WHY I GAVE MY FRIENDSHIPS A SPRING CLEAN

When Georgina Fuller turned 40, she decided to shake up her social circle

- GEORGINA FULLER

When it comes to making friends, I’ve always been a more-the-merrier sort of person. I have friends from every part of my life – school, university, work, the children’s clubs, our village, social media. But by the time I turned 40 a few (ahem) years ago, I found trying to maintain all these different threads of friends a little overwhelming at times.

Things seemed to have become busier than ever with work deadlines in my job as a journalist, while my husband Dom and I juggled the challenges of having three young children at different schools (who now expected us to be their taxi service!) and the general demands of day-to-day life. Keeping up with the pings from the parents’ and friends’ WhatsApp groups I belonged to sometimes felt like a job in itself.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

I found that I had less and less time to maintain different friendships, and some gradually started to slide and fall by the wayside. As my free time grew increasingly sparse, it also became more precious. I started being more careful about how I spent it and who I spent it with.

I had something of an online ‘cull’ at first. I thought if I wouldn’t cross the street to say hello to someone or meet them for a drink, there wasn’t much point in being friends with them on social media. Sometimes people popped up randomly, and I couldn’t remember meeting them in the first place! I culled around 100 ‘friends’ on Facebook first.