My oldest friend is about to turn 40. He tells me he feels good about this

I remember the shy, painfully self-aware boy from the country, but now his big laugh is ballooning out to fill the little Manhattan restaurant he has chosen for our dinner. We’re having Italian food. I’ve gone for spaghetti alle vongole. It’s something of a stretch from when I was 17 and we would eat Supermacs out of the bag while sitting on the floor round someone’s house. We met at school, which makes him – I believe – my oldest friend. There is no other person I knew back then who I still keep in touch with, let alone whose spare room I’ll still visit to stay in, or who I’ll meet for dinner whenever I’m passing through. He’s one of those people I could call and ask to stay with if it all fell apart, and we’re all incredibly lucky if we have one or two of those. Neither of us felt comfortable at home, which I suppose is true of many teenagers. My friend was the most self-contained adolescent boy I’d ever met: quiet, straight-backed, buttoned up. He left for New York in his 20s, where it was easier to live how he wanted to live; easier to be a gay man. This evening, despite the excitement of New York, I’m not really in the mood to socialise. I’m here for a week for work and I’m jetlagged. It’s been a difficult few weeks and I’m anticipating the formulaic catch-up ritual that is much of modern friendship – when you don’t see one another for extended periods, every meeting becomes an exercise in narrative storytelling. READ MOREThey fill you in on what has happened in their life since you last saw them, and you do the same. By virtue of this upload/download information exchange, you are considered to be “caught up”. The best elements of a friendship – in which you enjoy or do something together or actually connect meaningfully in the present – are often omitted. Then you return to your respectively overwhelming lives and promise to see one another in a few months. I often leave those sorts of lunches or dinners harbouring a small feeling of loss, as though an opportunity has been missed, or I’m aware I’ve been talking past someone I care about.This evening doesn’t go that way. My friend fills the space across the table between us with warmth. He doesn’t ask probing questions about the recent changes in my life. He doesn’t volunteer unsolicited advice. This in itself is such a rare and restorative quality that I feel myself regenerating softly at the table just thinking about it. Warming up and leaning in. A spring bud feeling the sun. My friend is about to turn 40, he tells me. Something shimmers between us – an awareness of passed time. So much of it. I ask him how he feels about that number – 40 – and he tells me he feels good. I believe him. He was an old young man when I met him all those years ago. He’s finally moving into the time of his life that always felt like home to him anyway. I can see by his face that he means this. There is something about that number – 40 – that relaxes something inside him. I think again of the impossibly tense, sombre boy with the straight back. He held in so much. This man across the table from me appears to hold nothing back at all. He laughs constantly. He makes the sort of appalling, maudlin jokes we’ve always bonded over. He bought his own place so now he can finally get the dog he has always wanted, since he grew up with dogs. “I pick her up from the shelter on Wednesday,” he says. “Her name is Noodle. I don’t think I’ll change it. She has a brother called Squidge.”[ Laura Kennedy: Lessons my snippy friend has taught meOpens in new window ]So much has changed for us both. The man I’m eating pasta with has transformed in the more than 20 years I’ve known him. I suppose I have too. We’ve witnessed most of the iterations of one another. We’ve spent very significant periods not seeing one another at all. We’ve lost touch a few times. But it’s one of those friendships. It requires no warm-up for reimmersion. Once you are back in one another’s company, it just picks up again. It goes by itself. There is no judgment, no comparison. There is primarily a sense of alignment that allows you to move past the surface-level information exchange very quickly, and to see one another in a deeply reassuring way. These friendships take significant time to build, and as a result they become much harder to develop from scratch with age. I recently had lunch for the first time with someone new, a person who could perhaps be a good friend with enough time and investment. She and I made tentative social moves across the table, attempting to figure one another out; to find the differences and commonalities. It really is harder to make new friends as you age – you’re thrown together with people more when you’re younger and closeness is given freedom to emerge naturally through proximity. [ It’s no wonder so many of us are lonely. Friendship has become harder and more complexOpens in new window ]And yet my oldest friend, who is such a vast presence in my life now, was once an awkward boy who wouldn’t quite look you in the eye. He’s been many different people between that point and this, and I’ve found value in all of them. All of them have borne witness to my own failures, the progress I’ve made, the versions of me between the girl he met at school and whoever he sees across the table now. All of them have been my friend. His company reminds me why making new friendships is worth the effort at every stage of your life. Not every friend will be like him, but we all need people around us who will turn a bad day around just by sitting near us. We have to work to find them.