When you move up faster than your friends: what it does to old relationships

“Well, Mr Director, I suppose you don’t have time for us any more.”

Everyone at the table laughs. So do you. You are sitting in the same pub as every year before Christmas, the same group from secondary school, the same order of stories. But when the laughter dies down, you notice that you have been choosing your words carefully all evening. You have said almost nothing about your new position. When someone asked how work was going, you said “oh, you know, same as ever” and quickly asked a question back. At home, something keeps nagging at you for a long time. You did nothing wrong. So why do you feel as if you had taken something?

We usually describe a promotion as the story of one person: they worked hard, they made it. In reality, success always lands in a web of relationships — among friends, in the family, in the environment you come from. And it does not always land softly. In this post I will write about what happens to old friendships when one of you starts moving up faster than the others, and why so much envy, guilt and quiet loyalty comes with it.

A joke that is not quite a joke

Jokes about “Mr Director” or “our star” are often the first sign that something in the group has shifted. A joke is a comfortable way of saying something we would not know how to say directly: that we miss you, that we are a little afraid, that we no longer know who you are now. At the same time, a joke is also a test. Without realising it, the group uses it to check whether you are still one of them.

You can respond in two ways, both of which seem sensible, yet neither really helps. You can make yourself smaller — “oh, it’s nothing special, just more work for the same money” — or you can feel hurt and slowly start turning up less often. The first keeps the peace but cuts you off from part of your own story. The second protects you but lets the relationship quietly evaporate.

Before we look at what could be done differently, it helps to understand why this shift is so delicate precisely between people who are close.

Friendship is made of hours

In 2019 the communication scholar Jeffrey Hall published a study on how much time together it takes for an acquaintance to become a friend. He found that a casual friendship takes roughly 50 hours of time together, a proper friendship around 90 hours, and a close friendship more than 200 hours. Not just any hours — what counted above all was time spent relaxing together, talking and sharing activities, not time when people were merely in the same room.

This finding says something we often overlook in success stories. Friendships do not fade because success in itself spoils anything. They fade because a new position often takes exactly the hours they were made of: Thursday evenings, Sunday walks, a spontaneous coffee. Responsibility, business trips, meetings scheduled around other time zones — none of this is subtracted from work, but from free time.

Your friends notice this before you do. You experience being busy. They experience your absence.

Why it hurts most with those closest

In the 1980s the social psychologist Abraham Tesser put forward a model that explains very precisely why someone else’s success sometimes delights us and sometimes hurts. It is called the self-evaluation maintenance model. According to it, how we react to another person’s success depends on two things: how close that person is to you, and how important the area in which they succeeded is to your own sense of yourself.

If someone close to you succeeds in an area that does not matter much to you, you feel proud — their success reflects on you too. But if someone close succeeds in an area that is also your own yardstick of worth, comparison is unavoidable and painful. The very closeness that is a source of joy in the first case becomes a source of threat in the second.

Friends from our youth are often in exactly that bottom-right box. You started from the same point, with the same dreams, perhaps in the same class or at the same university. You partly set your yardsticks of success together. When one of you suddenly pulls ahead, it is not only their life that changes, but also the yardstick by which the others measure themselves. And that is not malice. It is human.

The envy that is there — and the envy you expect

I have written about envy at greater length in Envy at work: the emotion nobody admits to out loud. Here I would like to highlight the other side: what goes on in the person who is envied.

In a review article, the psychologists Julie Exline and Marci Lobel described how heavily people are burdened by the mere thought that they are the target of envy. Many respond by playing down their achievements, hiding news or withdrawing. Interestingly, the expectation of envy is often enough — others do not necessarily have to feel it.

This matters because close relationships easily slip into a vicious circle. You expect them to envy you, so you say nothing about yourself. Your friends sense that you are hiding something and feel shut out. You read their coolness as confirmation of envy and withdraw even further. In the end nobody envied anybody anything, and yet the friendship has cooled.

Guilt because you made it

Often, when people describe how they feel after a promotion among friends who are doing less well, they do not talk about pride but about guilt. As if their success had taken something from someone. As if they had to earn it all over again, this time by apologising.

This feeling is related to what we call survivor guilt — when it hurts because things are easier for you than for others. I have written about it in Survivor guilt: when it hurts because you were the one spared. With a promotion, this guilt is usually quieter, but it works in a similar way: your joy has no room, because it feels unseemly.

Guilt is a useful feeling when it warns us that we really have wronged someone. Here, though, that is often not the case. Your friend did not lose a job because you got one. If the guilt still does not settle, it makes sense to ask where you know it from — who once taught you that being better than others is dangerous.

Interestingly, this kind of guilt readily links up with impostor syndrome. If you keep playing your success down in front of others, over time you start playing it down in front of yourself too. First you say “it’s nothing special” to make things easier for your friends. After a while you begin to believe it really is not.

When you no longer speak the same language

A promotion is not always just a higher title. Sometimes it means a move into a different social world: different habits, a different vocabulary, different expectations about clothes, holidays, food, conversation. This is felt especially strongly by people who were the first in their family to finish university or take on a leadership role — and in Slovenia, where the educational picture has changed greatly within a few decades, there are quite a few of them.

The philosopher Jennifer Morton wrote a book about this, Moving Up Without Losing Your Way. In it she describes how social mobility is not only a gain but also carries an ethical cost: relationships with family and friends from the environment you come from, and the question of who you are when you are no longer quite there and not yet quite here. People who have travelled this path often describe feeling that they have two languages — one for meetings and one for Sunday lunch at their parents’ — and that they are not fully at home in either.

