The Friends Who Find Us Later

There is a particular kind of friendship women are often encouraged to treasure: the lifelong kind. The friend who knew you before the husband, the children, the career, the wrinkles and the reading glasses. The one who remembers your bad haircut in 1987 and the boyfriend everyone knew was wrong for you except you. The friend who has watched you become every version of yourself.

I understand why we romanticize those friendships. There is something lovely about being known across decades. I just haven’t really had many any of them.

Actually, if I’m being completely truthful, I haven’t had a lot of the FRIENDS kind of friends people talk about at all. I’ve had people I’ve liked, people I’ve worked with, people I’ve enjoyed spending time with, and people who belonged to particular chapters of my life. Some of those relationships mattered very much. But that inner-circle, call-you-when-everything-falls-apart, laugh-until-you-can’t-breathe, know-what-I-mean-before-I-finish-the-sentence kind of friendship? Not so much. Thankfully I have sisters for that.

For a long time, I assumed that was something you were supposed to establish earlier in life. That if you hadn’t collected your people by a certain age, you had somehow missed the window.

Apparently, I was wrong.

I first got a glimpse of that a while ago with a woman named Trish. We knew each other through Facebook, but not well, and somehow the random idea came up that we should start writing letters to each other. Actual letters. It was one of those small ideas that could easily have gone nowhere, except it didn’t.

Those letters became a friendship.

Trish is now one of my dearest friends even though we live far apart and, in many ways, “only” write to each other. But that doesn’t make the friendship feel thin or secondary. Quite the opposite. I know I can send her a message when I see something that will make her laugh, or when someone at work is making me crazy, or when I just need to say something to someone who will understand the tone underneath the words. And she’ll be there.

That friendship quietly rearranged something in my thinking. It showed me that closeness doesn’t always need geography, shared history, or even the usual rituals we associate with friendship. Sometimes two people simply begin paying attention to each other, and over time that attention becomes care.

Then, more recently, I had the idea to create a local writers’ group. There was already an established women’s Facebook group in the area, so I put the idea out there to see whether anyone might be interested.

I was thinking about writing. I was thinking about accountability and creativity and maybe having a few people to talk to who understood why someone might spend half an hour changing one sentence and consider that productive.

I was not thinking, “Perhaps I will accidentally make three new friends.”

And yet, here we are.

Somewhere along the way, our Writers Group became more of a “writers group.”

The writing still matters. We talk about ideas and projects and words and the strange business of trying to turn the things living in our heads into something another person can read. But we also talk about everything else. We laugh a lot. We wander wildly off topic. We tell stories. We confess things. We admit fears and frustrations we may not have intended to bring with us that day. We can move from something ridiculous to something deeply vulnerable and back again without anyone seeming particularly alarmed by the change in altitude.

And somewhere in all of that, without anyone formally announcing it, care arrived. The genuine kind. The kind that notices, asks, remembers and makes room.

These women haven’t known me through all my ages and stages. They didn’t know the younger me. They weren’t there through the raising-kids years, the building-a-business years, or the years when I was becoming whoever I thought I was supposed to become. They don’t have decades of shared history with me.

And it turns out they don’t need it.

Maybe that is one of the quiet surprises of getting older. We spend so much time talking about what falls away with age that we sometimes forget to talk about what can still arrive.

Friendships change. People move. Lives become busy. Relationships that once fit perfectly can become uncomfortable or simply less relevant. Sometimes there is no argument, no betrayal, no dramatic ending at all. Two lives just slowly stop intersecting.

For years, I think I saw that mostly as a loss. Now I wonder if sometimes it is also space. Space for people we haven’t met yet, or people we already know only slightly who may one day become far more important than we could possibly predict.

There is something freeing about friendship that begins later in life. We come to it carrying fewer illusions about ourselves. At this age, there isn’t much point pretending we’ve got everything sorted out. We’ve lived long enough to know better. We’ve failed at things, changed our minds, lost people, started over, made questionable decisions and surprised ourselves. Perhaps that makes it easier to sit across from another woman, or write to one several hours away, and simply say, “This is where I am,” without needing to make the story prettier first.

There is also something wonderful about being known primarily as the person you are now. A newer friend doesn’t necessarily remember who you used to be or expect you to remain her. She isn’t confused when you change direction because she doesn’t have twenty years of evidence suggesting you normally turn left. She simply meets you here.

Maybe that is what has surprised me most. There can be tremendous intimacy in shared history, but there can also be intimacy in shared presence. You don’t always need someone who remembers your whole story. Sometimes you need someone willing to pay attention to the chapter you’re in now.

That seems especially meaningful to me these days, when so much of life feels less like accumulating and more like choosing. Choosing what matters. Choosing what deserves my time. Choosing what I want the years ahead to contain.

I wouldn’t have thought a random idea to exchange letters with a Facebook acquaintance would lead to one of my dearest friendships. I wouldn’t have thought a post about starting a local writers’ group would lead to three more women I can laugh with, be ridiculous with, be vulnerable with, care about and feel cared for by.

But life has a sense of humour that way.

I went looking for people to talk about writing with. Before that, I went looking for someone to exchange letters with. In both cases, I found something much bigger than the thing I thought I was looking for.

And maybe that’s one of the nicest things to discover as we age: the people who will matter to us haven’t necessarily all arrived yet.

P.S. And, just so no one feels quietly left out, these are not the only friendships that have found their way into my life more recently. There are others I value deeply too, and they know who they are. This just happened to be the story that got me thinking about how friendship can arrive in unexpected ways, at unexpected times, with people we never saw coming.

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