By the time you reach your 50s, friendship circles have a way of quietly shrinking. The school-gate crowd fades as the children grow up, while university friends either become lifelong fixtures or drift away, separated by distance, busy lives and long gaps between messages.
I’ll admit I have not always been the most reliable friend. I can become instantly captivated by new people, shower them with attention, then feel wounded when they start to retreat because I have come on too strong.
Now 53, a mother of two and 27 years into marriage, I can also feel menopause changing the way I relate to others. As my hormones shift, so too does my tolerance for people-pleasing — and for those fair-weather friends who are happy to lean on you in a crisis but somehow disappear when the favour needs returning.
Still, if there is one guaranteed way to put a friendship under strain, it is this: take a holiday together.
Every trip I have taken with friends has ended badly. Spending every hour of the day in close quarters can expose sides of people you would rather have left undiscovered. Petty irritations surface, uncomfortable truths emerge and invisible hierarchies suddenly become impossible to ignore. Before long, you may realise you do not like your friends quite as much as you thought — and, worse, they may feel the same about you.
One example still stands out: a camping holiday in Cornwall several years ago. There were six families, connected mainly through the mothers, though everyone knew each other fairly well. At least, that was what we believed.
We had met, as parents often do, through our children — mine were six and one at the time. Looking back, the group was probably far too large to get through a holiday without tension. The warning signs appeared before we had even left London, when one particularly overbearing woman decided she was in charge of organising the entire trip.
The planning alone should have told us what was coming. Well before departure, she produced a spreadsheet setting out everyone’s duties: who would bring which food, when each family would take a turn watching the children, and which days were reserved for the museum, the beach and a coastal walk. Then she sent it to the WhatsApp group as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
Anniki Sommerville says in the sudden glare of living alongside them 24/7, you see parts of your friends that you’d really rather not have seen
Anniki reflects that sometimes friendship isn’t worth the drama – and perhaps she’d been dumped because she wasn’t going to put up with it
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At first I thought this was helpful as a suggested itinerary. But then I realised she wasn’t asking for input: this was what we were doing. It was non-negotiable.
A few people muttered mutinously in private, but in usual don’t-rock-the-boat fashion, we all thanked and praised her for her brilliant research on the group chat. At a pre-holiday Chinese, which I’d naively thought would be a laugh, we were reminded again of the strict division of duties.
She had now very firmly cast herself as camp leader and holiday rep and Brown Owl all rolled into one. My heart began to sink at the thought of it.
Inevitably, it fell apart when we got there. No one liked being ‘sent to wash up’ because it was their turn. Several people point blank refused to play, setting up a ‘them and us’ group dynamic that soured the atmosphere from the start.
Meanwhile, we could all suddenly see that one of the couples’ marriages was fast veering off the rails. The sulky dad wouldn’t even look after his own kids, let alone anyone else’s, while his wife ran around trying to cover up for his horrible moods. The smile she slapped on was fooling no one.
I desperately wanted camp leader mum to confront lazy dad and tell him to stop ruining the trip for his family, but she wouldn’t. Depressingly, it seemed his own wife was just used to his terrible treatment of her.
The point is, we’d known none of this before we came on holiday. I’d never clocked how bossy Brown Owl was, nor did I know how awful a relationship this second friend was truly in.
It rained and the sea was freezing. On the third evening, another mum got so drunk she fell asleep in the campsite loos. The next morning she could barely remember anything about it. It was awful, teenage behaviour but I didn’t really blame her. The trip was so hideous, I’d have joined her had I not been on spud peeling duty.
We got back home and for a while the group seemed to disperse naturally. There was never a full debrief over a bottle of wine, but I did express my dislike of Chief Mum to several of those I considered closer friends.
Big mistake.
A year later, I opened Instagram one morning to see this same bunch of families on a very similar camping trip in France. Even though I’d kept seeing some of the Cornish calamity mums socially, I had known nothing about it. Clearly Brown Owl had unfriended me. It felt like being at school and not getting an invite to an in-crowd party and for a while it hurt like hell. Of course my kids got wind of it too, which was even worse.
Sometimes friendship isn’t worth the drama – and perhaps I’d been dumped because I wasn’t going to put up with it.
The friends that matter are the ones you think about when you feel lonely. The ones that you get an instinct to send a silly video or text to. The ones you reach out to when you’ve got something to celebrate and know they won’t slag you off behind your back for showing off. None of the camping crew made the cut – and that’s okay.
