The oldest friends are the best ones...
Like Sheryl Sandberg, Fiona Gibson has found that pals from 30 years ago are the ones she can always turn to
There is a time in everyone’s life that proves especially fertile in the forming of deep, lasting friendships. For me, it was my late teens through to my early twenties: the flat-sharing years, my days spent working in the rowdy offices of teenage magazines, my nights spent exploring London’s seedier corners with the women who would still be my closest allies and confidantes, 30 years on.
For Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, it was at the age of 10 that she found her soulmates, who would go on to be firm friends for life. Last week, she shared a powerful New Year’s message about how these women were the ones to pull her through the harrowing period following her husband’s death last spring. “They checked in daily,” she wrote. “They did not just hold me as I cried – they cried with me.”
One of Sandberg’s inner circle neatly summed up the nature of enduring friendship with a well-chosen card, which now hangs above her desk. It reads: “One day she woke up and understood we’re all in this together.”
Togetherness: that’s what friendship is about. It’s the gang we form and hang on to through all of life’s milestones. Career ups and downs, relationship highs and lows, marriage, babies, the handling of teenagers, the care of elderly parents: through it all, a close friend – who probably knows you better than a partner, and certainly better than your parents do – can reassure you that, actually, it’s going to be OK.
I used to wonder if being an only child who left home at 17 drove me to create a new family of my own. It certainly seemed odd to an ex-boyfriend who, when I lamented that two friends were relocating from London to Sydney, exclaimed: “Aren’t I enough for you?”
In a nutshell: no. “There’s something incredibly comforting and reassuring about being with people who have known you since childhood or university,” says Donna Dawson, a psychologist specialising in personality and behaviour. “Those friendships where memories are shared are so special. As we grow up, and life becomes filled with distractions, it’s easy to let those relationships dwindle to the once-a-year Christmas card. But it’s important to hook up and replenish, just like putting petrol in your car.”
My own gang cheered me on when I got married at 22 (if anyone had any doubts, they were kind enough to not say) and scooped me up when it crumbled seven years later. They were out in force again, celebrating with me at my second wedding. When I had a miscarriage in 1995, it was Marie who whisked me from our shared office and held my hand on the way to A&E.
When my twin boys were born in 1997, Jen, Kath and Sue were speedy visitors to my hospital bedside. When my husband Jimmy and I were bonkers with sleep deprivation, they forced us to pack overnight bags and leave our sons in their care while we snuck off for a night in a hotel.
When we left London for a new life in Scotland, barely a month went by without one of my inner circle jumping on a train for a restorative weekend visit. Feeling stranded and lonely, I tended to put on a brave face at home because admitting that I really wasn’t coping was too terrifying a prospect. Yet my girlfriends knew exactly what was going on. But deep friendship isn’t just about mopping up tears. We have our in-jokes and pet names and have laughed so much I have been barely able to breathe.
But friendships change as we grow older. These days, our gatherings tend to involve hugely enjoyable chats in cosy restaurants, rather than getting blind drunk on fierce Argentinian red and tottering home shoeless. Now in our early to mid-fifties, we are scattered all over the country, if not the world. We text, we email, we connect through Facebook – we even send each other little notes in the post.
So I suspect that anyone who says “I don’t have time to see friends” simply doesn’t want enough to see them. It takes seconds to fire off a text, after all, and 10 minutes to rattle off a chatty email. My spirits lift every time I spot Jen’s name in my inbox.
Forming new connections in middle age keeps life sparky and fun. I have made newer, firm friends – during my parenting years, and as a recent arrival in Glasgow – but those decadeslong friendships will always be irreplaceable. We love and care about each other deeply and are bonded for life. And if that doesn’t count as family, I don’t know what does. Fiona Gibson’s novel, The Woman Who
Upped and Left, is out in February