I'm still grieving a best friend I never had

Welcome to Single POV, personal essays from a single perspective of a not-so-single hopeless (sometimes disappointed) romantic

Last weekend, I complimented a girl’s roller skate shoulder strap. It made me want to get back into roller skating, and instead of going home and spending hours on Google trying to find the same one, I just asked her where she’d bought it. She could have looked at me funny. Instead, ten minutes later, I’d promised to send her my Brazil Tips PDF, and she’d followed me back on Instagram.

I love those spontaneous connections. But the older I get, the rarer they seem.

Not because people are less friendly, but because our lives become so full. We have friends to squeeze into already busy calendars, especially if, like me, you weren’t afraid of trying Bumble BFF and ended up with a handful of one-on-one friendships. Making room for someone new can start to feel like a chore. You really want to do it, to give them your full attention, but there aren’t enough hours in the day. Not to mention how hard it is to put someone up to speed with all of your drama and trauma.

When I look at my friendships spread across different groups and different cities (well, two, really), I sometimes grieve the one thing I never had: that single, lifelong best friend. The one who saw me learn how to ride a bike, watched my first kiss, and sat beside me through a work crisis. They never need any context, because they’ve seen it all.

I have friends who’ve been there for those moments. Just not all the same person.

Maybe that's why I loved watching New Girl. Jess had the loft and the housemates, sure, but she also had Cece. Their decades-long female friendship gave us flashbacks to awkward teenage years and endless reminders of how much they'd grown together. Watching them made that kind of lifelong best friend feel like a fundamental part of life, as essential as drinking two litres of water a day. If you don't have it, it almost feels like you've done it wrong.

But not all of us stayed in the same place our whole lives. Some of us—read: me—changed schools, moved countries, and had to learn, over and over again, how to let people go. Most of the time, I really didn’t want to, and being the one who left hurt. No matter how much you try to keep in touch, life happens, and texts or FaceTime can’t create new, shared memories. So all you can do is reminisce.

But then I remember something: I have my sisters.

During all five schools and two universities, they were always the people I came home to (even if, along the way, that became more metaphorical than literal). They’ve seen far more than the bike-riding moments. They’ve seen the parts of me I never showed anyone else. And maybe that’s true for other people, too. Maybe their forever person isn’t a best friend, but their mum. It might not look like shoe-shopping trips or late-night conversations about sex, but it’s still someone who’s been there through every version of them.

Whenever I read essays about girls accepting not having friends, they comfort me, because we’re slowly dismantling the idea that everyone is supposed to have one best friend who’s been there since diapers. That if your friendships don’t look like a TV show, you’ve somehow missed out.

Maybe we’ve been looking for the wrong thing. Maybe what we’re really longing for isn’t a best friend, but a witness. Someone who remembers the versions of us we’ve forgotten ourselves. For some people, that’s a childhood best friend. For others, it’s a sibling, a parent, or someone else entirely. And the rest? The friends we meet at twenty-five, thirty-five, or fifty-five? They don’t need to know every chapter to become an important part of the story. They just need to be there for the next one.

I still hope that, when I’m ninety-something, I’ll meet another ninety-something, sit down over coffee, and discover all the unexpected things we have in common. They won’t know the little girl who couldn’t ride a bike yet. But maybe that’s okay. Someone already does.

If you’ve also always wanted a lifelong bestie, then let’s be friends! Subscribe so you don’t miss the next Single POV essay.

Sincerely,
Renata 💋