Recently an acquaintance of mine played my friendship down with my friend saying that she herself had known her longer, which in her mind made her a better friend. It got me thinking about friendship and what measures it.
I'm lucky in the fact that a lot of my oldest friends are still my favourite friends. But for people like me who moved to London for career purposes, this isn't often the case. It is their old friends who they have the least in common with.
The people I went to school with have completely different lives to me. They upload photos feeding babies at 6am, when I sometimes get in at 6am. I have a crazy, busy life and sometimes those I grew up with and I don't have much in common. But my best mates from home whom I am still close with and I have been through so much together, we all have respect for our different lives and when we see each other it's like we're 16 again trying to get into some god awful nightclub. We still expect to get asked for ID. Sadly we never do anymore.
Are they any better than the 'London' friends I see daily? Some are, of course. But I've also made such amazing friends here that despite only knowing them four/ five years in some cases, and even four/ five months in others, they have too become friends I know I will have in 20 years time, just like my friends back home.
One of my best mates Sarah Cawood recently left London. I met her as a single girl. We were out three nights a week and had some parties that would make The Stones look like Westlife.
She has now married the man of her dreams, parked up outside London and has just had baby no two. Yes our friendship has changed. I'll be holding a milk bottle when I go to see her not a bottle of wine, but she is still one of my best mates who I call when I've had an awful day or need to know how to get chewing gum out of the sofa. Yet, some of the people I've known since I was a tot have drifted out of my life.
Studies show, statistically if you have been friends for seven years it is likely to last a lifetime. Yet, I'm a different person to who I was at 21 and some of the people I knocked around with then aren't here today. That statistic doesn't always bode true with me.
This got me thinking. The amount of time you are friends doesn't measure the friendship. But I think the mount of life experience within that friendship, does.
Going through family heartache, loss, success, happiness, broken hearts, crazy highs - that is what measures a friendship and what keeps it strong. Not because you met when you were yay age.
My friends have all helped me through all of the above, and hopefully I've done the same for them.
It is for these life moments that I know we'll be friends for life.
It's not the years, but the life in them.