Are We Losing the Art of Friendship?

A letter from the Host.

We talk endlessly about romantic relationships. Perhaps some of the most important relationships in our lives have been happening much more quietly.

There is a particular kind of message that seems to exist almost exclusively between adult women.

We HAVE to see each other.

Usually followed by several exclamation marks, a heart, and absolutely no concrete plan to see each other.

Nobody is being insincere. You really do want to see her. She really does want to see you. You exchange diaries, discover that one of you can do the 19th but the other has dinner, the 26th might work except somebody's away, and then somehow it is October.

This is one of the stranger things about adult friendship. You can love someone, think about them often, know exactly how they'd react to something that happened to you and barely see them.

When we were younger, friendship seemed to happen almost accidentally. We sat beside someone at school. Shared a flat. Worked the same shifts. Went to the same places every weekend. There were hours and hours in which nothing particularly important happened, and somewhere inside all that ordinary time, intimacy grew.

Then adulthood arrived and friendship became something we had to arrange.

And perhaps we're discovering that arranging a friendship is quite different from living inside one.

We don't really talk about friendship as a relationship

Romantic relationships come with an entire vocabulary.

We date. We commit. We break up. We have anniversaries. We go to counselling. We talk about compatibility, attachment, communication and whether our needs are being met.

Friendship gets remarkably little of this.

There is rarely a conversation in which two women sit down and say, I don't think this friendship is working anymore.

Instead, somebody stops suggesting dinner.

Replies take longer.

Birthdays become a message rather than a plan.

The person who once knew everything about your life slowly becomes somebody who knows the headlines.

Nothing happened, exactly.

And yet something ended.

I think this is partly why losing a friendship can be so bewildering. There isn't always a recognised ending to grieve. Nobody sends flowers when your best friend of fifteen years quietly disappears from your life. There is no compassionate leave for the woman you spoke to every day suddenly becoming someone you don't speak to at all.

You are simply expected to carry on.

And yet, if you've ever lost a friendship that mattered deeply, you'll know it can hurt every bit as much as heartbreak.

Sometimes more.

Perhaps we've underestimated what friendship actually gives us

A good friend doesn't just know you. She holds versions of you that no longer exist.

She remembers the terrible fringe. The boyfriend everybody hated. The job you thought would change your life. The night you cried in a toilet. The holiday where everything went wrong. The person you were before you became a mother, before the divorce, before the promotion, before whatever happened next.

There is something extraordinary about being known across time.

Romantic partners often meet us somewhere in the middle of our story. Old friends remember earlier chapters.

They know that the woman sitting opposite them drinking a very expensive glass of wine was once eating chips on a pavement at two in the morning with £14 left until payday.

There is comfort in somebody knowing both women and understanding that they're the same person.

Perhaps that's why old friendships can feel so much like home.

But not every friendship is supposed to last forever

This is the bit we don't say enough.

We romanticise lifelong friendship. The women who've known each other since they were six. The group who still holidays together twenty-five years later. The best friend who has been there through everything.

It's beautiful when it happens.

But longevity isn't necessarily proof of a good relationship.

Sometimes history is simply history.

You can have loved someone enormously and still grow in different directions. A friendship can have been exactly what you needed at twenty-seven and feel completely different at thirty-nine. Nobody has to be the villain.

Sometimes the friendship belonged to a particular version of your life.

Perhaps you bonded because you worked together and hated the same boss. Perhaps you were both newly single. Perhaps your children were tiny. Perhaps you lived around the corner from one another. Perhaps you were going through something at exactly the same time.

Then the circumstances changed.

And without the thing that held you together, you discovered that the friendship had changed too.

That doesn't make it fake.

It makes it a chapter.

We seem comfortable accepting this about almost everything except people.

Then there are the friendships that leave you tired

Most women know this feeling.

You meet somebody for lunch and leave feeling somehow... worse.

Nothing terrible happened. She didn't insult you. There wasn't an argument. But on the way home you notice that you're replaying the conversation.

Perhaps you spent two hours listening and weren't asked a single real question. Perhaps there was a tiny competitiveness underneath everything. Perhaps every piece of good news required you to make it smaller. Perhaps you found yourself explaining your choices more than sharing them.

