I can’t imagine my life without my closest girlfriends – but this is why I’ve had a friendship cull at 62: Kathryn Flett

Our friends are, as the cliché has it, ‘the family we choose’ – and if, like me, you come from a small family then your closest friendships are particularly vital, nurtured and treasured. I hope I am a pretty good and loyal friend who is lucky enough to have good and loyal friends – don’t we all?

I’ve worked as a journalist across magazines and newspapers for 41 years and en route I’ve made a lot of friends. Inevitably, the majority ended up ‘contained’, contingent on time and place. Sometimes intense, even consuming, eventually these friendships went pffft, like a firework, and the ‘show’ was over.

Often, we don’t even recognise when a contained friendship has ended – yet time passes and even friends once considered important find themselves being downgraded to ‘long-lost’. After this, relationships either have to be actively rekindled or simply let go. And while life gets in the way, just like people we’ve known and loved who have died, our former friendships live on vividly in our memories. They’ve served their meaningful purpose, helping us to become the 3D adults we now are.

Rewind. An only child, as a kid my best friends were my cat, Dinah, rabbit J Piers Grundy, and the Fossil sisters, Pauline, Petrova and Posy, whom I’d met at Madame Fidolia’s Academy of Dance and Stage Training… in my dreams! (They were the main characters in Noel Streatfeild’s classic children’s book Ballet Shoes). My first real BF, however, was ‘Sally’. We met at the little school in the road where I lived, in London’s suburbs, which was run by a lady with big hair and a small pekinese. Sally was pretty, petite and Jewish, so while I never got to have a sleepover on Friday nights, I did develop a lifelong love of challah. However, our friendship faltered after I got moved up a year at our next school.

Making friends at my (all-girls) school was easy – until I hit the Puberty Gap. With 18 months between me and the oldest girls in my year, my favourite Nicolas/Sarahs/Janes were all into bras and boys while I was still stuck on ponies. Throughout, my one constant friend was – and still is – Jonathan, whom I’d met at drama classes when I was 12 and he was 13. He’s one of the handful of ride-or-dies with whom I will never fall out, the older brother I’d always wanted but had to find; my mother adored him so much she later named my (16-years younger) little brother after him.

Throughout the second half of my teens my best GF was ‘Charlie’, terrible-twin habituée of clubs, cocktails bars, gigs, squats and raves. Charlie’s parents even allowed me to move in for a while and when I overstayed my welcome, pushed me back out the door so kindly I didn’t really notice. However, our friendship floundered when Charlie attempted to nick not one but two of my boyfriends and I decided I’d rather stay friends with her mum. (In fact, we’re all still in touch).

By my late teens I was out in the world, sofa-surfing, working in fashion retail in London’s King’s Road, with a new ‘family’ of friends on the shop floor (many are still mates over 40 years on). My old schoolmates felt – indeed were – a long way away from this semi-adult urban world I was navigating, attempting to work out not only who I was and what I might become. And then my very closest friendships – #TeamRideorDie – were made in my 20s; I found both my tribe and my career during my first job on a magazine.

My closest girlfriends are a handful of extraordinary creatives whose wit and wisdom are so essential to my sense of self I can’t imagine how my life would have unfolded without them in it. We’ve been there through the loving-and-losing years, the weddings, kids and divorces. Some still work, others are semi-retired, some have been homemakers raising (now adult) kids – and one had a life-changing accident that meant she needed full-time carers. Yet we’ve all led Venn-diagrammed lives characterised by periods of silence followed by busy bursts of activity. We don’t meet in big groups or holiday en masse but fold in and out of each other’s lives being supportive, respectful and never excessively demanding or needy. I love them.

Beyond this clutch, however, there is a wider network of people whom I like enormously – I’ll assume the feeling is mutual! – but who, for any number of reasons (location, work, family, whatever), are mostly on my life’s periphery.

These are the relationships for which social media was invented. They mean too much to let go but are too much like hard work to constantly sustain; they are important but not quite essential. Before the socials they would have become ‘long-losts’, now they’re largely fed by algorithms. They’re also, interestingly, the kind of friendships that teen/20-something ‘digital natives’ may describe as good mates.

When my eldest son, Jackson, died in an accident in September 2023, I found out who, from this wider circle, my ‘friends’ were –while my closest girls literally turned up on the doorstep, fuelled by deep kindness and endless emotional intelligence. One even flew in from her home abroad, stayed for a week, cooking and caring for us. However, one of the more unexpected developments was making new friends among Jackson’s friends.

I now have a 35+ strong WhatsApp group of 23/24 year-olds I barely knew at all and some whom I’d never even met. This would have astonished Jackson as much as it may have delighted/horrified him, too. They are a spectacularly smart and empathetic bunch of young people whose actions consistently run counter to every negative stereotype you hear about Gen Z.

Yet even as I’ve gained this cohort of younger friends, I’ve had to let go of those ‘Mum Mates’ with whom the tightest connection was, in truth, the bond between our kids. Their presence in my life, however kind their intentions, just highlights Jackson’s absence, his No Future. I see their faces and find myself searching the room for his. Within months I’d also had to sever ties with my closest local girlfriend – and have since let go of other people I liked but who proved themselves unable/unwilling to share my journey. Jackson’s death has shored up my boundaries and sorted friendship ‘wheat’ from ‘chaff’ yet, recently, I’ve started gently prising open my broken heart just enough to reconnect with a few ‘long-losts’.

I like to think that now, aged 62, I have a hands-on understanding of love, loss and grief – a grown-up who definitely doesn’t subscribe to the old adage ‘keep your friends close, but your enemies closer’ (from Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War) because if there’s anything I’ve learnt so far it is that life is not only short, it can be much shorter than you hope it will be. In the future, if any new friend vacancies arise, I can hopefully tell who I want to allow close, and who it’s best to keep at arm’s length. And, frankly, from where I’m sitting that already feels like a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Read more by Kathryn at kathrynflett.substack.com