7. decade-long friends

and why they matter

What I did today

I spent three hours of a beautiful Sunday with a very long-time friend, one of few people left in my life who I’ve known for 17 (!) years, since we were 11 years old.

You can’t “make” old friends. You can only grow into them, and there is incredible beauty and intention in that. This especially means the world to me, as I grew up in a place and worldview so profoundly different from my current life; by way of that, I feel I’ve lost commonality with most of my closest friends from home, resigned to the inevitability of it given rapidly changing circumstances and lack of common ground. The few I’ve managed to keep around are now some of the relationships I most value.

On the surface, there’s nothing groundbreaking or extremely unique to these relationships. I don’t talk to them every day, I see them rarely, but there’s unexplainable shared context that makes it incredibly easy to pick back up, to leave certain things unsaid and have them understood. That kind of synchronicity between people can only be built up over decades. The next time I can meet someone new that evolves into a 17-year-long shared history, I will be in my mid-to-late forties.

Long-term friendships are a quiet act of defiance in a world obsessed with disposability. I find the few enduring relationships that transcend space and time fascinating, they are something closest to a “grand design” that I believe brings meaning to seeming coincidences, that could end up shaping life in meaningful ways.

Prompt: Nostalgic art that represents lifelong friends who transcend space and time from childhood into adulthood

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Units of understandable time

A decade is the longest unit of time I can understand in concept. It’s enough time for mega trends to rise and fall, for entire industries to be born and disrupted, for places to transform, for people to grow further apart than strangers, or become inseparable. And yet, in the grand scheme of things, ten years is a blink — if you’re lucky, you blink ten times before the end. How will you spend your ten blinks, and with whom?

There’s a unique weight to decade-long connections. They hold the full spectrum of who you’ve been: the naive, the reckless, the ambitious, the heartbroken, the thriving. These relationships, especially friendships, are time capsules of yourself and others that bring context to your growth, your missteps, and the constant parts of yourself that have stayed intact.

The unsaid but understood

One of the things you can only earn slowly, is unspoken understanding between two people. You no longer need to say everything, fill context around a memory, or wonder if your tone came through correctly. They know the history behind your upbringing, your quirks, your issues; and even when life becomes unrecognizably different than those recent but long lost shared contexts, they don’t need a preface—they just understand.

There are only a few things in life that aren’t instantly accessible given unlimited resources, and friendships built over phases of growing up that can’t be replayed are one of them. For that reason, archives of shared experiences, especially early ones that felt innocuous at the time, or traumatic ones that lead to radical clarity, are worth their weight in gold. These are not just memories but threads that weave deeper connection through asynchronous, seemingly pluripotent lives that nonetheless have irrevocable shared origin.

The resilience test

Careers, relationships, distance, time zones; you could point to any one of these being the Achilles heel of a friendship that didn’t last. But there are a few that, despite periods of disconnect (sometimes years), bounce back with surprising elasticity. It bends but doesn’t break. It allows space for growth while maintaining a tether to the past.

I wonder what is there at the essence of friendships that endure, vs. fade. Some of it feels attributable to circumstance (a shared city, line of work, set of mutual friends, intersection in experience or hardship), but empirically I’ve found that that alone is not enough to re-catalyze things. There’s also no amount of work one person can do without reciprocity to some degree.

There’s something deeply reassuring about knowing that, even if months or years pass without a text, there’s a small nexus of people who have known you and care for you, the you before the adulthood set in, who will text back. Because the foundation is nostalgia, childhood, and connection. There’s a small band of humans out there from your shared past that may shape small or big parts of your shared future.

Mirror effect

"The best mirror is an old friend."
– George Herbert

These relationships also serve as mirrors, reflecting not just who you were, but who you’ve become. Sometimes, they remind you of a version of yourself you’ve forgotten. Other times, they call you out on bullshit because they’ve seen enough of your patterns to know, and like you enough to tell you. And in profound moments, they remind you of your strength when you feel like you’ve lost it.

Long-term relationships anchor us in ways we often don’t realize until we look back.

Why they matter

Entropy increases, transience increases. It feels increasingly easy and acceptable to ghost, unsubscribe, and “move on” today — having someone who has seen you through multiple versions of yourself is invaluable. The world spins, but decade-long relationships remind us that not everything has to.

When you think of someone, send the text, make the call, plan the meal. These connections are rare, and in a world of fleeting interactions, they are a quiet but powerful rebellion against the temporary.

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