We’re on day two of a girls’ trip in California — currently tucked into a little bungalow at Nick’s Cove in Point Reyes. Fifty-five degrees, overcast, beautiful. Today we head to Healdsburg for the second leg of the trip: a few days of wineries and slowing down.

It’s not lost on me what fortune it is to have friends who travel together, who intertwine their lives the way we do. Twenty-two years of knowing each other. And somewhere in that many years, I’ve started noticing something I didn’t expect: it takes real work to keep knowing each other, season after season.

Friendships take maintenance too

We talk a lot about the effort marriage takes. Less about the effort friendship takes — especially the lifelong kind, the kind that’s meant to last.

But it’s true here too. It can take biting your tongue to spare a feeling. It can take the self-awareness to know when you need a little space. Mostly, it takes a willingness to let someone change — to let them be who they actually are now, not the version of them you’ve been carrying around in your head for two decades.

I’ve changed a lot in the last few years. Physically, mentally, spiritually. I’m not who I was in 2023, or any year before that. And at 46 to 50 years old, I think my friends and I are all a little more susceptible than we’ve ever been to what psychologists call the “end of history illusion” — the sense that we’re finally, finally fully baked. That this version of us is the one that’ll still be here in ten years.

It never is. Everything we live through changes us — what we experience together, and what we experience apart.

The work of staying aligned

Maybe that’s the real project of a long friendship: creating enough shared experience that the changes have a chance to line up. That we keep shaping each other, instead of just being shaped separately by everything else going on in our lives.

In a marriage, you’re together by default, every day. Friendship doesn’t work that way. Seeing each other takes choice, planning, commitment — sometimes a ten-minute driveway conversation, sometimes months of planning a trip like this one.

I can feel, sometimes, that my friends don’t fully trust the person I am right now. That this steadier, calmer version of me hasn’t quite been believed yet — like they’re waiting for the veneer to crack and the old, more judgmental, grudge-holding version of me to show back up. It stings a little, honestly. But I understand it. All I can do is keep showing up as who I actually am, and let trust catch up over time.

The fear underneath it

There’s a real fear in all of this: what if the versions of us that exist today just aren’t meant for each other the way our younger versions were? What if the choices we’ve each made have quietly moved us in different directions?

It’s hard to see someone clearly today when you share so much history. We remember each other single and searching. Before kids and after. In seasons of depression, anxiety, loss. It’s easy to lean on the story instead of looking at the person standing in front of you right now — and the real work is choosing, again and again, to actually meet each other where we are.

Love, not just liking

It’s a little funny — and a little humbling — that in my mid-forties I still catch myself wondering if my friends like me. It’s different than middle school, though. I don’t need every girl to like me. I need these three. And what I want from them isn’t really “like” — it’s love. Sustained, durable, doesn’t-flinch-when-I-change love.

The truth is we don’t earn that kind of love. We just give it, and we receive it.

I think, in the end, it’s the relationship itself — the whole tangled, weaving unit of us — that will be the thing that carries us forward. Putting that ahead of our own egos. Knowing that in a real crisis, we’d each drop everything for the others. Knowing that love, moving forward together, matters more than staying loyal to who we used to be.