Group Chat is a weekly series where HuffPost UK writers address the diary dilemmas we all face and how to reclaim our social lives in a busy world.
When people talk about their lives, there’s one word that crops up time and again: exhausting. Life is exhausting, work is exhausting. We’re all so knackered that even our social lives exhaust us. I’m tired too, a lot of the time, so I thought I’d write about something that energises me.
That something is friends – and specifically the friends you make when you’re an adult.
Friends have never felt more important as they do to me, aged 37. That might be because I’m currently single or that life has got more complicated for all of us, and we need each other in ways we never anticipated. In any case, I feel #hashtagblessed with mine, who’ve arrived at varying ages and stages.
Like many people, I suspect, they come in three groups: 13 years at the same school furnished me with gal pals for life. Some of them knew me when it was still socially acceptable to drink milk from a bottle and have an hour’s nap after lunch on a blanket. These days we hang out and chat as their kids do the same.
University gave me the golden friend who is now my BFF, not to mention other brilliant mates who are always there at the end of the phone or M32. And then, in my first job on a local paper, I found my journalist friends. Nothing bonds you like working in Morden for three years and eeking out a £13K salary at the various watering holes of the lower Northern Line.
School friends, uni friends, work friends ... I’ve never been brilliant at mixing these groups, but I love them equally and I’d be greedy to ask for more.
But when I hit my fourth decade, something magical happened. Through life circumstances, I made new friends. They haven’t replaced my old ones (though I think for some people they do). Mine enrich life – like getting the world’s most unexpected bonus.
This is an ode to the friends of my thirties.
The Friend From The Jobshare
In fact we met in our twenties, sharing an unpaid writing gig about off West End theatre. Niche, I know, but that’s how you often bond with grown-up friends. Through geeky interests you no longer feel the need to hide.
Is there such a thing as friends at first sight? I still remember our first coffee in the old Foyle’s caff on Charing Cross Rd. Ours was a friendship forged in freelance solidarity – sharing tip-offs, invoicing woes and contacts. But by the time I turned 30 it had become fully fledged: we visited each other for dinner; travelled across London for a swim and a catch-up. I forgot to book accommodation for the Fringe, so she smuggled me into her uncle’s house in Edinburgh to sleep under his piano.
When she gave birth to her daughter and asked me to part of Team Baby, it was one of the proudest moments of my life.
The Friend On The Other Side Of The World
When your employer sends you 10,000 miles away from home, life feels like a big adventure, but also pretty precarious. So imagine the comfort of getting into a taxi to your first big work event in Sydney and the woman next to you smiling a big Aussie smile, and proceeding to give you the complete lowdown on everyone in your new office, city ... and country.
Two years later, you come back to visit and she puts you up for a fortnight, no questions asked – except all the big nourishing ones as you figure out what to do when life doesn’t quite work out as planned. And two years after that – during which time you’ve got the Sunday morning / evening Skype gossip down to a fine art – she gets a work trip to Rome and you think nothing of flying out and mainlining red wine and complex carbohydrates together like there’s no such thing as a 12-hour time difference. Yeah, that friend.
The Friend Of The Friend
Those journalist mates I mentioned above? This friend (a lawyer) comes away with us for a weekend – just for the hell of it. On our first group holiday, we are thrown into sharing a bedroom because we’re the only ones without partners. We chat into the small hours about the boys and books we’ve known and loved and, next time round, we choose to share – and the time after that, too.
Now, even though she’s married with a kid, we meet up in our lunch hours to swap adventures – parenting, dating and otherwise. This friend and me, we’ve become ladies who lunch and, believe me, nothing makes me feel more grown up. Which, in lieu of other major life markers, is something I need right now. The morning after one of our sushi meets, I wake up to find her latest book recommendation has arrived in the post. By Prime. What a diamond.
So, these are some of my new friends. There are others – the pair of brilliant ladies I met on an evening writing course. We vouched to each other to get together to share our efforts. The name of our WhatsApp group? Writers’ Block. We cook instead. And there’s the pal I went out for wine with last night who has children my age, but who gossips like a teenager. And my two last bosses.
With grown-up friends, it doesn’t matter how old you each are. The delight is that you’ve chosen each other with the confidence of people who know what they need and want. There are no group dynamics at play. No peer pressure.
And we’re mostly women. I spent much of my twenties ladding it up in some kind of rebellion against my all-girls’ school and uni house-share, I think. Some of those men have become friends, too, but as I get older, I find myself valuing female friendship above all else. Reading back, I think this goes some way to explaining why.