To the Friends Who Once Felt Like Home

An ode to the friendships that shaped us, the people we loved, and the quiet sadness of no longer being part of their everyday lives.

Have you ever looked back over your life and realised there were people who played such an enormous role in it, and wondered whether they ever truly knew just how much they meant to you?

Those rare friendships where you never felt like you were too much. Too needy. Too dramatic. Too complicated.

Where you didn't have to explain yourself, apologise for being yourself, or work hard to feel accepted.

They just brought out the best in you. I've been thinking about two such friendships lately, not because anything terrible happened, but because quite accidentally, I discovered through social media that one of my dearest old friends had recently married. And only last year, I discovered another had done the same.

Two weddings. Two beautiful new chapters.

Tears not because I wasn't happy for them,

but because there was a time when I couldn't have imagined not being there and perhaps because, with the understanding I have today, I see those friendships a little differently.

The first friend

I remember meeting him at a youth camp. He was sitting along a wall with a group of friends, and almost instantly, I knew, not just that we would become friends, but something about who he was and, in my mind, where his life might one day lead.

Perhaps I saw something that he hadn't yet recognised in himself, or perhaps something he already knew but wasn't ready, or able, to share with the world.

I never needed him to explain it.

It didn't change a thing about how I saw him or how much I loved him and we became the closest of friends.

But life doesn't always unfold in the direction we imagine, especially when faith, family and expectations have already written so much of the story for us.

He married. He had three beautiful children. He built a life. Through those years, I watched him. I remember how tired he always seemed.

At the time, I couldn't understand why. I saw the exhaustion, but I didn't understand the weight that might have been sitting beneath it.

We would stay up for hours while his wife snored on the couch, watching movies that interested us far more than they interested her. We'd talk about art, culture and life, and laugh until the early hours. There was something so wonderfully easy about our friendship, I knew and loved the man sitting beside me.

Yet I didn't fully comprehend how much of himself he might have been holding within.

How exhausting it could be to live with expectations that didn't necessarily reflect who you were, how complicated it might feel to love the family and life you had created, while also carrying a part of yourself that had never been given the freedom to be fully expressed.

I had seen something in him from the beginning.

But seeing someone and understanding what it costs them to live a life where they cannot fully be themselves are two very different things.

Eventually, life took an unexpected turn. A conversation opened a door, and what had perhaps seemed impossible for so many years began to become possible.

When I saw the photograph of his wedding, tears rolled down my face, because there he was the friend I had known all those years ago. The man I had always seen.

Only this time, something was different, he no longer looked tired. The stress and heaviness I remembered seemed to have lifted.

He looked alive.

I found myself thinking about that young man sitting along the wall at youth camp, and the extraordinary journey between then and now.

A marriage. Three children. Years of responsibilities, expectations, love, uncertainty and choices that only he could ever fully understand and now, a wedding photograph that spoke to me of something I had hoped for him all those years ago.

Happiness.

Not because his earlier life hadn't held love or meaning. I know it did, but because there was something beautiful about seeing him now, seemingly at ease with himself and the person standing beside him. I had always wanted that for him and perhaps that is why I cried.

Because sometimes we see something beautiful in another person long before life gives them the space to live it and sometimes, many years later, we get the privilege of witnessing that possibility become their reality.

And then there was the other one...

Oh, this friendship. He was considerably younger than me, but there was an instant connection.

He made me laugh.

Little did he know, during seasons when life wasn't always easy, he made life feel okay. He was the life of the party. The room came alive around him.

Funny, charismatic, entertaining.

He could hold an audience without even trying.

And we were inseparable.

We watched My Best Friend's Wedding and The Mirror Has Two Faces together. We laughed, talked, shared stories and simply enjoyed being in each other's company.

Two peas in a pod, He had girlfriends. He flirted. He played the part of the charming young man everyone expected him to be.

He also came from a very well-known family within the church, where there were expectations, spoken and unspoken, about what a young man's life should look like.

While he seemed so confident on the outside, I often wondered about the parts of himself he kept private.

