Friendships are amazing things: they’re the only relationships we have that are held together by choice, not obligation.

Esther Perel calls friendship “the most free-choice relationship we have”. There are no vows, no papers and no external script telling us what we owe one another. They’re pure in the sense that they exist because of freedom and choice: we choose to keep coming back to them.

Freedom is a huge part of what makes friendship so lovely.
But it also makes it remarkably easy to neglect.

Because the onus isn’t really on any of you to uphold it either. Unlike romantic relationships or family life, there are very few structures forcing friendship back to the top of the list when everything else begins filling up around it . (And we know, especially if we live in cities, that everything else is very good at filling up.)

So when a friend has chosen for you all to frequent a pub in Stoke Newington despite knowing you live in Brockley, and Citymapper is now suggesting a route involving two trains, a bus and what appears to be a short maritime crossing, there are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons not to go. You desperately want to cancel to keep something left in your own personal battery reserves.

The problem is, though, that if every tired evening, annoying journey or slightly inconvenient plan becomes a good enough reason to stay home, friendship has very little structure left to protect it.

A lot of friendship is kept alive by doing things you would absolutely decline if the person involved mattered 15% less.

No one really wants to get from Brockley to Stoke Newington on a wet Thursday. Or go to a birthday drinks where the only person you really know is the birthday person and spending twenty minutes pretending to understand the backstory to a breakup involving two people called Tom and Liv. Or go to a wedding dress fitting in Folkestone when you both live in West London.

But ultimately showing up is often what loyalty looks like in adult friendship: a series of minor inconveniences you keep choosing because the person matters more than the inconvenience.

Now, we love therapy, but therapy speak has pervaded our algorithms: it’s meant we have also become extremely fluent in the language of protecting our peace. We know when to say no, when to leave early, when to “honour our capacity” and when a social plan is apparently threatening our nervous system.

A lot of that is genuinely useful. Some of it may also be a very sophisticated vocabulary for not getting on the 6.23 to Walthamstow (where only married people seem to live).

There is a difference between having boundaries and arranging a life in which nothing is ever allowed to inconvenience us.

Reciprocity sometimes means absorbing a small amount of friction for somebody you love. Not constantly, and certainly not when the relationship only ever seems to run in one direction, but often enough that the friendship has something sturdier holding it together than mutual good intentions.

Because feeling warmly towards someone is not actually the same as maintaining a friendship with them.

This is not an argument for martyrdom. Nobody needs to prove the depth of a friendship by attending a 30th birthday in a barn in Gloucestershire with two days’ notice, nor should being a “good friend” mean saying yes until you resent everyone you know.

But friendship probably does need us to resist the idea that inconvenience is, by itself, evidence that something is not worth doing.

Friendship isn’t sustained by how warmly we feel about people in the abstract.
However, it is sustained by how often we make room for them in our actual lives.

Sometimes that means going to a Zoo for a hen do.
Other times it means metaphorically burying a body with them.

Because at the end of the day, we’re born, we die, everything in the middle is hard, and we’re all just walking each other home.

There are no vows or contracts forcing us to turn up for our friends, which is exactly why turning up means something.