One year, five years, 10; silver, gold and diamond anniversaries. It’s normal to celebrate how long we’ve been with our partners but our friendships rarely get the same treatment, even though they can require just as much effort as our romantic relationships. Which is why my best friend, Ruth, and I decided to mark 20 years of friendship with a trip to Paris, much like we would two decades with our husbands. Ours, too, is a commitment that deserves a lavish weekend away.
We spent three glorious days doing our favourite thing together: talking incessantly for hours on end. We cackled over cocktails at a fancy bar, over spritzes on a rooftop and rosé by the canal. We practised our French on surprisingly patient locals, stuffed our faces with baked goods and drank too much coffee. We sauntered through Montmartre and the Jardin du Luxembourg, and along the Canal Saint-Martin. She humoured me by making the trip to the original Diptyque store; I humoured her by wandering by the Sacré-Coeur. It was the perfect trip, not least because it was a rare opportunity to look back on our life together and pat ourselves on the back for a friendship well done.
I don’t lay claim to pioneering the friendiversary but neither is it a common celebration. It’s simply not normalised in society the way romantic anniversaries are, says Claire Cohen, author of BFF? The Truth About Female Friendship. She thinks it’s because there’s no “rule book” when it comes to celebrating our friendships, even though our friends are often the “longest loves of our lives”.
“It’s always struck me as really weird that we don’t celebrate our friendiversaries. Like, we’ll mark going out with a romantic partner for six months or a year, but ignore 20 years of friendship,” she says. “With a lover, there are set milestones — waymarkers by which we chart the success and progress of the relationship, and anniversaries fall into that category. With friends? We haven’t got any of those things and it’s all much looser, even though the commitment is often just the same.”
Cohen says there can be huge benefits to marking milestones in a friendship, least of all because it’s a way to celebrate the shared history between two people who’ve seen and done it all together. She and her best friend of 30 years recently celebrated their own friendiversary by going ice skating, followed by a “delicious lunch”.
“Trust me — it was the best thing we’ve done together in ages,” she says. “It felt like a moment to just be happy and proud that we’d made it this far, grown up together and let each other grow within the friendship, too. It was basically like a big high five for our friendship.”
For Ruth and me, our friendiversary was a chance to reminisce about how we’ve essentially grown up together. We went from two teenagers who met while working at Wetherspoons to each other’s maid of honour. We’ve supported each other through house moves, career changes and a baby. There’ve been countless holidays, dinners, karaoke nights, tears, secrets we’ll never tell.
“A friendiversary just reminds you that amid the busyness of life and major shifts we all experience over the decades, you’ve stuck by one another,” says Cohen. “It makes sense that you’d want to celebrate that.”
Our Parisian friendiversary also gave us an increasingly rare opportunity to make new memories. It’s not hard being friends — but maintaining deep, meaningful friendships as an adult is. Long gone is the freedom of our university days when we could decide last-minute which one of us would jump on a train, entirely determined by whichever indie night we wanted to go to (Leadmill in Sheffield or Up the Racket in Manchester?). Twenty years later, we simply don’t have time for the marathon phone calls of our youth. Instead there are countless WhatsApp messages comparing diaries so we can book a weekend together four to six weeks in advance. Paris was a real luxury compared to the usual afternoon spent running after a toddler at a National Trust property equidistant from our houses.
Over dinner, Ruth and I discussed how we’d managed it for so long and agreed that when one of us suggests doing something, we make it happen. Most of us are guilty of saying at least once to a friend that “we must meet up”, knowing full well we never will, but that is rarely the case for us. Each time we see each other is a deliberate choice not just to see each other that day but to continue making the effort. Sometimes that’s driving 60 miles to a Costa coffee in a retail park in Chesterfield just so we can see each other for an hour. Sometimes it’s travelling thousands of miles to spend a week together on a beach in Mazatlán. To do that for 20 years is no mean feat. Why not acknowledge it with a bougie weekend away and call it a friendiversary? Look at your calendar, text your best friend and make a date to celebrate how long you’ve been together.
I’m already planning our 25th.
Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?
5 People On The Benefits Of Age-Gap Friendships