Recently my 11-year-old niece was showing me some cute content she and her bestie were exchanging on the app CapCut. Videos of them hanging out accompanied by Q&As: what’s your BFF’s fave colour? Song? Star sign? Style? All this was animated with stickers about how much their BFF rocks. I was struck by the level of almost religious devotion. It took me back to my youth when my girl friendships were similarly intense.

But then, to quote Carrie Bradshaw, lynchpin of arguably the most famous group of BFFs in Gen X’s pop culture, later that day I got to thinking… about how my friendships now in midlife suddenly feel that same level of intense again. There’s been a shift: the long phone calls are back; the exchanging of books, cards with ‘love’ messages, just because. Lunches putting the world to rights – and sober these days! So, we remember it all.

The rituals may be different but we’re saying the same thing as my niece and her BFF:

I see you, I appreciate you, you are the BEST.

Many of us have friends who have seen us through all of them too. Last month, for example, I was going for lunch with a friend I’ve known for thirty-plus years. I texted before she picked me up: “Ran out of HRT. Got any spare progesterone?” which she promptly handed me when I got in the car along with her reading glasses for reading the packet. “Right, I guess this is where we are now,” I said. How we laughed. We spent the journey discussing her impending divorce, when twenty/thirty years ago, it would have been who we were dating. There’s a ‘full circle’ feel to this midlife friendship vibe.

As my friend H says: “There’s something so special about those friends that have known you through all your eras. Each time you lost yourself during those times, they saw you come through it and back to yourself, just like they’ll see you come back after this last transition we’re all going through (menopause). They know the core of you.”

And these days our cores are stronger than ever because we’ve been through stuff. Many of us have ‘done the work’ on our childhood wounds, probably had therapy, often out of necessity of life becoming painful. Not a day goes by, now, without a friend sharing some wisdom or helpful contact be that a great counsellor, a miracle lash serum, or some pearl of wisdom they’ve heard on Insta (where, by the way, psychotherapists not celebs, are our heroes.) Our collective wisdom is a superpower and it’s supercharging our friendships.

It is subtly changing the nature of them too. In our younger decades we were partners in crime, now we’re each other's therapists, champions, even parents. I go wild swimming with a friend C every week. That drive there and back, the lap around a freezing lake, not to mention the bacon sarnie afterwards IS my therapy. The cold water acts like wine, disinhibiting us. We talk about everything, the joys and the ugly stuff. We find solutions by thrashing stuff out.

“My girlfriends are everything to me at the moment,” says C. “They give me connection, solace and joy at a time in my life that is hard.”

We are also actually telling one another what we mean to one another. There’s a feeling that we don’t have the time to hold back. Nor spend time with friends we feel meh about. It’s quality over quantity these days. We’ve distilled our friendship group down and only the best remain.

“When I was younger I had so many friends, exhausting myself seeing them all,” says my friend A. “Now I just don’t have energy for people who bring me down, only those I really love. After all, I need them in a way I didn’t in my thirties when perhaps I relied on my husband more.”

It’s not just the old friendships that are having a revival either. “I’ve noticed with my new gym girlfriends, this sense of really bigging each other up,” says my friend S. “Even though we haven’t known each other long, there’s a fast-track connection and mutual support that comes from us all having shared the same path. We know what we’ve been through!”

On WhatsApp recently, H sent me an extract from Nora Ephron’s brilliant book, I Feel Bad About My Neck in which Ephron describes missing her best female friend who sadly passed away.

“I want to talk to her, I want to have lunch with her. She is my phantom limb, and I can’t believe I am here without her.’’

“This is how I feel about you darling” she said. “Couldn’t be without.”

That’s how I feel about her too, and other female friends I have at this stage. There are many rubbish things about midlife for women. I don’t need to list them. But this renewed potency of friendships seems a wonderful compensation.