We all have that friend, that one particular friend whose meeting with us felt serendipitous. We thought we’d be in each other’s lives forever.
The friendship bond was tight. You stood next to her during her wedding and knew that after her second date with this man he was the one even though she wasn’t sure she wanted a third.
You were there to stop her from taking that last tequila shot. She unplugged and hid the rotary phone the night you were crying about your ex, and rushed back to your dorm room to call him.
Life walked in and said, I’m going to stretch you so thin and make you so tired that your priorities will have to change. Then, and only then, will we see if your friendship can stand the test of time.
And the hard truth is, sometimes friendship fade–even the ones that we thought were air-tight.
Why We Love Old Friends
We don’t only think we are going to grow old with our partners, we think we are going to grow old with our good friends and we imagine that one day we will tell our grandchildren about the hell we raised. That doesn’t always happen but when it does, we feel incredibly lucky to share a bond with someone who has made it through the decades of our lives.
One minute we are getting ready for our high school dance and talking about wanting to grow up faster, get married and have kids. We are perfectly positive that our latest crush is the man of our dreams. The next minute we are standing next to each other looking at our high school kids who are pissed because we insist on taking too many pictures of them before prom.
We meet for lunch, we catch up through a few texts, we plan girls’ weekends and complain about our kids, our parents and our marriages. We share our incredulity that our husbands still don’t know how to read our minds after this many years of marriage.
And every once in a while, reality slaps us in the face. We look at one another and think, “Damn, I’ve know you for 30 years! Thank you for sticking around.”
These precious few are the friends who have seen us make horrible mistakes and share our inner struggles. They have stood alongside us while we made life-changing decisions. These friends are rare and have an indescribable kind of specialness.
They know us because they were there when our heart got torn out of our chest, when we failed that test, when we didn’t get the job, when we bought the new car, and when we peed on the stick– all 50 times.
They listened to our birthing stories and we wanted the dirty details of theirs. They were excited for us when we met Him, and they were brave enough to tell us when we weren’t living up to our potential.
Friends who have been with us through the decades know us in a way no one else ever will– they are the real heroes, our true soul mates, and we don’t care if they ask us if we are PMS-ing, they’ve earned that right.
They have a way of knowing what we need before we even know it ourselves and the way I see it, if they’ve been around long enough to see us through college, jobs, losses, marriages, divorces, and are still there while we experience our first hot flash and try to navigate our way through the fresh hell known as peri-menopause, they aren’t going anywhere.
They’ve been a big force behind the grit that helped us make it through the seemingly impossible parts of life. Our friendship keeps getting better with age. Why mess with that perfect recipe?
Besides, at this point, we are all too tired to start over and make new friends anyway.
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