How did friendships become another life admin chore?

With marriage and kids, life gets a lot more complicated. Forget spontaneous pub sessions, says Rebecca Holman, 36 – now getting together with friends means Doodle polls and spreadsheets...

the whatsapp groups I have with my friends have changed. Once full of cat memes, random screengrabs and all the best gossip, they’ve now become a series of terse exchanges over diary dates that never seem to result in any of us meeting up IRL.

‘Guys, it’s been three months since I moved into my new flat,’ my friend announced recently, ‘and no one’s been round yet. How about we book in a Sunday over the summer and I’ll make everyone brunch?’ It was a generous offer from my mate, who really should have been giving us all a bollocking for being bad friends in the first place, and we all 100% meant it when we enthusiastically said we’d love to.

And then we started suggesting dates. I listed all those I could do in June, July and August, and pressed send just as another friend hit reply with all the dates she couldn’t do (more or less all the ones I’d just proposed). Another friend kept sporadically replying between work meetings and then losing track of where we’d got to (‘23rd? I can’t do that. But it’s a Thursday – are we doing it on a Thursday? Or do you mean July not June?’). After 52 – yes, 52! – messages along these lines, the friend who’d invited us to brunch sent us all a short (in both senses) message: ‘Shall we just abandon this?’ Spoiler: I still haven’t seen her new flat.

The upshot is my friendships are in danger of becoming another piece of life admin, and there’s nothing fun about that. Whereas in the past we’d have gone to the pub twice a week and spent the whole weekend together, now we struggle to meet more than once every couple of months. So when did it become so hard to see the people we purport to care about the most?

In case you’re wondering, I’m not a flake – quite the opposite. If I’ve put something in my diary, I will do it. But I tend to plan months in advance, which means I end up only seeing the people who do the same. And the friends who hate to plan, who will only do stuff on the spur of the moment? When they suggest an impromptu drink after work or a brunch in three days’ time, I’m already booked up. As an added complication, I’m pregnant with my first child, which means I feel like I need to see all my friends as much as possible before (as I see it) I go into lockdown for the next 18 years – but I also can’t hack more than two school nights out a week and have to leave at 10pm anyway.

I used to be spontaneous, I promise. But as our lives have changed, partners, jobs, children and house moves have made it harder than ever for us to see each other at the drop of a hat. Which is why, at Christmas, I created a spreadsheet and asked a group of friends to fill in their availability for the year so we could book in some semi-regular evenings out and maybe even a weekend away. I know not everyone appreciated being asked to plan out their year that way, but four out of six of us now have children, and we no longer all live in the same city. Spontaneous nights out might be the best ones, but with four babysitters and two overnight trips to London to plan in, there’s a danger that if we don’t nail it down, our meet-ups won’t happen and we’ll start to drift apart – and the thought of that makes me really sad. Even sadder than I feel about the Doodle poll I’m about to create to get some Christmas dates in (yes, in July).

Apart from all the paperwork involved, guilt has become a new and regular facet of my friendships. I feel guilty that I don’t see friends as much as I did before I got married, guilty that I’m not spontaneous and now a bit guilty that being a parent will make me a less attentive friend than I was before.

I know that I have unrealistic expectations of myself. It’s a bit overdone to blame Sex And The City for modern life’s woes, but I couldn’t help but wonder, how did four women, some with children, partners and massive jobs, make their Sunday brunch date every single week for six seasons without one of them having to bail?

Intellectually, I know that friendships waxing and waning are part of life, and that, like most women, I carry enough guilt already, so I should probably give myself a break. But equally, just because friendships I’ve cherished over the years aren’t the most convenient any more, doesn’t mean I should let them fall by the wayside. It’s called ‘making an effort’ for a reason. I suspect, over the next 12 months, my friendships will be increasingly shaped by the people who live near me or are at a similar life stage, but when it comes to my oldest friends, I’m not ready to give up on the Whatsapp negotiations and Doodle polls just yet.