Most women couldn’t cope without true friends… So why has it taken me until 45 to realise I need them too?

At the beginning of last year I received an email from someone I had not heard from in many years. Twenty-two years, to be precise.

It was a friend I had lost touch with over the years; a best friend, in fact; someone I was so close with growing up that people often mistook us for sisters.

As time passed, I have often thought about this person. We met in primary school and were as tight as a sailor’s knot right up until university. And then, just like that, we lost touch.

There was no dramatic ending. No sudden goodbyes. One day we were like glue and then we no longer were. Of course, it’s possible it wasn’t as sudden as I remember. Perhaps she had been pulling away for years, it’s just that I, being a bad friend, failed to notice.

In the absence of answers, I spent the past two decades assuming it was because of my inability to hang on to friendships that she walked away.

I would not have blamed her. You see, there has always been a pattern to the majority of friendships in my life — if, indeed, you can call them that. They are short-lived but intense. When I’m with someone it can feel like the greatest friendship on Earth. But once our lives change direction, the friendship tends to untether, too.

This has left me aged 45 with a huge network of contacts but a dearth of people I would call true friends.

And by this I mean people I can ask to water my plants or look after the dogs if I’m ever left in the lurch. People who will let me cry or rant, and not judge me. People I can call at any hour of the night and be sure they’ll pick up. And people who, in turn, can expect the same from me.

For the past few decades there has only really been my friend Sam, whom I met at university — and whom I only see when she comes to stay once a year. We have a closeness that does not require phone calls and dinners out. We direct message on Instagram. It is an easy friendship; one without expectations and minimal maintenance. It has lasted the distance.

The other is my best friend, Will. But he’s my husband now, so I’m not sure it counts.

Of course, I have wonderful colleagues, many of whom I consider friends, but because I work for a U.S. tech company, I only speak to them via Zoom most of the year. I have incredible neighbours, too, but I’m not sure you would call them deep friendships either.

So what happened to all the others? I have boxes of photographs of me with people I once considered friends but whose lives I now know very little about.

There was the young man who lived in the dorm upstairs from me at university. We walked for hours around London together talking about anything and everything. But the friendship petered out and we went our separate ways when we graduated. He went to Cambridge to teach while I stayed in London to try to make it as a journalist.

Farrah began to reevaluate her priorities after receiving an email from someone she had not seen in 22 years 

Then there was the woman I spent one very intense year partying with. Our friendship was born of a shared ambition to meet men and gad about town. But once we had partied ourselves out, the friendship petered out, too. I think she is a doctor in Australia now, but I can’t be sure. I haven’t spoken to her in decades.

And then there are the incredible female colleagues I spent two decades working alongside when I was a magazine journalist and editor. And all the women who came to my hen party (I think there were eight, though I’m only in touch with two of them now — Sam and my sister).

So, where did everyone else go?

The answer is quite simple: nowhere. They didn’t go anywhere; just like the friendships I had with each of them.

Does it pain me when I think about this? A little. But the truth is I’m no good at the nurturing part required to sustain deep friendship. I don’t call. I rarely text. I forget birthdays and am incapable of reaching out simply to say hi.

You know how some men are not ‘good boyfriend material’? Well, over the years, I’ve come to realise that I’m not ‘good friendship material’.

And so, last year, I decided to make a change.

‘Let me do an executive coaching session on you,’ said my colleague, Lisa, some years back. Lisa worked for the same publishing house as me and was someone whose company I enjoyed very much.

One of Farrah’s close friends is Will – but as he’s her husband now, she’s not sure it counts

Still, our ‘friendship’ never moved beyond the confines of the office block in which we worked. That was what we had in common. And the moment she left, I doubted we would see each other again.

She was re-training to be an executive coach and needed a guinea pig. She asked. I relented.

I cannot remember the details of the coaching session now, only that there were lots of questions and the end result was some sort of pie chart that showed the priorities that made up my life.

‘This here is work,’ she said, motioning to a giant chunk that took up more than two-thirds of the pie chart.

‘And this . . .’ she said, motioning to the remaining slither, ‘is your relationship.’ That was it. No hobbies. No family. And certainly no friendships.

I felt a bizarre mix of shame and pride. Shame that I had, in 40-odd years of life, failed to accumulate any significant friendships; pride that I was so self-sufficient.

Lisa questioned whether it might be an idea to make room for a friendship or two. I told her my life was simply too full. But when I went home that evening, it dawned on me what a cliche I had become; the mountaineering career woman who kept everyone at arm’s length.

Suddenly, the reality of being friendless later in life felt like a very real scenario. Was I prepared to be without the comfort and nourishment that female friendships so often offer? I wasn’t so sure.