Unlike my first friend, he never seemed tired or burdened.

He was the actor, and we were his audience.

Or perhaps that's simply how I remember him now. I remember writing to him one day, telling him that it was okay not to be in a relationship.

That he didn't need to find someone simply because he had reached an age where people expected it, that it was okay just to be himself.

The following day, I heard through the grapevine that he was engaged. He hadn't told me.

And that hurt.

Not because I wanted him for myself, but because I thought I was the person he could tell anything.

We were best friends.

I had been the person sitting beside him watching romantic comedies, laughing at the absurdities of love and life and somehow, I hadn't been part of this announcement.

Of course, I went to the wedding and just before the vows, in a moment that was so wonderfully him, he turned to me and said:

"Deb, let's have a quick kiss. Get Mum annoyed!"

His mum had always worried we might end up together. I think she saw me as something of a bad influence. We were so close that even one of his former girlfriends blamed me for their breakup., which was rather ironic, considering I was the one who had introduced them!

Those memories still make me smile.

There was so much laughter in that friendship.

Eventually, he went overseas and life did what life so often does. Time zones, distance, responsibilities and different worlds slowly found their way between us.

He and his wife became something of a powerhouse couple in London.

I was a mother of two, our lives looked very different.

When his marriage began to unravel, he called, I remember wishing I could somehow be in London, sitting beside him, listening and helping him through it.

I didn't really know his wife well. By then, distance and the different directions our lives had taken meant I knew very little about their everyday relationship.

But I knew him.

I knew the man who loved generously, who gave so much of himself to the people he cared about.

I remembered the friend who could make an entire room laugh, who seemed to have an extraordinary ability to make everyone around him feel special.

I knew he loved her. But I also wondered whether loving someone and being in love with someone had become two very different things. I wondered whether he had spent so many years trying to build the life he believed he was supposed to have that somewhere along the way, his own needs and desires had become harder to acknowledge.

Perhaps I was seeing things through the eyes of the friend who had known him years before. I couldn't possibly know everything that had happened within their marriage.

But I knew how much I wanted to be there for him.

Not to fix anything. Not to tell him what he should do.

Just to sit beside my old best friend, the way we once had, and let him know he didn't have to face it all alone, perhaps, more than anything, I wanted him to know that he never had to be anyone other than himself with me.

The things we couldn't see

Something I have come to understand through my own healing journey is that we can love someone deeply and still not fully comprehend what they are carrying.

Both these men were extraordinary friends to me, they were thoughtful, generous, protective, funny and kind.

They made me feel seen.

They made me feel accepted.

They brought a kind of laughter into my life that I have rarely experienced outside my closest friendship and my marriage.

There was a wholeness to those friendships. I didn't feel I needed to become someone else to be loved.

And perhaps that's why I find myself reflecting so much on them now.

I wonder whether they experienced the same freedom with me.

I knew things about them that weren't necessarily spoken openly in the worlds we inhabited.

And I loved them.

There was never a question of that.

But loving someone unconditionally doesn't automatically mean we understand the full extent of their struggle.

Especially when faith and religion are part of the story. There is something particularly complicated about growing up or living within Christian communities where love is spoken about so freely, yet certain parts of a person's identity may feel impossible to acknowledge. I don't say that to dismiss people's convictions or the complexities of faith.

I say it because I have watched people I loved navigate those complexities, and I wonder now what it cost them.

How much pressure did they feel to meet expectations?

How much of their lives was shaped by what other people needed them to be?

How often did they put everyone else's happiness before their own?

And how much courage did it take to finally choose a different path?

I used to think that because I accepted them, that was enough. Today, I realise acceptance and understanding aren't necessarily the same thing. I may have been a safe place in some ways, but I didn't fully understand the weight of the world they were navigating.

I didn't understand trauma the way I do now.

Or shame.

Or the extraordinary ways people learn to adapt, perform, please and protect themselves in order to remain connected to the people and communities they love.

I think about the laughter we shared and I wonder how often laughter was also a place of refuge for them.

