I sit at my desk almost every day. Beyond the window lies the sea. Immediately to my left is a bookcase with two framed photos propped up in front of the books. Despite the charms of the ocean, I often find myself gazing at these. The one in the blue frame, a recent, sun-dappled shot of me with my friend Hannah. We have known each other since we were 18. And in a gold frame, a faded snap of my friend Mattias and me, taken at a magnificently drunken dinner party in New York eight years ago.
Both of these close friendships – and the handful of others I have been lucky enough to forge throughout my life – mean more to me than I have ever tried to put into words. People talk of their friends being like family, and with my family nearly 4,000 miles away in the US, that concept has a profound resonance.
So it didn’t surprise me at all when the comedian and TV presenter Sue Perkins spoke of the great loss she felt when her friend and co-star Mel Giedroyc got married. While discussing her memoir, Spectacles, with the actress Dawn French, Perkins described their friendship as a “double helix” and said Giedroyc’s marriage,13 years ago, was “so frightening”.
“It is not ‘I want what you have’, it is not ‘I’m jealous’, it is the letting go and the profound love as you do it,” she said.
That this entirely understandable sentiment has made the headlines is perhaps testament to the fact that this loss is a part of friendship rarely discussed openly and honestly. Instead, female friendship – and, given the way that marriage and childrearing go, it is usually female friendship that is affected – is depicted as a real-life version of a Boots “here come the girls” advert – or worse, the teeth-grittingly awful Diet Coke ident, where one girl rips her tights and then her friends do too, so she won’t feel bad. Idiots. But real-life friendships are incredibly complex and nuanced. And as we age, they shift in ways we couldn’t ever have imagined when we were in our teens and 20s.
For me, the most telling scene in the 2011 film Bridesmaids – a rare and wonderful depiction of female friendship – is the look on Annie’s (Kristen Wiig) face when Lillian (Maya Rudolph) tells her she is engaged – confusion, sadness and horror all flit across her features before she must readjust them, hug Lillian and whoop with joy.
My friend Hannah got married in 2006, when I was in the process of getting divorced. It was a little confusing. Now Hannah has two small children. Spontaneous nights out are out of the question. We go for weeks without seeing each other, and I too have felt that same sense of loss. Whereas once our lives ran in parallel – university, London, career, marriage – I veered off track years ago. I have no children, no husband.
Another close friend has just had a baby after a horrendous and emotional five-year period of trying. I couldn’t be happier, but I know too that I have lost her, albeit hopefully only temporarily. Texts will go unanswered, meetings unarranged. And who can blame her? You don’t have to have given birth yourself to understand that babies are all-consuming.
These feelings are seldom articulated because they feel churlish. The equivalent of wailing “But what about meeee?” as your friend waltzes off into the sunset. We feel selfish, stupid even, for feeling left behind. But it is possible to feel happy for your friends yet sad for yourself. Usually it’s not even that simple. Marriage and babies are no guarantee of joy. Being single is not necessarily the carefree cocktail and Tinder-fest your coupled-up friends imagine it to be.
Hannah and I have known each other for 22 years; our friendship is resilient. We love each other, and deep down, we are still the same people we were when we were knocking back pints of snakebite when we were 18. And, thanks to Hannah’s husband and children, our friendship is richer than ever. I love her children. I feel privileged to be part of their lives.
Change is always hard to deal with – especially when it’s happening to someone else. But change, as Perkins has noted, has so many rewards.