Or perhaps you've simply become different people and you're both still performing an old friendship out of habit.

We talk so much about recognising unhealthy romantic relationships, but much less about noticing how our friendships make us feel.

And perhaps the question doesn't always need to be, Is she a good friend?

Perhaps it's simply:

Who am I when I'm with her?

Do you like that version of yourself?

Are you relaxed? Funny? Honest? Interested? Do you leave feeling fuller somehow?

Or do you become guarded, competitive, apologetic, small?

The body often notices these things long before we give ourselves permission to admit them.

Social media has made friendship stranger too

We now know an enormous amount about people we haven't actually spoken to in years.

You know she went to Greece.

She knows your son started secondary school.

You know she changed jobs.

She knows you cut your hair.

You've watched each other's Christmases, birthdays, holidays and kitchen renovations unfold in little squares on a screen.

And it can create the peculiar illusion that you're still in one another's lives.

But knowing what somebody did at the weekend isn't the same as knowing how she is.

Sometimes I wonder whether social media has allowed us to maintain the appearance of hundreds of relationships while quietly reducing the amount of actual friendship happening underneath them.

We can send a heart instead of calling.

Watch a Story instead of asking.

Write gorgeous!!! underneath the photograph and feel, momentarily, as though we've checked in.

Perhaps we have.

But perhaps sometimes we haven't.

Adult friendship needs something younger friendship didn't

Effort.

Not enormous effort. Not another relationship to manage perfectly. Nobody needs a friendship performance review.

Just intention.

Because the accidental hours are mostly gone now.

Nobody is automatically sitting beside you in double maths five days a week. You're not sharing a bathroom with three girls at university. You don't necessarily live ten minutes away anymore.

There are jobs and children and partners and parents and commutes and divorces and school holidays and a thousand small pieces of administration standing between two women and a bottle of wine on a Thursday evening.

So perhaps friendship in adulthood requires us to occasionally choose one another deliberately.

Send the message.

Put the dinner in the diary.

Call rather than sending the heart.

Tell her the thing you've been meaning to tell her.

And sometimes, perhaps this matters just as much, stop repeatedly chasing the friendships that no longer seem to be choosing you back.

There is another kind of friendship waiting for us

One of the loveliest things about getting older is realising that you haven't already met everybody who will matter to you.

We talk about making friends as though it belongs to childhood. As though by thirty-five you've assembled your cast and the doors have closed.

They haven't.

There are women you haven't met yet who may one day know exactly how you take your coffee.

Someone you meet through work might become the person you call when everything falls apart. The mother you vaguely recognise at the school gate might eventually be sitting at your kitchen table. Someone you meet on holiday might become part of your life for years.

You are not too old for new friendship.

You haven't missed the window.

And perhaps there is something particularly wonderful about the friendships we make later, because we're no longer choosing people simply because they happen to be nearby.

We know ourselves better.

We recognise kindness faster.

We have less appetite for performance.

We know the difference between somebody who is interesting and somebody with whom we feel at ease.

Maybe the art isn't disappearing after all

Perhaps friendship has simply become easier to neglect.

There are louder relationships. More urgent responsibilities. People who need immediate answers. Friendship rarely bangs on the door demanding attention.

A good friend will often understand that you're busy.

And that's precisely why months can disappear.

So perhaps this is simply a reminder to think of someone.

Not everybody. This isn't an instruction to conduct an audit of your entire social life.

Just the person who came into your head while you were reading this.

The one you keep meaning to see.

The one whose voice you haven't heard for too long.

The newer friend you really like but haven't quite crossed into proper friendship with yet.

The woman who has been beside you through so many versions of yourself that you've almost forgotten what an extraordinary thing that is.

Send her the message.

Not we must catch up soon!!!

Something with a date in it.

Because romantic love may get most of the songs, films, flowers and grand gestures.

But being known by another woman, really known, across years and mistakes and reinventions and terrible haircuts and all the lives you've lived in between, is one of the great love stories too.

Perhaps we should treat it like one.

From our house to yours.