A little help from my friends

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Dear Cog reader,

On Wednesday of this past week my husband and I marked our 20th wedding anniversary. I have no idea how time can pass so quickly (though it may have something to do with getting married when you’re 25, because you want to throw a big party). Before heading out for a celebratory evening of tacos and The Avett Brothers, I made a photo book — to show my husband and three kids all of our different “eras,” so to speak. And with all due love and respect to my husband, Anil, it had me thinking more about my friends.

Anil and I met in Charlottesville, in our last year of college, and when I told him I was planning to move to Boston and he could “come with, if he wanted,” he did. In a feat of luck and real estate, we lived next door to each other in Somerville, and one of his roommates, Melissa, became one of my closest friends. She still is. When Anil went to medical school, he and I moved in together, but there were stretches when we hardly saw each other. That was when I had Margaret.

Still later, when Anil was in residency training, I would joke that I was really married to my friend Katie. We lived a half-mile apart in Brookline, and when it snowed we would meet at Washington Square Tavern to share garlic fries and watch the first flakes fall onto Beacon Street. In the fall, we strolled from Boston Common to the end of Newbury Street under a canopy of changing leaves. I can’t tell you what Anil and I did for Valentine’s Day over that handful of years, but I remember the one I spent with Katie, singing along to Brett Dennen at The Paradise Rock Club. In the rom-com montage of my late 20s, Katie’s “the one.”

Fast forward to when my kids were very young, I lived within walking distance of Kiki and Gregor, friends from college who had four kids of their own, the youngest of whom was born two weeks before our oldest. Anil worked a lot of nights and weekends, and Kiki was my parenting manual and my meal partner. I can still recite her taco/kebab/bagels order.

All this is to say, my husband is great — 20 years in, I’m still a fan. But I can’t imagine living two decades alongside this one other person without my friends being part of our story.

I know I’m far from alone in relying on friendships to get through difficult phases of life, or regular everyday life. There’s certainly an ease to friends with shared history; I’m thinking of Cog contributor Julie Wittes Schlack who wrote, “In conversations with old friends, none of us has to explain how we got here.” Of course, there’s nothing like a friendship forged in the teen years, all shared playlists and passenger seats.

As we get older and life gets more complicated, we find each other in spin classes, book clubs or across the backyard fence. When the “Barbie” movie came out, my friend Margaret and I watched it at a Cape Cod drive-in with our families, marveling at the different versions of ourselves that we were lucky enough to share with each other.

All this was swirling around in my head as I thought about an essay we have in Cog this week, by Tove Danovich. She reflects on how hard it can be to make new friends as we get older, and she proposes we approach friendship with the same time and intention we give romantic relationships.

After all, partnership doesn’t just come from one person in our lives; if we’re lucky, we find it in many people along the way. For me, the best thing about friendship, and somehow the part that keeps surprising me, is the reassurance of time — that we can come back to each other. How that shared history doesn’t evaporate; it lives inside us.

Whether it’s a relationship that’s lasted 20 years, or one that’s just getting started, knowing that you matter to another person, and that they matter to you, is a gift.

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