When I was in high school I had a very close-knit circle of girlfriends. There were six of us, and we called each other “the brat pack”. I had known some of them for two years, and some of them for fifteen by the time we graduated. Since high school, they’ve all faded away, the last two to go this past year.

In my first two years of college, I didn’t have many girlfriends. One of my brat pack members was at school with me, and we stayed friends. I made a few other friends here and there, but overall was busy creating very unhealthy relationships with boys. I left that college and none of the friends, save the one from high school, really stuck. However, I did stay friends with a girl I met while working at a camp while I was in college.

Then I went to my second college. There I made the truest friends of my life. There weren’t many, only three. But for some reason I clicked with them. They are my lifelong friends, that I have no question about. So I added them to my cache of my high school friends and my camp friend.

Here’s the problem: All of these friends lived in the states I attended college. One year after graduating, I moved to my home state. I had one friend here, for a while, that ended this year.

I miss my friends. I miss them with an ache that is almost physical sometimes. I miss seeing them for coffee, for dinner, for movies and TV. I miss talking to them. I miss going shopping with them, doing things with them, doing nothing with them.

I am making new friends, slowly but surely. But they aren’t the same. They don’t have the history of my old friends. I don’t have the same comfort level. The intimacy isn’t there, at a time when I need it desperately. I feel so far away from my closest friends that it’s hard to tell them my deepest stuff over the phone. And I don’t feel comfortable enough with my new friends to tell them.

Thank God for my sister. Without her I would be lost.

But I still miss my friends. I try to explain this to my husband, but he happens to be a boy. And his best friend lives five minutes away. Also, he doesn’t totally understand the need a girl has for girlfriends- close, dear friends you can pour your heart out to whenever you need to. Who will support you through thick and thin. Who know you.

It’s hard to know what to do. When you’re in college, intimacy happens quickly. Because you are at a level of high intensity in your life, of finding out who you are and growing up. You share your history with them, and have lots of time to get to know them. Once you are married, with a job and people start having children, it is harder to make friends like that. While you may make friends at work, or online, they’re not made at the same intensity and intimacy as your high school and college friends were.

I miss my friends. I miss the comfort and ease, protection and safety I feel with them. They are just a phone call or plane ride away, but it is too long.