The firsr time I met my friend Penny Sychrava, I was 10 years old. She seemed fantastically exotic, thanks to her Czech inheritance, with her pale complexion and mass of curly dark hair. She was non-conformist and confident; I was fascinated. Years later, she told me that she immediately liked me too. We sat next to each other in art class throughout secondary school. We shared a vaguely rebellious, arty sensibility and, when we hit our teens, the friendship intensified; we loved the same books and music and clothes, we were part of the same gang of friends, we went to our first nightclub and our first gig together. They were our most formative years.
I've known Penny for nearly 30 years now. It's the friendship which has withstood the most upheaval in my life. We have both been through life changes - break-ups, bereavements, relocations, various jobs (we work in related fields; I'm a journalist, she's an arts publicist) and Penny has also had a child. I did wonder if that might alter our friendship, though, as it turned out, she was still the same old Penny, except with a lovely daughter in tow, and, if anything, she found that she needed her friends around even more. We've been through all of this, but are still just as close today, in our late thirties, as when we first bonded in art class. The Spanish have a saying: 'A life without a friend is like a death without a witness.'
Penny and I have witnessed each others' lives right from the beginning and I do think that our shared history helps us make some sense of the way we live now. It has also probably set a positive template for all my later friendships. Recent research has shown that most of us have an average of 30 friends at any one time, six of whom we consider close. This applies to both sexes, although men are likely to have one less close friend than women do. More than 50 per cent of British adults claimed their friendships were more important than career, money or even family.
Two years ago, I moved to rural Ireland for the sake of a relationship. It was a miscalculation on many different levels. I believed I would be able to adjust painlessly from city to country living, that I would find it easy to adapt my working life to my new circumstances, that the relationship would make up for everything I'd sacrificed. But the most bonkers assumption I made was that life without my old friends around would not be all that different. How wrong I was - I lasted eight months. I hadn't realised how important it is to any love affair to have friends around, so you don't live just through your partner.
It was the familiar, easy laughter I missed, those frequent chinwags with Penny or other friends, over tea or cocktails or brunch, about the inconsequential things of everyday life. I had one old friend who lived nearby, which was a huge help, but still, after a while, I went into a kind of decline. All the preoccupations, idiosyncrasies and values I'd accumulated over the years, that made me me, and helped me make sense of the world, were suddenly irrelevant.
At the risk of sounding like a drama queen, without my friends around me, I began to feel like I was becoming invisible, like the essence of me was ebbing away. I missed the old me and I wasn't sure if I was ever going to get her back. That's when I came home.
My experience is not an unusual one, according to Phillip Hodson, fellow of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy: 'Lifelong friends help us come to a unique sense of our own identity, a sense that may not necessarily be reflected in our relationships with our parents or siblings or partners. We seek likeminded souls and when we find them, we tend to hang on to them.'
I've come to realise that my strongest friendships are really very strong. I know this because I tested them to the limit by selfishly swanning off to Ireland and abandoning them - and they stood by me. Of course, some would say that this is a hopelessly childlike, Pollyannaish view, but real friendships, the sort that endure, are unconditional. And that doesn't mean they are necessarily sickly-sweet; they can be quite brutal in their candour and honesty.
Research has shown that over a lifetime we are likely to make around 400 friends, but just 10 per cent of these will last. Everyone else may give up on you when things go horribly wrong or you behave badly, but your real friends stand by you, even if, as I did, you abandon them to pursue a patently unrealistic romantic dream. Surely that's the whole point: they love you despite the blips and the unhinged behaviour; they love you for the 'real you'; they accept you, get you, they know what makes you tick and what makes you laugh.
And it's the friendships which go beyond status or money or glamour that survive. Real friends don't disown you if you're going through a broke phase or a fat phase, if you're unwell, if your career is in a less than glittering patch, if you're chronically single or in a wildly unsuitable relationship. If anything, crises are a leveller. As Alain de Botton puts it in his book, Status Anxiety : 'There may be no better way to clear the diary of engagements than to wonder who among our acquaintances would make the trip to the hospital bed.' And such situations, he says, force us to rethink our friendships, giving us 'a clear reason to concentrate our energies on those relationships which will best withstand the erosion of our standing'.
Susie Boyt, whose latest novel, Only Human (Review), follows a key female friendship, cannot imagine her day-to-day existence without her friends, five of whom she's known from before the age of 10.
'Anyone I've known less than 15 years, is a bit of a new, risky friend,' she laughs. 'Seeing friends for me isn't a luxury, it's a need. All my best friendships have had an absolute quality to them; both parties tacitly agree to offer an all-weather, round-the-clock, five-star service. Talking unguardedly with a friend, not having to explain everything because they know you so well, is one of life's great pleasures.'
During my eight months in Ireland, Penny was temporarily living in Spain with her family and also feeling homesick. We exchanged emails frequently. We missed each other. There was something else, too: we both missed the sense of ourselves that was somehow reinforced by our friendship. Because ultimately, aren't our identities largely a product of our loved ones' knowledge and memories of us and their feelings for us? All these years, my friends had been reflecting an image of me back at myself.
For many people, friendships are the longest, most constant, relationships in their lives. We stay independent adults for longer as we delay pairing off and having children or decide not to have them at all. Geraldine, who works in publishing, has known her best friend, Jill, for 30 years.
'It is the most constant relationship in my life and far more enduring than any of the men I have dated. Jill has been with her partner for 26 years. They are very happy, but have never lived together, and I think our friendship has been a major support in our lives. When my mother died, it was Jill who helped me through it. As you get older, the really strong friendships develop. We're not just a coupled society any more. We all have more choices about how we live now and I'm very happy with the choices I've made.'
'Friendship has been promoted,' says Hodson. 'And it's a particularly British phenomenon. In the UK, we are much further down this road than the more religious European countries. After all, we have the leading divorce rate in Europe and, as we become less traditionally and instinctively reliant on spouses and families, we form "para-families". Our traditional families are still important to us, but many of us also set up a sort of second family because we find that the conventional kind doesn't give us all we need.'
I have never been so relieved in my life as when I found myself surrounded by old friends after I returned from Ireland. I'd been proved wrong, but none of them said: 'I told you so.' They just helped get me back on my feet. And now that I'm back among them, I try to be a better friend than I was. I like to think that I'd do more or less anything for them, that no mercy mission would be too much trouble, no favour too big. As it happens, I'm in another relationship now, but I've learned my lesson.