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Friends grow apart. It’s a truism that we all realise at some point in our lives, but new research suggests that it's on Facebook that this home truth is most evident. A new study from the University of Colorado shows that when we’re culling our friends list it's friends school (‘high school’ in the US study) that are most likely to get the chop. The survey, carried out by doctoral student Christopher Sibona, found that the reason for these virtual break-ups was the same as you might expect in real life: people’s opinions mature and develop, and friends find that they're no longer interested in one another. “The most common reason for unfriending someone from high school is that the person posted polarizing comments often about religion or politics," Sibona told Phys.org. “The other big reason for unfriending was frequent, uninteresting posts." The study surveyed 1,077 people and divided friends into more than a dozen distinct types including “common interest friend”, “friend through spouse” and the somewhat vague category of “internet”. From these groups, friends from secondary school were most likely to get the chop, followed by those from the “other” category, “friend of a friend” and then “work friends”. Interestingly, while old friends were unfriended because of their actions in the virtual world,friends from work were more often unfriended because of something they'd done in real life. | 
