Date Your Friends

I think you should date your friends.

Not romantically, obviously.

I mean actually date them. Ask them out. Make a plan. Choose somewhere to go. Put a day in the diary and make a little occasion of being together, instead of friendship always being squeezed into the gaps between everything else.

I thought about this today because of my friend Dominique.

Dom is actually quite a new friend. I've only known her for a little over a year, which somehow doesn't seem possible, because she has very quickly become one of my favourite people to be around. We're both Shakespeare fans, among other things, and it's one of those small overlaps that made the friendship feel instantly a bit deeper than its age would suggest.

But this particular story begins with a letter.

Today I sat down and wrote:

Dear Dom,

I'm writing to ask you on a date this Saturday, 12th September.

I'm proposing we go to Towneley Hall, where we can take a stroll and then immerse ourselves in the art gallery and history.

It's only £5.60 for adults.

We could also take a picnic and flask and just enjoy the gardens.

That's my idea.

Love, Fran.

RSVP.

And underneath, I drew two little boxes:

Yes, please.

No, thank you.

Dom lives just down the road from me, so I folded the note, wrote To Dom on the front, and sent Halle running down the road with it like some sort of tiny Victorian messenger.

A little while later, Halle came back carrying my letter. In true Dom fashion, there was now a huge red tick beside Yes, please, and underneath she'd written: Yes, a thousand times yes.

It made me laugh.

We do this naturally when we're falling in love with someone. We ask them out. We think about where we might take them. We choose restaurants and walks and exhibitions, make reservations, dress nicely sometimes, look forward to seeing them. We say things like: Saturday is ours.

And then, somewhere along the way, many of us stop doing that with our friends. Friendship becomes: Are you free sometime? We really need to catch up. Let's arrange something. And three months disappear.

Adult life is particularly good at swallowing friendship. There are partners and children and jobs and houses and appointments and washing and shopping and tiredness, and the endless administrative work of simply keeping a life running. The people we love become people we exchange voice notes with from supermarket car parks.

Perhaps that's why friendships sometimes deserve dates. Not extravagant ones. A flask, a picnic, a walk around a garden. £5.60 to wander through an old hall and look at paintings together.

There is something very lovely about being deliberately chosen. And romantic relationships shouldn't have exclusive ownership of that feeling. Your friends are some of the great loves of your life too — the people who sit beside you while your life changes shape, who know the backstory, who remember what you said six months ago, who listen when something has gone wrong and laugh with you when something completely ridiculous happens.

Some friendships last decades. Some arrive unexpectedly and somehow become important almost immediately. They deserve tending. Perhaps occasionally they deserve a handwritten invitation, delivered down the road by a nine-year-old.

So this Saturday, I have a date.

There will probably be a flask. There may be a picnic. There will be art and history and wandering around the gardens at Towneley Hall.

And there will be Dom, who has already RSVP'd.

Yes, a thousand times yes.