Three Friends, Four Siblings, and Why That Is Enough

Making friends has never come easily to me. But somewhere in my fifties I stopped apologizing for a small circle and started celebrating what I actually have.

Making friends has never come easily to me.

Maybe it is because I am shy. Maybe it is because we moved every two years until I was thirteen and I learned early that just when you found your people, it was time to pack up and leave them behind. Probably it is both. What I know is that I arrived at adulthood without a large circle of friends and spent more years than I care to admit wondering if that meant something was wrong with me.

It does not. It never did.

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I had friends in college and in graduate school. But those friendships were cemented by shared time and shared circumstance. Once we left, the cracks appeared, and eventually we drifted in the way that people do when the thing holding them together is gone. It is not anyone’s fault. It is just what happens.

What I have instead are three friends. Women I found as an adult, women who know everything about me, women I could call at three in the morning and they would answer without question. They have been with me through the best days of my life and the worst ones. We have history. And what I have come to understand, somewhere in my fifties, is that this is not a small life. It is a very full one.

The French Teacher Who Gave Me France

The first friendship began in a college classroom. She was my French teacher, then my tutor, and somewhere along the way she became one of the most important people in my life.

It is because of her that my love of France grew into something deep and lasting. Her family, who lived in Paris and had homes in several regions across France, embraced me as one of their own. They took me in, fed me, argued with me at the dinner table, took me to towns and villages I would never have found on my own and taught me things no guidebook ever could. The history of the regions, the food, what it means to actually live French rather than simply visit. For many years I spent every summer with them. Those summers are among the happiest of my life.

The remarkable thing, and I still find it remarkable, is that my friend’s grandmother was actually an American who grew up in Norfolk, Virginia and moved to Paris where she met her husband. The next town over from where I lived for many years. And not only that. Her family raised money to have a statue erected in Virginia to commemorate a relative who was crucial to the American victory in the Revolutionary War.

That friendship started in a classroom and grew into a family. I do not take that for granted for a single day.

The Violin Teacher Who Arrived at Exactly the Right Moment

The second friendship began with a phone call to the symphony.

I was twenty-eight. I had decided, with the kind of determination that only comes when you are finally ready to start actually living, to tick off one of my long-held dreams. I wanted to learn to play the violin. I called the symphony, they gave me a name, and I showed up for my first lesson with no idea that I was about to make a lifelong friend.

I will be honest with you. I was not a gifted violin student. Not even close. My dog Munchen left the room every single time I practiced. I eventually stopped taking lessons and I cannot say that anyone in the house was sorry about it. 

But the friendship? That was the real lesson. We share a love of music, the fine arts, baking, food, travel and books. She came into my world at exactly the moment I needed that kind of person in it, and she has never left.

The Friend Who Saw the Sparks Before I Did

The third friendship has a story that still makes me smile.

She was there the day I met Bill. We had actually crossed paths years before we became close friends, but it was that particular day she remembers most clearly. She says she could see the sparks from across the room before I even knew what was happening. A year later Bill and I became a couple. A few years after that my friend and I were inseparable.

We have traveled all over the world together, including several trips to Paris. We share the same loves: books, art, music, food. The same thread that seems to run through all three of my closest friendships. I have thought about that more than once. They say like attracts like and I believe it. Three women, found at different moments in my life, similar in so many ways and yet different enough that we grow and learn from one another still.

And Then There Are My Siblings

My other great friendships are with my siblings. We are four, and we grew up sharing secrets and adventures, moving from place to place together as a little world inside the bigger world of each new city and school. When you move every two years, your siblings become your constants. They are the ones who already know the story. We have been each other’s harshest critics and loudest champions, sometimes in the same afternoon.

As adults we scattered. One to Europe, one to the Midwest, one to Florida, one who stayed home, along with other moves in between. The way families do when it is time to build your own life. But through the holidays and the gatherings and the meet-ups in Europe and a very great many phone calls, we kept the bonds strong. We cemented what childhood had started.

And now, for the first time in our adult lives, three of us are living in the same town. I do not take that lightly. There is something about having the people who have known you longest living down the road. They were there for the tree that fell on the house. I am there when someone needs an extra pair of hands. We argue sometimes, we are siblings and not saints, but at the end of any disagreement the love is still there even if we need a few days’ space first.

What a Small Circle Really Looks Like

I think we spend a lot of our younger years measuring our friendships. Are we popular, do we have enough, should we be socializing more, collecting more people? Social media makes it worse. Everyone else always seems to be surrounded by a laughing group of women who brunch together every Sunday and have known each other since kindergarten.

My husband actually has exactly that. A group of six who went to grade school together, high school together, and are still close after all these years, including one week away together every year. It is a friendship I have admired for decades. It is genuinely lovely to see.

But it is not the only way.

By fifty, most of us have stopped measuring. Or we should have. What I know now is that friendship has never been about quantity. It is about having people in your life who know your real story. The good, the bad, and the complicated. And love you anyway. It is about showing up for each other across decades and distances and difficult seasons, without keeping score.

A large circle of acquaintances is easy to find. Someone who answers at three in the morning, that is rare. That is everything.

Three friends and four siblings. A life built on the kind of love that answers without question.

I do not need more than that. Not even a little.

Tell me about your friendships. How many close friends do you have, and how did you find them? Have you always had a small circle, or did it narrow as you got older? 

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