02/09/2026
I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship recently.
And about something I’m not sure we talk about enough.
Friendships do not always occupy the same place or space in everybody’s life.
For some people, friendship sits alongside a partner, children, parents, siblings and a large family network.
For others, friendship is much closer to the centre.
You might be single.
You might have a partner but no children.
You might have lost a parent.
Your family may live far away, or perhaps family relationships are complicated or absent altogether.
You might simply have reached a stage of life where the people who know you best, check in on you, celebrate with you, sit beside you when things fall apart and remember the tiny details of your life are actually your friends.
And sometimes I wonder whether we fully understand what that means.
A week or two passing without calling a friend may not feel particularly significant when you have a busy household and people woven into the everyday fabric of your life.
You assume you’ll catch up soon.
But to the person whose support system looks different, that friendship may be one of the central relationships in their world.
The call matters.
The invitation matters.
Being remembered matters.
Someone wondering how they are matters.
This isn’t about suggesting that people without traditional families are lonely, incomplete or waiting around for somebody to contact them.
Many of us have very full, rich, independent lives.
It is simply about recognising that relationships do not necessarily carry the same weight for each person within them.
What might be one of many important relationships in your life may be one of the most important relationships in somebody else’s.
We understand that marriages, partnerships and families need care, attention, reliability and tenderness.
Perhaps friendship sometimes deserves to be understood in exactly the same way.
Because for many people, friends are not somewhere on the edges of family.
They are the people we love.
They are the people who have witnessed our lives.
They are belonging.
They are home.
They are family.
So the next time you think, I must text them, or I really should get back to them, perhaps don’t leave it for another week or month.
Think for a moment about the shape of their life. About who they have around them. About whether they have a partner, children, parents or a big family network to fall back into at the end of the day.
Because that message you nearly didn’t send, that phone call you thought could wait, that simple “I was thinking about you” might mean far more than you realise.
Sometimes reaching out isn’t a small thing at all.
Sometimes it’s how we remind someone that they matter and that they belong. ❤️
