Until Elizabeth Day met her husband in her late thirties, romantic relationships had always let her down. It was her friends who celebrated or commiserated her highs and lows. She had a thriving social life and regularly sought out new friendships – until she realised that she had grown to rely on the feeling of connection friendships brought for her own self-worth. ‘I was, in short, a friendaholic,’ she writes in her new book of the same name. ‘I wasn’t just passionate about friendship. I was addicted to it.’
But then the pandemic hit and our diaries emptied overnight. For Elizabeth, the journalist and broadcaster famous for finding the value in failure with her How To Fail podcast, it made her realise that racing around trying to meet the demands of anyone who asked for her time left little space for the close friends who brought her the most nourishment. She started questioning how she’d allowed this to happen. The book is an insightful look into the nature of friendships – as well as a candid examination of her own.
‘Sometimes, in our rush to forge connections, we make more and more friends, but actually we can end up spending less and less quality time with the ones who really count,’ she tells me as she sits down for a three-way video call with Grazia and her best friend Emma Reed Turrell. When it comes to those friends who ‘really count’, Emma is Elizabeth’s number one.
They met in fresher’s week at Cambridge University in 1998 and hit it off almost immediately. Decades later, they’re closer than ever and co-host their podcast Best Friend Therapy together, where they tackle life’s emotional challenges. There’s a chapter of Friendaholic dedicated to Emma and mentions of her are peppered throughout the book. ‘I know that she is always in my corner with this phenomenal, grounded, emotional and intellectual intelligence that I really rely on as a North Star,’ Elizabeth, 44, says of Emma. While Emma, 42, an author and psychotherapist, describes Elizabeth as ‘a part of me that is indistinguishably woven through every cell in my being and every part of my life’.
So who better than these soulmates to share their wisdom on enduring friendship? To begin with, Elizabeth doesn’t believe a friendship is a failure if it ends. ‘We need to get smarter as a society on the idea of de-stigmatising friendships ending, because it’s rare that we enter into any relationship believing it’s going to be lifelong, but there’s this idea that if a friendship ends you are bad.’
Writing the book made her realise that it helps to know what a person means by friendship. ‘For me, my metric is generosity of spirit. I don’t need the weekly phone call. In fact, I have a phobia of it. But I need to be friends with someone who I believe will be thinking the best of me,’ she says.
Despite being best friends, Elizabeth and Emma see each other only once every month or two, with Elizabeth in London and Emma in Southsea. They don’t speak on the phone much, preferring WhatsApps and voice notes. ‘When we do meet up we can hit relational depth really quickly,’ says Elizabeth. ‘We will not hold the other one to an expectation of contact,’ Emma adds.
The fact they don’t feel the need to chat every day might come as a relief to women who worry they’re not putting in sufficient time with old friends. How do they differentiate between a close friendship where you don’t need to speak all the time and one that’s run its course?
'If you allow yourself to radically accept that that friendship has ended, what feeling does it give you?’ Emma says. ‘If it gives you a feeling of relief or closure, chances are that part of your brain has fast-forwarded to that conclusion and you haven’t been ready to catch up yet. If you still feel like, actually, there’s something there, my first step would always be to open up that conversation.’
Elizabeth agrees, but she’s also a big believer in the ‘non-verbal boundary. Ghosting gets a very negative press, but sometimes it’s really difficult to put things into words without worrying that you’re being cruel to the other person,’ she says. ‘There is a way of erecting a non-verbal boundary: making your communication slightly less frequent, being slightly less available, and allowing things organically to tail off.’ For others, though, clear conversations are the best way, she adds.
How you support a friend (or fail to) during a difficult period can make or break a friendship, and this is something they’ve had to navigate over the years. When Elizabeth was in a relationship that made her unhappy, Emma trod carefully. It was when Elizabeth announced she was leaving her partner that Emma knew she could rally around her. ‘But the conflict was there concerning how much was appropriate for me to say. I left a lot of space open for her to talk about whatever she wanted to talk about. I probably did invite conversations, but I was very careful not to give my opinion, because at that point I could feel that what she needed was to know that she was unconditionally accepted by me.’
Nodding, Elizabeth says, ‘It was such a relief when I told her what was going on and she didn’t think less of me. She actually said, “I love you more now than I ever thought possible because you’re being your real self.” I can’t even put into words how important that was for me and how safe it felt when the rest of my life felt very unsafe.’
The fertility gap is another challenge that can impact friendships, as groups divide into those who have settled down and had babies and those who are childfree or have struggled or not been in a position to conceive. Elizabeth has spoken many times about her fertility issues, while Emma has two children. How have they negotiated this? ‘Emma is sometimes so thoughtful about it that I have to beg her to tell me about her children because she doesn’t want to intrude. She would always make me feel that there was time for me to show up as myself and for us to have our friendship, independent to anything else she was going through,’ Elizabeth says.
‘I thought that, if I was sensitive enough or withheld enough, I could help Liz avoid some of her pain or feelings. She had to say, “I do want to know about these parts of your life,”’ Emma replies, adding, ‘My children absolutely adore their Auntie Liz.’
What is clear is that Emma does too – and the feeling’s reciprocated. Elizabeth might have made her name for rebranding failure, but she’s certainly mastered friendship.
‘Friendaholic: Confessions Of A Friendship Addict’ by Elizabeth Day (£14.99, 4thestate) is out now. Listen to Best Friend Therapy on all podcast platforms.