Some friendships are seasonal. Thank them for the semester and stop forcing a year.

Some people are for a particular stretch of time, and they are not lesser for it. A friendship built on sharing a team, a class, or a bad summer job can be real and good and still have a natural length. Forcing it past that leaves both of you feeling like failures at something neither was doing wrong. Finishing is not the same as it having been fake.

If one has clearly run out, let it end gently. Say the true kind thing about what it was, once, in a message. Then stop arranging your week around a reply that is not coming.