You need new things, new memories, rather than using nostalgia as the glue holding a friendship together.

Remember that weird haircut you got? Or that time you peed yourself when you were kind of too old to be peeing yourself? Or when you went through a phase where you lied and told everyone your name was Scarlet because you wanted to seem more interesting? If you start every conversation with, “Hey, remember that time when… ?” you and your friend will die of boredom. Much in the way that nobody in relationships feels the same way they did when they met decades ago, you’re unlikely to be able to keep up the momentum of the early days – so don’t expect to. There were new experiences to talk about, new stresses to vent about, and by the time we graduated, we could be sure that if we could get through three years of hardly seeing each other we could survive whatever life threw at us. It meant we always had loads to catch up on, and gave us a new energy. We went from me practically living in her house to seeing each other every few months, and to our surprise nobody died as a result.

When one of my close pals went to university a whole 45-minute drive away, while I went to one closer to home, we wept, gave each other goodbye gifts and wrote each other heartfelt letters about how much we meant to one another. Here are some of the things I’ve learned about making those connections last. It’s lucky that we still like each other, but that doesn’t mean there was no work involved. We have all evolved from being teenagers who listened to My Chemical Romance on our Sony Ericssons in the park to adults with jobs and, for one of us, a baby. I’ve had the same group of friends for more than half my life – one from the first year of secondary school, when we bonded over whatever it is 11-year-olds bond over, and two I met a couple of years later, during an intense emo phase. They’re not as fragile as the friendships of the teenage years, when something as simple as your pal going to Starbucks with someone else can shake your relationship to its foundations but neither is it like primary school, where you can just go up to someone in the playground and decide you are now best friends for ever.īecause they’re not as valued as romantic relationships, it’s easy to underestimate the magic of maintaining long-term friendships throughout your 20s and beyond.

Best friends ever t-shirt