By HTE Founder, Erin Hughes
I’ve been thinking lately about the importance of having a ride or die.
Not necessarily in the dramatic sense of someone you’d call at 2am when everything has fallen apart, although you’d hope they’d answer then too.
I mean the person who says yes.
Yes to the trip.
Yes to making a plan.
Yes to finding the time when finding the time feels almost impossible.
One of my best friends, Maddy, is that person for me.
We’ve known each other since we were 11. We’ve grown up together, and over the years our lives have changed in almost every possible way. We’ve built careers, relationships and families. We have children now, with all the beautiful chaos and logistics that come with them. And since Maddy moved to America in 2011, we’ve lived on opposite sides of the world.
And yet, somehow, we have never stopped planning our next adventure.
I think there is something important in that.
The friendships we choose to keep
When you’re young, friendship can feel effortless.
Your friends are simply there. At school. On weekends. At parties. You don’t necessarily need to plan months in advance to see them.
Then life gets bigger.
Careers become more demanding. People move. Partners come along. Children arrive. Weekends fill up. Calendars become ridiculous.
Suddenly seeing someone you love requires six messages, three calendar checks and, in our case, occasionally an international flight.
Friendship becomes something you have to actively choose.
Despite living on opposite sides of the world, Maddy and I somehow manage to see each other as much as I see some friends who live only a couple of hours away.
There isn’t really a secret to it.
We plan.
We prioritise.
We make it happen.
And I think that matters, because
so many of us have friendships that mean the world to us, yet we assume they’ll survive indefinitely on good intentions.
“We have to catch up.”
“We should do that.”
“One day.”
But one day has a habit of becoming another year. I’ve realised that I don’t want the important friendships in my life to exist in whatever time is left over.
Someone who says yes
For me, the best thing about having a ride or die is knowing there is someone who is still up for it.
Maddy and I share a love of travel and adventure. We’ve travelled together before children and since having them, and even as our lives have become busier and more complicated, that part of our friendship hasn’t disappeared.
The destinations are wonderful, of course. But increasingly, I don’t think the destination is actually the point.
It’s having someone who wants to go.
Someone who gets just as excited as you do about where you might go or what you might do next.
Someone who doesn’t immediately give you 14 reasons why it will be difficult to organise.
Someone whose instinct is, “Yes. Let’s work it out.”
Our adventures together represent a kind of freedom for me. A chance to feel carefree, to have fun, explore, laugh and talk about what we’re going to do next.
Even as we get older, that hasn’t disappeared.
I don’t want it to.
When life gets fuller
I genuinely thought having children might change things.
Not the friendship itself, but our ability to continue having these experiences together.
It hasn’t.
The logistics certainly changed. Life became fuller. There are more people to consider and considerably more organisation involved.
But the friendship remained a priority for both of us.
I think that’s significant because, particularly as women, there can be an expectation that once we enter certain stages of life, the things that matter to us personally should naturally move further down the list.
And guilt can come with challenging that.
When my children were very young and I made time to see Maddy, there were occasions when people would ask how I could leave them.
I felt judged.
There is something about that question that immediately suggests you are doing something wrong. That a good mother shouldn’t want time away. That choosing time for yourself somehow means choosing something over your children.
I think that kind of guilt can become so ingrained in us that we don’t always stop to ask why we feel it.
Wanting time with a friend doesn’t mean wanting your family any less.
Wanting adventure doesn’t mean you’re dissatisfied with the life you’ve built.
And continuing to nurture parts of yourself that existed before children doesn’t make you less committed to being a parent.
For me, those things can exist alongside one another.
In fact, I think they need to.
Friendship shouldn’t get the leftovers
Maybe this is the part I’ve come to understand more as I’ve got older.
Friendships need protecting too.
We talk endlessly about putting work into relationships and making time for our families. Of course those relationships deserve our attention.
But our great friendships deserve something too.
It’s very easy to assume they’ll always be there.
We can postpone the dinner.
Cancel the weekend.
Forget about the trip.
We’ll find another date.
And sometimes we do.
But sometimes years disappear that way.
There is something our closest friends give us that no other relationship can replicate.
I don’t expect one person to fulfil every part of my life.
With a friend who has known you since you were 11, there is history. They have known different versions of you. They remember things you’d forgotten. There is a shorthand that comes from decades of friendship.
And there is something wonderful about having someone who can still bring out that carefree part of you.
Someone who reminds you of who you’ve always been, while still being completely part of who you are now.
Keep making the plan
Perhaps having a ride or die isn’t really about how long you’ve known someone.
It’s about continuing to choose each other as life changes.
Maddy moving to the other side of the world could easily have made our friendship something we looked back on fondly.
Children could have changed it.
Distance could have changed it.
Busy lives certainly could have changed it.
But through all of those different stages, we’ve kept asking the same question.
Where are we going next?
And I love that.
I love knowing there is someone in my life who still wants to dream about the next adventure.
I love that having children didn’t mean that part of us disappeared.
I love that we’ve continued to make time for something simply because it brings us joy.
And I am incredibly grateful to have a friend who keeps saying yes.
Because perhaps that’s another kind of ride or die.
Not only the person who stays when life is difficult, but the person who reminds you to keep having fun when life becomes busy.
The person who makes the plan.
The person who helps you protect a little bit of the carefree person you’ve always been.
The person who wants to know what’s next.
I hope Maddy and I are still doing this at 60, 70 and 80.
Actually, make it 90.
I have no idea what our adventures will look like by then.
But I hope one of us is still coming up with the plan. And the other is still saying yes.
