SUNDAY afternoon, champagne glass in hand and I’m sitting in a friend’s garden, surrounded by a gang of people I’ve been friends with for years.
We’re cooing over the newly christened baby, laughing and reminiscing, and the air is suffused with a sense of pleasure because we’re all together, friends from the days when we shared houses, cigarettes, boyfriends and lecture notes. I’m laughing too on the outside, but inside I’m feeling a little unfunny, a little fat, a little like the least attractive, least interesting girl in the group. Slowly, tiny inadequacies that have lain dormant for years are popping their heads over the parapet.
I recognise them from years back and I’m not particularly pleased to see them again. These friends are my best and most beloved — and yet some of them I see only once or twice a year. Small surprise, then, that I slip back into the insecure twentysomething I used to be; it’s all that we have in common, our younger selves. We simply do not see enough of each other to be aware of who and what we have become. It makes me sad and fearful of further divergence between us, and a little guilty about the new friends I have who share my day-to-day life and work: gossipy e-mails, lunches and coffees and early-evening glasses of wine.
In an ideal world, the two would combine; my old friends would be the ones I see and speak to every day, but life is rarely that neat. Fictionalised friendships are far simpler; at the bar in Cheers, in Central Perk in Friends or just at Jerry’s flat in Seinfeld, no one ever changes or moves on, paths never diverge. The final episodes of Friends, which ends in the UK on Friday, have finally brought some reality to the series; Monica and Chandler are moving out of the city to bring up children, Rachel is leaving for Paris. Fifty-five million Americans watched the six say their fond farewells, leaving ABC casting around to find something to fill the void. Time to make new friends. The problem is that no one wants to. Not really. Old friends are the ones that count.
Why are we so obsessed with old friends? Longevity is a badge of honour in friendship, tapping into our deep-seated belief that keeping in touch with those who knew us as children or adolescents is somehow worthy in itself, proof that we have remained unchanged by the years that have passed. We admire celebrities who assure us that they still hang out with the friends they had before they were famous, and are suspicious of those who admit that t hey’ve lost touch and moved on.
“We like to stay in touch with old friends because they may be the only witness to certain parts of our life,” says Dr Dorothy Rowe, the psychologist and author of Friends and Enemies. “Particularly as people get older, this shared experience is seen as extremely valuable. Family life is increasingly fractured, people move away from where they grew up to pursue careers, and sometimes we value those who link us with our past far more than those who share our present.”
The phenomenal success of the website Friends Reunited is proof of this, attracting millions to log in to discover what happened to Ugly Bob from German class. “People in their thirties and forties are hugely interested in Friends Reunited, possibly because they are at a stage in their lives where they will have lost touch with older friends,” Rowe says. “So much of friendship is based on common interest, and paths begin to diverge in your thirties — marriage and children, or demanding careers. We don’t mean to lose touch, but moving on is a natural part of life.”
Moving on; it even sounds a little hard, as if we’ve left people behind carelessly without thought. Friends Reunited milks the misplaced guilt that most of us feel about losing touch, although the name itself is something of a misnomer. If we were really friends, why would we need to be reunited? “To show how successful we’ve become,” says my friend Clare, who recently attended a 20-year school reunion. “It was ghastly, everyone talking either about their wonderful careers, which fantastically expensive school their children were at, or where they were going to buy a property abroad. It served as a timely reminder as to why I hadn’t kept in touch with any of them.” She’s not planning to attend the next one.
Clare is unusual in being happy to admit that she has few long-term friends, although she’s aware that it does raise eyebrows. “I went travelling and lost touch with people,” she explains. “But when I say that I don’t really have old friends, I can see that people think it’s odd — that I must have been hugely unpopular, or I’m a bit hard. But why are newer friends seen as second best? It’ s incredibly liberating; we’re all at the same stage in our lives and they know me only as I am now, there’s no history or baggage, or decade-long resentments bubbling away in the background.”
This is the joy of friendships formed later in life; new chums didn’t know you when you were cripplingly shy, embarrassingly gauche, cringe-makingly certain of yourself, or when you had a string of disastrous affairs. They won’t know about the embarrassing vodka incidents, the failed attempt to go travelling, or the fears and anxieties that preoccupied us in early adulthood. New friends allow us to reinvent ourselves, or at least to finesse the corners without the nagging anxiety that we’ve changed, or betrayed ourselves, or become the type of person we always said we didn’t want to be.
“Change is inevitable and new friendships are part of that,” Rowe says. “It’s through making new friends that we gain entry to different areas of life, experience new things. But people do feel guilty if they drift apart from old friends and it can be difficult, particularly for women, to decide that a friendship has come to an end.”
Change may be inevitable, but it also makes most of us uncomfortable. If a friend says “You’ve really changed”, it tends to be accusatory, causing us to question ourselves — have I changed? Have they? Is that a bad thing?
The answers are probably yes, yes and no; we all change, the world keeps turning. Four nights after the christening, I had some work friends round for supper; we ate meze, drank wine and cackled at an Abba video. I’ve known them only a couple of years but it was easy and comfortable and we chatted about what had happened yesterday and last week, rather than five years ago and five years before that. They might not be the people I’d call if my world fell apart at 4am, but they’re an integral part of my life now, just in the way that those older friendships were when I forged them all those years ago in a smoky student bar with an insecure soul.