In such a position, losing friends is a double loss. You lose not only people, but also the part of yourself you shared with them. So it is no wonder that many people feel lonelier after success than before it.

Loyalty to where you come from

Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, one of the founders of family therapy, coined the term invisible loyalties. He used it to describe the deep, often unconscious bonds that tie us to the family we come from. These loyalties are not always spoken, but we feel them — for example as guilt when we do something our parents could not, or as unease when we drift away from what the family regarded as “ours”.

The sentence “don’t forget where you come from” can express pride. But it can also carry a warning: don’t become too different, don’t leave us. In some families, success is allowed only up to a certain limit — the one that does not threaten the sense that we are still together. Whoever crosses it often pays, without knowing it, with their sense of belonging.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, this is one of the frequent questions: which part of what you feel about your success is yours, and which part you have taken on from your family. Christian Gostečnik describes how patterns from the family of origin repeat in all later relationships, friendships included. I have written about how we carry inherited feelings in What I inherited besides genes: a family’s emotional legacy.

A group of friends is a system

An old circle of friends is also a system, with roles that took shape years ago. Someone was always the joker, someone the organiser, someone the one for whom things never worked out — and whom the others comforted. When someone steps out of their role, the group feels unsettled and, without meaning to, tries to pull them back. In systemic therapy we call this the tendency towards balance.

If you were the one in the group who was always “barely getting by”, your success is especially confusing for the group. You no longer know how to be with one another. I describe similar shifts in roles in Managing for the first time: how your relationship with former colleagues changes, where a colleague becomes a manager overnight.

This is how a conversation might sound that people rarely see through to the end (the conversation is composite, not a real person):

“Can I tell you something? Last time, when you said ‘Mr Director’, it stung a bit.”
“Oh, you know it’s a joke.”
“I know. But I feel like I no longer know what I can say. If I tell you how things are going, it feels like I’m showing off.”
A pause. “Maybe it is a bit hard for me. Nothing has moved for me in the last three years.”
“You never told me that.”
“And you never told me you feel you have to apologise.”

Nobody solved anything in this conversation. But for the first time, both of them said something true. Often that is exactly what a friendship needs: not equal success, but permission to talk about inequality.

Two temptations and a third way

When a friendship starts to crack because of a difference in success, people most often turn to one of two solutions. Both are understandable, and both have a price.

The third way is no guarantee that every friendship will survive. But it is the only one in which you remain whole — success included — and in which your friends get the chance to respond to you, not to your shadow.

In practice this means a few very simple things. When they ask how you are doing, you answer truthfully but briefly, and ask back out of interest, not politeness. When you sense distance, you name it instead of covering it up. And when the hour you used to keep for your friends is now taken, you find a new one — less often, but reliably.

Exercise: a map of old friendships

Take half an hour and a sheet of paper. The exercise is not meant to repair friendships in one evening, but to help you see where you stand.

1. Draw three circles. Write yourself in the centre, put the friends who are still close in the inner circle, and those who have drifted away in recent years in the outer one.
2. Next to each name in the outer circle, write when it began. Was it with your promotion, a move, a child, a loss of theirs? Not all distances have the same cause.
3. Write down what you have kept from this person over the past year. News you did not share, or struggles you did not show. And what you think they have kept from you.
4. Choose one person you would like to stay close to. Not all of them. Think of one concrete step: a call, an invitation, a sentence you have been carrying for a long time.
5. Check your guilt. Ask yourself: “Who would I be disloyal to if I were genuinely glad about my success?” The answer is often the name of someone who is not on the map.

If something strong comes up at the last step, do not push it away. That is often exactly where the reason lies why success is harder to live with than it was to achieve.

When it is not about envy

Everything I have written could be read as an explanation of why your friends are “jealous”. That would be the wrong conclusion. Not every distance is envy.

Perhaps you have changed too. Success sometimes brings new topics, a new rhythm and a new way of talking. If for the past two years you have talked only about work at every get-together, your friends may not be drawing away from your success, but from conversations that leave no room for them.

Perhaps the friendship has done its work. Some friendships were made for a particular period — for school, for student days, for a shared flat. When lives diverge, a relationship can diverge too, with no blame on either side. I have written about how such an ending hurts in When a friendship ends: a loss without a ritual.

Perhaps your success touched a wound. If your friend has just lost a job, is going through a divorce or is ill, your news will be harder to hear not because of you, but because of what they are carrying. Then neither hiding nor explaining helps, but patience — and sometimes letting them be the first to speak.

And one more limit: if every success of yours brings guilt or anxiety so strong that you would rather sabotage it or give it up, it may no longer be only about your friends. Then it is worth talking to a professional about it. With me, this can be a session in which we look together at where the rules come from that allow you success only up to a certain limit. I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

What to remember

• Success does not land in empty space, but in a web of relationships — and there it is often harder to carry than to achieve.
• Friendships rarely fade because of success itself; more often because a new position takes the hours they were made of.
• Comparison hurts most between close people who shared yardsticks of success — that is human, not malicious.
• Guilt about success is often loyalty to where you come from, not a sign that you have taken something from someone.
• Instead of shrinking or leaving, you can name the distance — and give your friends the chance to respond to you, not to your shadow.