How much more might I have noticed if I had understood then what I understand today?, not because I could have fixed anything.

But perhaps I could have listened differently.

Perhaps I could have been more curious about the things that remained unspoken, and I would have recognised that while they were giving me a place to feel completely myself, they might still have been searching for that same freedom.

The sadness of not being there

When I discovered the weddings, I felt something I hadn't expected.

Sadness.

Not resentment.

Not anger.

Just the sadness of absence.

I thought about My Best Friend's Wedding and laughed at the irony. There was a time when I would have imagined being there, celebrating, perhaps even standing beside them.

Being part of the photographs, speeches.

The laughter.

The moment when two people promise to share their lives.

Instead, I was looking at photographs on a screen and I realised that somewhere along the way, I had become someone who knew them once, rather than someone who knew their everyday lives.

That is a strange kind of loss, because no one has done anything wrong and there has been no great falling out, no terrible betrayal.

Just the quiet passing of time.

Different countries. Different responsibilities. Different seasons.

Suddenly, people who once knew almost everything about you have whole chapters of their lives you know very little about.

I don't think we talk enough about the grief of friendships that simply drift apart, especially the ones that were once so full of life.

The ones where you could pick up the phone without thinking.

Where you laughed until your stomach hurt.

Where you knew each other's stories, families, habits and dreams.

The ones that made ordinary days extraordinary.

Sometimes, I think we assume that if a friendship was truly meaningful, it would have lasted in the same form forever.

But perhaps that isn't how love works.

Perhaps some relationships shape us so profoundly that their place in our story remains, even when their place in our everyday life changes.

What I understand now

There is another part of this reflection that has stayed with me. For years, I thought about how much these friendships meant to me.

How much joy they brought.

How accepted I felt.

How much I loved them.

But I hadn't really considered whether I had been as good a friend to them as they had been to me.

Not because I didn't care but because I didn't yet have the understanding to recognise what might have been happening beneath the surface.

Healing has a way of changing how we remember things. It doesn't necessarily change the events themselves, but it can change what we notice.

We begin to recognise the patterns, the silences, the protective behaviours and the ways people learn to survive within the expectations around them.

We begin to see that someone can be the funniest person in the room and still carry things no one knows about.

That someone can be generous, loving and devoted while quietly struggling with questions about their own identity and belonging.

Sometimes the people who make us feel most accepted are themselves longing for a place where they can experience that same acceptance.

I can't go back and ask all the questions I wish I had asked and perhaps those questions wouldn't have been mine to ask anyway.

But I can honour what those friendships taught me, I can recognise that love isn't always about understanding everything.

Sometimes it is simply about leaving room for someone to become who they are, without withdrawing our love when their life takes a direction we didn't expect.

To my old best friends

If you ever happen to read this, I hope you know how much you meant to me.

I hope you know that when I remember you, I remember the laughter first.

The late-night conversations.

The movies.

The ridiculous moments.

The ease of being together.

I remember feeling completely accepted.

I remember two people who brought out some of the happiest, most carefree parts of me.

And I hope, in some small way, I gave you that too.

I am sorry for the things I didn't understand then.

Not because I believe I could have changed your journeys, but because I wish I had understood more of what those journeys might have asked of you and although there is a little sadness in discovering these beautiful new chapters from a distance, there is also enormous joy.

Because when I look at your wedding photographs, I don't see the friends I've lost.

I see two people I once loved so dearly, living lives that have continued to unfold in ways I could never have imagined.

I see happiness.

I see possibility.

And I see something I always wanted for you both. The freedom to love and to be loved, without having to lose yourselves in the process.

wasn't there to witness the beginning of these chapters, but I was privileged to be part of earlier ones.

And those chapters will always matter to me.

So here's to the friendships that once felt like home.

To the people who made us laugh when life was hard, to the ones who saw us, even when we didn't fully see them.

To the love that remains, even when the closeness changes.

And to my two old best friends...

I'm so glad you found your people, I only wish I could have been there to raise a glass.

With love, always.