There are phone calls that change the direction of your day. Female friendship over 40 is its own kind of Magic.
Not the ones with news or urgency or something that needs to be handled. Just a voice on the other end of the line saying I was thinking about you. I wanted to check in. How are you really doing?
A very dear friend of mine called me like that not long ago.
She knew I had been moving through a big season of change. The kind of change that doesn’t always show on the outside but that you carry quietly on the inside, rearranging things, figuring out who you are becoming and what you are leaving behind. She knew because she pays attention. Because that is the kind of woman she is.
She didn’t call with advice. She didn’t call with a solution. She called because she wanted to know I was okay. And then she said let’s get together. Let’s catch up properly. Let’s sit across from each other and actually talk.
So we did.
We met for coffee and we sat there for what felt like both five minutes and an entire afternoon. We talked about everything and nothing. We laughed. We shared. We updated each other on our lives the way only women who truly know each other can, with honesty and warmth and no need to perform or impress.
And I drove home feeling fuller than I had in a while.
There is something that happens when a woman who loves you looks at you across a table and really sees you. Not the version of you that has it together. Not the version you present to the world. Just you. The real one. The one who is still figuring things out and is brave enough to say so.
We talk a lot about self-care. About bubble baths and journaling and long walks and all the beautiful ways we tend to ourselves. And those things matter. But I think we sometimes forget to name this one. Female friendship over 40 has a quality to it that I don’t think we talk about enough.
The phone call from a friend who was just thinking of you.
The coffee that stretches into two hours because neither of you wants to leave.
The conversation that reminds you that you are known. That someone out there is holding space for your story even when you haven’t spoken in a while.
That is care too. That is some of the most sacred care there is.
I think women have a gift for this that is unlike anything else in the world. We feel each other. We sense when something has shifted. We know when a friend needs a glass of wine or a cup of coffee or just someone to sit with her in the middle of whatever she is moving through. We don’t always need the words. We just know.
And when we answer that knowing, when we pick up the phone, when we show up, when we say I see you and I am here, we are doing something quietly extraordinary.
We are reminding each other that we are not alone.
If you have a friend like this in your life, tell her. Tell her what it means to you. Tell her that the call mattered, that the coffee mattered, that she matters.
And if you haven’t called your person in a while, the one you have been meaning to reach out to, the one who has been on your mind, maybe today is the day. She is probably thinking of you too.
That is what female friendship over 40 feels like when it is real. Like coming home.