Issue #40: Staying friends when your lives look really different

Mind the empathy gap – when you scroll through hundreds of potential partners on Hinge every week, while your best friend married their first ever boyfriend.

At school, my friends and I vowed to be Best Friends Forever – while taking for granted what an easy ride we’d had so far. Our only disparate life choices were our GCSE choices. Our calendar years had the same structure, defined by the academic year, and our immediate paths were set out before us: A-levels, university, first jobs. We followed similar daily routines; wore identical uniforms; in primary school, we even shared a career dream (to form a girlband, naturally).

Human beings are relational. We grow up understanding our lives through our immediate peers. And the instinct, at school, is to be exactly like each other. I remember when I moved schools aged 13 and felt mortified to be wearing the ‘wrong’ school shoes; while all my previous classmates had worn Mary Janes with long black socks, clompy Kickers were the style du jour at my new school. Just under two decades later, footwear is the least of my worries.

Now, in my wider circle of friends alone, some of us roll in from a night out at 2am; meanwhile, others are woken by their babies at the same hour. Some scroll through hundreds of potential partners a week; others married their high school boyfriend. Some sleep alone every night; others yearn to have the bed to themselves just once. And as the gap between our realities widens, so can our capacity to understand each others' lives. 

The friendships that have thrived in adulthood, for me, are the ones where we’ve left the channels of honest communication open. The friends who will share the day-to-day reality of married life, rather than the Insta-veneer.

Even fundamental concepts like ‘home’ range from a rented house share to a jointly-owned five-bed in the Home Counties. When we talk about a holiday, it could be a spontaneous solo backpacking trip or a family resort trip booked a year in advance. Dinner, a hastily assembled beans on toast or a feast cooked by a partner from a Waitrose recipe card.

Cue, the empathy gap. 

Honesty is such a lonely word (in the words of Billy Joel)