Advertisement

'What I've Learnt About Friendship'

friendship: Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss
friendship: Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss


"It can end with a mouse click"

It was Rowena Grant-Frost's oldest friend who taught her that even the oldest friendships don't always last forever.

After 15 years of friendship, the end had arrived. It had been a long time coming, and ultimately, I knew it was for the best, but it still stung when I realised what had happened: I'd been unfriended on Facebook. It seemed like a silly thing to feel upset about, but I couldn't help it. As I stared at my phone's screen while my bus bumped along, Tara's face stared back at me with two unfamiliar words beside it, inviting me to "Add Friend". "Maybe it's a mistake?" I thought. I refreshed the page. No. A lump formed in my throat. We had been friends forever, Tara and me. We'd met at high school and been best friends ever since. Even when high school was over and we'd both moved away, I assumed we'd remain close for life.

And at first, we did. In our 20s, we stayed in touch, chatting about the future: I wanted to be a writer; Tara wanted to work in finance in New York. And we both made it, to our credit, but only after we gave ourselves completely to our goals, leaving little time for anything else. In the end, our conversations became filled with more silences than words, as our lives slowly untangled from each other's and headed in separate directions. In our hearts, I think we knew our friendship was ending, but neither of us knew how to tell the other.

We'd both learnt a lot about ourselves during our 15 years, and, as I sat there with my phone, I realised Tara was teaching me one final lesson: friendship isn't always forever. Friendship can, and does, run a natural course and its ending can be as quiet as a mouse click.

This was a hard lesson to learn, especially when I thought about how it had all began.

I had been 12 and lonely - an awkward kid on her first day at high school, hoping, like everyone else, that I'd make friends. Before being ushered into classrooms, new students were paired up, and Tara and I wandered along together.

"Hey," said Tara, as we stopped in front of our classroom, "do you have anyone to sit with at lunch?"
I shook my head.

"Do you want to sit with me?" she asked.

And she grinned at me, in a way she would for 15 years, as we celebrated birthdays and milestones, and learnt how to become adults together. It was a grin that told me everything would be alright because, no matter what, we still had each other.

It was also a grin I recognised from her Facebook profile picture as she stared at me, now as a stranger, while I rode home one night on the bus.


"I ended up as her 'plus one'"

There's a world of difference between friendship and mutual dependency, says Lucy Foster.

It was winter 2001. We were both in our final year of university. We were both single. Our bedrooms were next to each other in our shared house.

Days turned into comforting, companionable weeks, and before we knew it, we spent almost every hour together.
But this was not a gentle, unassuming love affair with the boy next door. This was me and my mate, Tulip, depending on each other for company as our love lives were an unholy mess.

Every morning, one of us would shuffle into the other's room and take up the conversation where we'd left it the night before. We'd take the same bus into lectures, we ate lunch together, we propped up the same bars, and we spent Sunday nights on the sofa, drinking tea and eating toast. For those few chilly months, we were each other's flotsam, something to cling onto in the rocky seas of single life. Then she met Mark and Sunday nights, once more, became a very lonely affair.

I learnt then that expecting friends to fill the boyfriend gap was both unrealistic and unwise. The dependency was unhealthy; born from a desire not to be alone rather than, as is the case of heady romance, the desperate urge to be together. We worked better (as we still do, 13 years later) as good friends with independent lives, who now see each other for a couple of hours every week. I love hearing her stories, but I don't feel the need to have a part in every one.

So it came as some surprise, in my late 20s, when it happened again with another friend. What had begun as an occasional few drinks after work had turned into a close friendship; Helen and I met up on weekends and invariably it would finish with one of us crashing on the other's sofa and sitting out the ensuing hangover together the next day. I was living on my own so there was no-one to worry if we steamed in at 4am and danced until six. And it was brilliant and I suppose I was flattered. Somebody had marked me out as special. Somebody had chosen me.

This time, though, I didn't stay single. I met the man who would become my husband, and my attention, free time (and devotion) slowly and inexorably went to him. Yet, I still felt beholden to a woman who expected me to accompany her to the weddings of her friends, to go drinking late into Wednesday nights, to be her boyfriend substitute. I was her "plus one" of choice, and if I dared say no, it was seen as nothing less than a betrayal. So sure enough, like a doomed romance, we drifted apart.

I think everyone needs crucial relationships in their lives; people for whom they'd drop everything. For me, that is my family and my husband. While I loved Helen, the role she had available for me was a position, that by being in a committed relationship with a man, I couldn't fill. And that is the real lesson here, the one that she taught me: your good friends should be there when they need you. When you need them all of the time, you're not just friends, you're dependents. And that's something altogether different.


"'Normal' friends are all that matter"

Decades of friendship with an old school friend taught Shane Watson that true mateship is about honesty, not status.

It was my friend Flo who taught me that true friendship means total honesty: accepting each other for who you are and never trying to improve on that when the wind changes. It was a lesson that took a long time to learn. Over the years the desire to belong to the cool gang, the urge to be thought of as smarter, more glamorous, sometimes got the better of me.

I met Flo when we both attended a girls-only boarding school. There, your friendship group determined your status. You were either a contender, a normal, or a nobody. I wanted to be a contender and I learnt fast. The culture was competitive: you weren't loved for yourself - you were loved for what you brought to the party. Everyone had a role - I was the clown; Camilla was the sophisticate; Ali was the trouble chaser - but when they all left (earlier than I was allowed to), I was forced to fall back on the steadier crowd and one girl in particular, Flo. She never begrudged me the years I'd ignored her. Unlike me, she had nothing to prove. And the cool girls? I never really heard from them again.

Then there was university: the big chance for reinvention. All these fascinating people who had no idea that I used to be fattish and dress appallingly. I remember, to my shame, panicking that my old friends would show me up and tried my best to keep them apart. As if they didn't notice. Flo would come to visit and I'd usher her out of sight (I think part of me thought I was protecting her). Flo just smiled.

Flash forward a decade and I'm working in magazines. I'm having a ball hanging out with a dizzying array of contenders. But I am chiselling out smaller and smaller timeslots to spend with Flo and Jane and Carol - the people who know me inside out. They're the ones who know not to give me beauty products for presents (I get eczema), who know I have sweat pads sewn into my dresses, who know my family, and have nursed me through every messy breakup and job failure. I do appreciate them. I love them. They just aren't the top priority in these heady days.

There is no crisis, no one incident that pulls me up and reminds me that only a fool mistakes glittering company for real friendship. I get older. My niece dies and, funnily enough, only a handful of people really care. Flo gets ill and pulling her through becomes the most important thing in my life. I get married and realise that I only want old friends there. Really old friends with whom I can be myself the way I am with my family and Him. I've taken the long route but I've learnt that my normal friends are all that matter.

RELATED:
20 things we learnt from Sex and the City

How to find a new BFF when you're over 30

Do you really need a best friend?