Old Friendships. Timeless Connections.

If I had to sum up Friendship in one word, it would be Comfort. – Terri Guillemets

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I just spent the weekend in Liverpool with a friend I’ve known almost my whole life.

We keep in touch regularly by phone and WhatsApp messages, but we haven’t seen each other since our trip to Helsinki and Stockholm four years ago. Later, she shared a short Instagram video from the weekend with the caption: “Nothing hits like an old friendship. Pure comfort.”

And you know what? She’s absolutely right.

Let me tell you, the “pure comfort” started the moment we set eyes on each other. Right away, adulthood was relegated to the corner and we went straight back to being total goofballs. There was nothing mature or composed about our reunion. There was certainly no sensible catching up over polite drinks. It was just complete chaos.

That chaos made the weekend feel amazing. It really made us question how we’re trusted with responsibilities, or how we even function in society. If there had been a hidden camera, the world would have finally discovered the secret lives of people who regularly forget to pay car tax, miss important emails by a week, and get their best ideas for dinner at 8:45 pm at the Lidl checkout. But wait. How do people like us hold down jobs, raise stable children, keep them alive, and operate an oven without burning the house down? Total mystery.

The main reason for the trip was for a friend’s 60th birthday party in The Wirral. For reasons we still don’t understand, we both agreed like sensible adults and booked flights to Manchester instead of Liverpool. No joke! Just before the trip, we realised we’d basically set up a mystery tour for ourselves across England. Don’t ask me how this happened. We asked ourselves the same thing, but neither of us could explain it.

If it had been with anyone else, there would have been stress, apologies, embarrassments, and self-blame. We’d probably be checking Google Maps every few minutes, trying to act calm. Instead, we just laughed like total ijits. Apparently, after nearly four decades of friendship, being competent is entirely optional.

And yes, after our accidental cross-country adventure, we finally arrived at our Airbnb, and we made it to the party where we really let our hair down. We had such a ball! We even backed it up the next day with a barbecue hosted by the birthday girl.

We stayed in a lovely Liverpool Skyline Airbnb and spent the rest of the weekend dancing, eating too much, drinking, catching up, making TikToks, staying up late, and totally forgetting to be adults.

Somewhere in the middle of all the dancing, and pretending we still had the energy of women twenty years younger, time just slipped by. We laughed until our stomachs hurt in the back of Ubers, sang along to cheesy playlists, took blurry photos that will never see the light of day, and got lost on our way back to the Airbnb after the party, convinced we could still follow directions like we used to. Every moment felt easy and safe, like the world had made a bubble just for us to be ridiculous in. There was never any need to explain our inside jokes or our weirdness. For that weekend, it felt like nothing else mattered; we were just the same two friends we’ve always been – slightly older, but unmistakably us.

Being an adult takes more self-control than we like to admit. But this weekend, I got to be irresponsible for a while, with zero consequences. I opened the door for the version of me that rarely gets to come out. The goofy, ridiculous side of me that doesn’t care about looking composed or matured. Old friendships are special like that, aren’t they? They hold onto little pieces of us, remembering our laughter and silliness from before life became all about responsibilities and forgetting why we walked into the kitchen.

I’m not saying we become fake as adults. But if you live on this lovely planet earth, then you’d know that life happens. The older we get, the more life starts sorting relationships by pressure, geography, marriages, work, exhaustion, ego, and different growth paths. Many friendships quietly dissolve without any drama. Life also hands us roles. People, and sometimes entire systems, can freeze us in versions of ourselves we’ve long outgrown. We lose track of ourselves, and we wear these roles so much that they start to feel like our whole identity.

Then you spend a weekend with someone you’ve known for close to forty years. You dance. You laugh until your ribs hurt. You accidentally book a flight to the wrong city. You make weird TikToks. Suddenly, you remember a version of yourself you didn’t realise had gone quiet.

Maybe that’s what my friend meant by “pure comfort” on Instagram. There’s history and familiarity, no doubt, but nothing compares to being with someone who truly gets you. Someone who knows every version of you and still sees you. Someone who knew you when you were just a walking disaster. Someone who knew you before certain disappointments, before the overthinking, and before the glossy coping mechanisms. Someone who can sit with who you are now without making you perform stability, success, or strength. Ok, ok I can almost hear you saying, ‘not every old friendship deserves romanticising.’ Obviously, I totally agree with you on that. Some people only knew a wounded version of us and try to keep us there. But I’m talking about the ones where silence is not awkward, where you don’t have to over-explain yourself, where laughter comes back within minutes like it never left. The ones where you don’t leave the interaction feeling evaluated, and reminds you that your life has chapters. That kind of connection is gold.

I think part of the comfort also comes from being temporarily released from self-monitoring. You’re not trying to network, impress, decode, or manage perception. You’re just present. It’s quite remarkable to be truly known over time, given how temporary, fast, transactional, curated, rushed, and disposable relationships and everything else in the world seems to be now.

The best part about old friendships is that you’ve already seen each other at your absolute worst, so there’s really nowhere left to hide anyway. Hee hee!