Who stays, who fades, who gets the voice notes, and the strange reality of making, keeping, and losing friends in your thirties.
Nobody asked us, but lately we’ve been talking about friendship.
Not friendship in the I’m so lucky to do life with these girls Instagram-caption kind of way.
The other kind.
The friends you keep. The ones you lose. The ones who quietly fade without anyone ever really deciding they were over. The person you’ve known for twenty years who somehow knows less about your life than the person you met three years ago.
The friend whose call you’ll always answer.
The one you love dearly but, if you’re being completely truthful, don’t really want to have dinner with.
Which brings us to the slightly horrifying question:
Do we still like all of our friends?
Maybe we’re all quietly auditing our friendships.
At some point in your thirties, time becomes wildly expensive.
There may be partners, kids, careers, parents, houses, schedules, and laundry that apparently reproduces while you sleep. An open Saturday night can feel like a winning lottery ticket.
So without necessarily meaning to, you start noticing.
Who leaves you feeling better after you’ve been with them?
Who can you tell the truth to?
Who gets the eleven-minute voice note from your car?
Who are you excited to make plans with, and who are you quietly hoping cancels?
And maybe the most uncomfortable question:
If I met this person today, would we become friends?
Woof.
But are we auditing the wrong people?
It’s very easy to ask whether our friends are still showing up for us.
It’s harder to ask whether we’re still showing up for them.
This is something the two of us approach very differently.
Colleen is a show-up person. She makes the dinner work. She goes on the trip. She rearranges the schedule. Friendship gets a place on the calendar even when the calendar is already full.
Kelsey on the other hand, says no.
A lot.
Perhaps the best example happened at Colleen’s bachelorette dinner, when Kelsey casually announced to a table full of women who had traveled to celebrate their friend that she would rather be working than on a girls’ trip.
Everyone laughed. But from the other end of the table, Colleen leaned in.
“No. She’s serious.”
She was.
And this continues to be our friendship.
One of us stretches herself too far to show up.
The other occasionally wonders if she has gotten a little too good at protecting her time.
Which has made us wonder:
What does being a good friend actually require?
Maybe friendship is supposed to inconvenience us sometimes.
Maybe the people with rich communities aren’t simply lucky enough to have found great friends. Maybe they’ve spent years going to the dinner, making the phone call and showing up when staying home would have been easier.
But the opposite can also be true.
Does being a good friend mean saying yes at the expense of yourself, or the people waiting for you at home?
Are you going because you genuinely want to be there, or because saying no makes you feel like a bad friend? This one hit us a little harder. How many of our yeses are actually about friendship, and how many come from the expectations we’ve quietly placed on ourselves about what being a good friend is supposed to look like?
Maybe some of us need to say yes a little more.
Maybe some of us need to discover that no is a complete sentence.
Annoyingly, both can probably be true.
And then someone new gets the voice notes.
There’s another strange thing about friendship in your thirties: some of your closest friends haven’t known you very long at all.
They weren’t there at 22.
They don’t know your ex.
They weren’t at your wedding.
They didn’t witness whatever questionable choices were happening in 2015 (and boy were they questionable on our end- shout out to our exes!).
They don’t know every version of you.
They just know this one.
And somehow, sometimes, they’re the person getting the voice notes.
It makes you wonder what actually turns someone into your person.
Is it history? Proximity? Shared experience? Showing up? Being in the same season of life?
Or is there something freeing about meeting someone later, when neither of you needs the other to be who she used to be?
The two of us were actually set up on a friendship blind date in our twenties.
To this day, it’s not entirely clear why so many people in our overlapping circles were convinced we would like each other.
Looking back, though, we were both a little lost. We didn’t entirely know where we were going, but we were both searching for something.
Maybe part of what we were looking for was mature friendship before either of us was particularly mature.
And maybe that’s why some friendships survive entire versions of us.
Not because we stayed the same. Because we allowed each other not to.
So maybe the friendship audit isn’t really about who to cut.
And before anyone gets their (Skims) panties in a further bunch, we’re fully aware that while we’re over here auditing our friendships, there is a very real possibility we are currently on someone else’s performance improvement plan.
Maybe it’s simply worth noticing:
Who knows you now?
Who are you holding onto because you love them, and who because you’ve always known them?
Which friendship have you assumed faded when maybe it’s simply been under-tended?
Who deserves a little more effort from you?
Where could you say no without feeling guilty?
And maybe most importantly:
Do you like the friend you are to the people you love?
We don’t think every friendship is supposed to last forever.
Some people stay. Some fade. Some come back. Some arrive much later than you expected and somehow feel like they’ve always been there.
And a very small number survive entire versions of you.
Maybe growing up isn’t figuring out how to keep everyone.
Maybe it’s learning who you want beside you as you keep becoming someone new, and remembering that they’re making that choice about you, too.
Nobody asked us.
But we’re curious:
Who gets your voice notes?
Best pondered over French fries and Diet Coke…
xx,
Colleen and Kelsey
