I feel like friendships are one of those things that should come with rules. Unspoken rules that no one needs to talk about, but still rules. Rules that take some common sense, but they're stupidly easy to follow.

"Don't blow off your friends," or "If you do blow them off, don't post about it on social media for them and the whole world to see," or even better, "You can't cut your friends out of your life and not speak to them for months at a time until you've suddenly got time to keep a friendship thriving and expect them to wait for you or want anything to do with you."

You know how little kids like to start eating something and then set it aside to go play, and come back to it because they know it'll be there when they come back?

That is not what you do with friends!

You do not randomly wake up one day and decide to stop talking to your friends and put them on the back burner. You do not actively avoid them and then decide you want to keep in touch with them on social media.

If you're trying to leave a friendship, you leave completely and do not look back on the past. Nothing's more annoying than going about your day and finding an old friend, who dipped out on you, interacting with you on social media, almost like they're trying to ignore the fact that they ghosted you for almost a whole year.

With that being said, don't be that person.

If you're going to cut me out of your life, do it.

Don't carefully saw me out with a plastic butter knife, use a machete and chop me totally out of the picture. I'm not going to wait for you to decide that you have time for me, and I'm certainly not going to be here for you to come back to whenever you want.

I can't express how important it is to me that you realize that. I won't waste my time waiting for a friend who might not come back to me. You began cutting me off, and if you don't finish it, I will.

Don't be that friend.

Don't be the one that revisits old friendships unless you have intentions of actually being friends with that person. Just use your common sense and keep your friends near.