Why some professional relationships fade (and why that's OK)
I sometimes think about how many people I was once incredibly close to, and now barely speak to at all. There’s a mate from university who was, at one point, one of my best friends. We lived together, did everything together, and then, slowly and without any drama, we lost touch. No fallout. No awkward moment. Just life moving on.
At the same time, new people come into your life. My other half often jokes about “your new mates” from my running club, which I joined a couple of years ago. They’re people I didn’t know at all not that long ago, and now see regularly. That shift feels completely normal in personal life. We don’t beat ourselves up about it. We accept that relationships change shape over time.
Yet when it comes to professional relationships, we’re much harder on ourselves.
At work, we often assume relationships should be either actively maintained or quietly written off. If we haven’t stayed in touch, we feel guilty. If a conversation goes quiet, we assume we’ve failed at networking. We treat professional relationships as fragile things that need constant attention, rather than as something more resilient.
In reality, most professional relationships ebb and flow in exactly the same way personal ones do. People change roles, priorities shift, projects end, energy moves elsewhere. A relationship going quiet usually says far more about timing than it does about value or trust.
The trouble starts when we try to force it.
Forced catch-ups, overly polished check-ins, and messages sent purely out of obligation tend to feel awkward on both sides. Not because the relationship has gone cold, but because the contact doesn’t reflect where either person is now. We’re trying to recreate a version of the relationship that belonged to a different moment.
When you stop forcing professional relationships, something interesting happens. The pressure lifts. You give yourself permission to let connections rest without labelling them as “lost”. And when you do reconnect, it’s less about reviving something old and more about discovering what the relationship might look like now.
This matters because reconnection is often where people get stuck. They assume too much time has passed, or that they need a compelling reason to reach out. But just like with friendships, the absence of constant contact doesn’t erase what was built. Trust doesn’t disappear because a calendar got busy.
Reconnecting doesn’t have to mean picking up exactly where you left off. It can mean starting a new conversation with someone who now has different context, experience, and perspective. Often, those are the most interesting conversations of all.
Professional relationships don’t need to be continuously maintained to be meaningful. Sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is let them breathe, without guilt or pressure, and trust that the right ones will resurface when the timing makes sense.
Photo by Zhanhui Li on Unsplash