Farrah began to make a friend again for the first time in years – in the form of her colleague, Lisa

I was also intrigued about what it might be like to have a proper friendship later in life. I had only known deep, meaningful friendship as a young woman and, for the most part, they were relatively fleeting, in part because of my inability to maintain momentum.

It might seem odd to you that a person can reach midlife with just one friend — and just one annual ‘friendship date’ in the diary.

But here’s the truth: I’m good alone. I always have been. I’m naturally a very introverted person; social situations exhaust me and I find small talk intolerable — though I have figured out how to do it, since my job has always required it.

I like deep conversations; getting to know the soul of a person quickly and thoroughly. Since I have been a journalist for more than 20 years, interviewing fascinating women almost every week, I’ve always had that.

I’ll never forget reading an interview with the late chef Anthony Bourdain, where he was questioned about friendship. ‘The kind of care and feeding required of friends, I’m frankly incapable of,’ he replied. ‘I’m not going to remember your birthday. I’m not going to be there for the important moments in your life. We are not going to reliably hang out, no matter how I feel about you. I make very good friends a week at a time.’

I remember reading it and thinking, ‘Yes! Finally, someone has articulated how I feel about friendship.’ The fact that he travelled 365 days of the year, and thus was literally incapable of long-term friendships, was a minor detail.

But around my mid-40s something changed, namely my desire for friendship. Not just to receive it, but to give it as well. I’d just changed jobs, moving from a busy London office filled with women to working largely from home.

And I had largely stopped doing journalism, a fact which meant I was rarely, if ever, interviewing other women. Suddenly, the absence of real friends in my life — those that were there year after year through the good and bad times — was glaringly obvious. This coincided with Lisa re-entering my life, not as a colleague, but a friend, I hoped.

Farrah said that making a new friend felt ‘like dating all over again’ – marked by excitement and nerves

It felt like dating all over again, an exploratory period marked by excitement and nerves. Would Lisa enjoy my company once she saw the real me, unencumbered by any sort of work persona? And would she be able to make room in her life, which was filled with other friends, for someone who had so far proved themselves unreliable friendship-wise?

She began WhatsApping me just to say hello. I’d never really experienced this so took days — even weeks — to reply.

I explained I was bad at the small stuff. I tried to make up for it with grand gestures. I whisked her away for a weekend in the Sussex countryside because she was going through a stressful time. This was a big deal for me. I hadn’t been on holiday with a female friend for more than 20 years. I worried about what we would talk about. Would we get on?

I felt enormous pressure to make a success of it. I remember trying to plan a spare afternoon we had — should I book massages, should we go into the nearby village and go vintage shopping? And yet, I realised, it was a sign I cared deeply about this other person.

In the end, it was the most magical of weekends. We laughed all night and day. We had scones and tea in a little cafe and watched the world pass by, like two old ladies who had been friends for a lifetime. It felt not just good, it felt wonderful — emotionally nourishing but also genuine fun. Something I had, I realised, been missing for a large portion of my life.

‘You are a good friend,’ she told me as we drove back. It was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to me. Largely because I never thought I was capable of it.

I have had to work hard since then to keep it going. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I worried I wouldn’t be able to stick to all the usual rules that dictate conventional friendship. And, by the way, I didn’t. I forgot her birthday (I was a week out!) and I’m still hopeless on WhatsApp. But she understands this. And, over the past year, our friendship has fallen into a wonderful, natural rhythm of its own.

Thanks to Lisa, I now realise friendship can take many forms. It doesn’t have to look like every girl gang film Hollywood trots out, complete with brunches out and phone calls where you pour your heart out. A real friendship is one where a friend allows you to be exactly who you are and stands by you regardless. (Unless you’re a complete beast, of course.)

Farrah has understood the meaning of a true friend – and that is for them to understand exactly who you really are

I also learned that a true friend helps you see who you really are.

I never believed Lisa when she said I was a good friend. I thought she was just being kind. But then another person told me the same thing. It was my best friend from all those years ago at primary school. I hadn’t spoken to her in decades and then, suddenly, there she was in my inbox.

She was a mother now, and had started to think a lot about her own childhood. Which meant she started to think about me, since we had been so close back then. She had read a piece I had written about being bad at friendships — and was reaching out to say I was wrong. I was the best friend she ever had.

And I realised that this is another thing that true friends do — they have the courage to speak up when they believe you are wrong. And by doing so she gave me back both my capacity and confidence for friendship. Perhaps I was not as bad as I had told myself all these years. I just needed a friend to tell me that.

And before you ask, yes, we did meet up some months later and picked up almost exactly where we left off so many years ago.

It was like finding a wonderful old jumper you had loved your entire life and that understood every curve of your body. I’m seeing her again in a few weeks. And this time, something tells me I won’t let her go.