up for others, and that allowed a lot of the relationships to fizzle out.

I realised that most of these friendships had stayed alive for so many years because I had been putting in more than what I’d been receiving in return.

Sometimes the people from your previous chapters aren’t the right fit for your next one.