‘We’ve barely been in the same room but our friendship’s grown over Zoom’
WE’VE BARELY BEEN IN THE SAME ROOM… BUT OUR FRIENDSHIP’S GROWN OVER ZOOM
It’s hard to make new friends in your thirties – but, despite three lockdowns and 200 miles between them, Laura Antonia Jordan and Jessica Barrett have done just that
LAURA: Despite the darkness of the past year, for many of us, it’s also been a time of the lights going on. Suddenly illuminated were our real wants and needs, hopes and desires. We could see starkly what, and who, was serving us and the things that no longer were. For me, the pandemic, grief and heartbreak floodlit the importance of friends like Jess.
I have spent the past 20 years chasing and agonising over (so-called) romantic relationships. And yet there is something undeniably romantic about the fact that our friendships are not defined by blood, laws or contracts – you do not sign on a dotted line to make it official – and that all we really need for a friendship to function and flourish is a mutual desire and investment in making it work.
The pandemic has irrevocably changed all kinds of relationships. Some of them have combusted under pressure, others have just faded away in an unremarkable way. How well you know somebody doesn’t necessarily correlate with how long you’ve known them; having someone’s number for decades doesn’t automatically mean they’ll pick up. But the beautiful flipside is that it has also pressed fast-forward on ‘new’ friendships. Friendships aren’t static, you have to put in effort to make them breathe (this year more than ever) – but, at their best, it doesn’t feel like an effort. That’s what happened with us.
You have a choice in every relationship: are you going to be someone who shows up or not? Jess has shown up, every single day, since we first met two years ago. They say when it’s right you ‘just know’; well I just knew as soon as I met her. We leapfrogged from colleagues to BFFS with a speed and
ease that felt inevitable – I think it would be impossible to not fall head over heels for her. She is a gift I feel grateful and humbled to have received, someone who has carried me during a nightmarish period in my life, created space for me and seen and heard me when I felt, living alone, like I was invisible. But that makes it sound heavy, and she is also one of the funniest people I’ve ever met (one of my greatest joys this year has been seeing how she also lights up my younger sister – recently widowed and living on the other side of the world. We say she is the missing Jordan sister). Levity, I’ve learned, is an essential ingredient of love for me.
It’s not just the pandemic that has accelerated our relationship but the fact we were both in our thirties when we met (although I would have loved to have known her in our wild early-twenties, I suspect it would have been trouble). I think one of the biggest fibs we’re fed is the idea that your friends are set in stone from an early age. But we evolve and grow all the time. I am more discerning about who I let into my life now – but when I’m in, I’m in. Although you share mythologies, mistakes and memories with friends you’ve known for decades, the beauty of making friends when you’re older is that you can bring years of experience and layers of respect to the relationship.
One of the most important lessons Jess has taught me is that, despite my life not being where I want it to be, my story is not ‘done’ by the age of 36. Naively, I used to think I’d be ‘fully formed’ by my midthirties – I see now, you never are. I am not at full capacity for friends, connection, love. It is, as my therapist might say, ‘a journey’ – and I can’t imagine being on it without her.
JESSICA: How many times is it normal to meet someone before you realise they’re going to be your best friend? I suppose, in the same way people talk about meeting The One, you ‘just know’. When I started freelancing at Grazia in the spring of 2019, Laura and I were drawn together like naughty schoolgirls on the first day of term. As the months went on, it went deeper than our shared dark sense of humour and love of tie-dye (we were way ahead of the curve on that one, in retrospect). The day we discovered we had done the same course at the same university, a year apart, felt significant. We always revisit the Sliding Doors possibility that we could have actually met 15 years earlier. When we really think about it, perhaps it’s better that we didn’t. We were both badly behaved enough.
I know that making new friends in your thirties can be hit and miss. I’m lucky enough, aged 37, to have a lot of close friends in my life, a few of them for over 30 years. While I love the stability of my longterm network of friends, I’ve also always thrived on making new ones. The past year spent largely on the sofa hasn’t been the easiest time for that, but those of us who have made new friends more recently will know that you’ve been through more with them in the last 12 months than with some other friends in a decade.
Laura and I began confiding in one another very early on. Laura was in despair about the illness of her beloved brother-inlaw Cam, who had been diagnosed with cancer, and worrying desperately about her sister Olivia, both of whom were on the other side of the world in New Zealand. It seemed like we had been brought together for a reason; I’d watched a very close friend lose her battle with cancer four years before. When Cam died, I felt Laura’s pain very deeply. The only privilege of losing those closest to you is that when someone else is experiencing grief, you have the right words to comfort them. I hope I did that for Laura. I also shared my darkest moments of grief with her, to show her there is a way out of them.
Last March, after less than a year of IRL friendship, the world went into lockdown and my new friend was suddenly 200 miles away: I live in Bath with my husband Ollie, while Laura is in London. Rather than watch our friendship flounder, though, we’ve become closer than ever. Via the usual routes of Facetime, Voicenotes and Whatsapp, we’ve built a bond that I now think is unbreakable.
There is no one in my life more thoughtful or willing to put someone else first; Laura has supported me through some of the most anxious and difficult months of my life. She has a way of putting you at ease, even at her own lowest points, and we always end up crying with laughter.
We may not have had the normal foundations for a friendship (we’ve only ever had one night out together, and one night away), but we’ve built what feels like a very modern one. We’ve set up a virtual book club with Laura’s sister Olivia, we send each other gifts (for me a Ganni top, for her a Mini Eggs Easter Egg), I send her stupid Tiktoks.
In a world where we’ve all been mostly isolated for a year, we’ve been forced to reassess how our friends fit into the ‘new’ versions of us and our lives. I feel lucky that I just happened to find one who already feels like my sister.
THEY SAY WHEN IT’S RIGHT YOU ‘JUST KNOW’; I JUST KNEW AS SOON AS I MET HER