We place a lot of value on old friendships.
And rightly so.
There’s something quite extraordinary about having someone in your life who remembers you at twenty-five when neither of you had much idea what you were doing but were both fairly confident you did.
Someone who remembers your children being small.
The jobs.
The relationships.
The houses.
The mistakes.
The hairstyles that seemed entirely reasonable at the time.
We talk about friendships that have lasted thirty, forty, fifty years almost as though the number itself is proof of something.
And perhaps it is.
Although I’m not entirely sure what.
Because I’ve been thinking lately about the friends who arrive later.
I moved to the area where I live now about ten years ago, on my own.
And since then I’ve made some wonderful friends.
Close friends.
Not new friends with an asterisk beside them because they haven’t yet completed the required thirty-year qualifying period.
Friends.
Some of them have become every bit as precious to me as people I’ve known for decades.
And I think friendships made later in life give us something quite different.
They meet us without a before.
My newer friends didn’t know the woman raising children while working full-time, exhausted and trying to keep everything going.
They didn’t watch me make the mistakes.
They didn’t know the woman who constantly questioned whether she was getting any of it right.
They didn’t meet all those earlier versions of me.
They met this one.
The woman who arrived here on her own.
Children raised.
Grandchildren arriving.
Working.
Supporting herself.
Making her own decisions.
Living alone and, rather surprisingly to some of my older friends, actually liking it.
That’s the woman my newer friends became friends with.
And I’ve realised there’s something quite lovely about being seen that way.
Sometimes the way another person sees you allows you to see yourself differently too.
They don’t look at me and see all the uncertainty it took to get here.
They just see the woman who got here.
Occasionally, they’ll even admire something about my life that I still think of as simply getting on with it.
And I rather like seeing myself through their eyes.
Old friends give me something completely different.
They remember.
Sometimes rather more than I’d like them to.
They can remind me of something I said in 1994 that I would personally have preferred to have been destroyed along with all other records from the period.
They know where I’ve come from.
And occasionally that means they still expect to find an earlier version of me.
An old friend might say:
“You should meet somebody.”
And I’ll say:
“I don’t want to, I’m happy as I am.”
And sometimes I can see that she doesn’t quite believe me.
Because she remembers when I did.
She knew the woman who wanted partnership, marriage, stability.
So perhaps when I say I’m happy living alone now, she hears it as me making the best of what I’ve got.
But I’m not.
I simply changed.
I lived another twenty or thirty years.
The newer friend doesn’t have that comparison.
She only knows the woman who says:
“No, actually, I like living on my own.”
And thinks:
Yes. That sounds like you.
Neither friend is wrong.
They simply know different parts of me.
And perhaps that’s why I’ve stopped thinking that the most valuable friendships must necessarily be the oldest ones.
We don’t think that way about romantic love.
If a woman meets someone at sixty and falls deeply in love, we don’t say:
“Yes, but you’ve only known him eighteen months. Surely the man you dated in 1987 is more significant.”
We celebrate it.
We say how wonderful it is that she found love later in life.
We understand that something can arrive late and still be profound.
So why don’t we talk about friendship in the same way?
Why don’t we celebrate the woman you meet at fifty-eight who, two years later, knows from the way you answer the telephone that something isn’t right?
The friend you didn’t grow up with but somehow immediately felt comfortable beside.
The woman who wasn’t there for your first marriage, your babies or your thirtieth birthday, but who knows exactly who you are at sixty.
There is no hierarchy here.
An old friend has something a newer friend can never have.
History.
She remembers the journey.
She knew some of the women who built the woman sitting here now.
But the newer friend has something too.
She met the finished-so-far version.
No history to compare her with.
No old expectations.
Just:
This is you. I like you. Shall we have coffee?
And perhaps later life needs both.
The people who can look backwards with us.
And the people who arrived further along the road and simply started walking beside us from there.
I’ve become much more open to that as I’ve grown older.
Because getting older shouldn’t mean our circle can only become smaller.
People leave. Lives change. Friendships sometimes drift. Geography gets in the way.
But new people arrive too.
And occasionally one of them surprises you by becoming important.
Not because you’ve known her forever.
Not because she knows every chapter.
Simply because there’s a connection.
Perhaps we should celebrate that more.
We make such a lovely fuss when somebody finds love later in life.
Maybe we should make just as much fuss when somebody finds a friend.
Because there isn’t a closing date on either.
And perhaps the loveliest friendships aren’t always the ones that can say:
“I’ve known you all my life.”
Sometimes they’re the ones that say:
“I didn’t know you then. But I know you now.”
And sometimes, now is exactly where we need to be known.