Column: Friendship is a miracle, especially after 30

Can we talk about how hard it is to make new good friends in your thirties? Reader, I am currently going through a friends exodus of sorts — three good friends are shifting (or have shifted) out of the country in the next few months. Now if this was ten years ago, I would wave goodbye with a happy heart, wishing them all the best in their new lives. But now in my thirties, I want to clutch each of their legs like a sulky toddler crying, “Don't goooooo!”

I am luckier than most. 

Over the last two years, I've managed to make not one but two good “new” friends. This may not seem amazing to anyone else who forges new relationships quickly, but prior to that, I looked around and realised my newest friend and I had known each other for about six or seven years. 

That's quite a long time if you think about it. 

The fact that I managed to meet these new ladies (we'll come to the column about how hard it also is to make an opposite sex friend when you're in a relationship later) was a miracle in itself. For by the time you reach a certain age, you imagine you've met everyone you're likely to meet and made friends with the people you're likely to stay friends with. 

In these two cases, these were women I knew vaguely before, but circumstances had never allowed for long conversations. Several glasses of wine later, here we are. One of them has left the country, but the other is someone I meet at least once every two weeks. At least, until she leaves as well.

My other friends leaving are women I've known for a lifetime. In one case since I was four years old and we were next-door neighbours, and in the other, for 16 years, since college and beyond. We have our shorthand down pat, our likes and dislikes, our shared histories stretching out behind us like a comfortable patchwork quilt. 

I feel bereft at the idea of their loss, even while I celebrate for them, because as an only child, my friends are literally my family. I know a lot of people say this, but never is it so true as in the case of an Only.  

But, in the midst of my blues, I began to see other old friends, women who had been busy for a few years with new babies, but who are just beginning to emerge and want to see me again. Friends who I've known since I was little, friends who add to the patchwork of my life. 

And in seeing them, I began to recognise the evolution our relationships had taken, from just us to the  lovely new additions, new little friends in their own right.  After all, even though you might wish it, life can never be fully static. It has to keep changing, keep moving on, and you can either flow with the current, or cling on to a rock wishing you could keep in one place.

I was looking at a collection of e.e. cummings' poetry today, and one line leapt out at me. 

Friendship is a miracle. It is, it truly is. 

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is the author of five books, most recently a YA novel about divorce called Split and a collection of short stories about love called Before, And Then After. The views expressed here are her own.