That trio of tricky girlfriends on The White Lotus is me. Sometimes you need to let go

Last weekend Pies and I celebrated 40 years of friendship at her place in Adelaide. Except for her kids asking where the Hard Solos were and the bloke she had over for Friday dinner being the ex-premier, it was like we were teenagers again.

Tried on wacky stuff in op shops, snorted with laughter revisiting our business idea for a surprising funeral service, had two days where only protein shakes and tequila passed our lips. Loved each other’s shoes, I was the tidying matron to her vortex of controlled chaos.

Leslie Bibb, Michelle Monaghan and Carrie Coon as three friends in season three of The White Lotus.

And we hit the dance floor. Two women with eight kids between them, held together by HRT and collagen and transition lenses, bringing it to When Will I Be Famous? Sort of ridiculous but super precious.

I’ve subscribed to the trope of “we can pick up where we left off 20 years ago”. But my weekend made me appreciate anew friendship has to be more than meeting twice a year for overpriced margaritas and ritual retellings of that wild night in Broadbeach and half-lit revelations about whether you’re still in love or secretly disappointed with your children.

It needs the making of memories. You have to do stuff together. Daggy stuff is fine. No need for a resort and fabulous capsule travel wardrobe.

These thoughts have been sparked by the three women in the new series of The White Lotus. Everyone else is just wallpaper. The business guy with the feds on his case, the angry bougie hippie? Don’t care. But the scenes with the trio of girlfriends? Every line nails it.

Columnist Kate Halfpenny with friend Pies, in 1991, and creating new memories in 2025.

The passive-aggressive judgments, piranha smile competitiveness about bodies. The whispered side-taking. And yet the underlying loyalty that would see wagons circled if an outsider was critical.

I watch these fictional people and suspect this is me. My inner bitch is always close, along with my obsession with looking at myself in shop windows. But more fascinating is the question of whether long friendships are necessarily good friendships.

There’s something magnetic about mates who knew you when IDs were fake and heartbreaks felt real. The people who wore matching Sportsgirl rara skirts with you, reported back after seeing a real-life penis, who knew you were electrified by Marty Hou’s combination of guitar and Kingswood station wagon. That shared history? Valuable currency.

But lately the uncomfortable truth is nostalgia is a lovely place to visit but a useless place to live. Like the White Lotus women’s discovery that political, social and economic divides are more powerful than knowing what you looked like with a spiral perm, I wonder why we hang on to long friendships when the only thing we now have in common is memories.

For me, the glorious thing about old friends isn’t just shared history but that they don’t need the back story. They helped write the original narrative.

But time changes everyone. Are these relationships worth keeping? Hell yes. And maybe not. The question is whether your present-day selves would choose each other.

A 2023 US government survey found 68 per cent of people had ended a friendship. Generation X and Baby Boomers were most likely to break up with a friend.

A 2016 Dutch study found that along with it taking seven years to restore bad credit, there’s a good chance that every seven years you replace half your closest friends.

Gerald Mollenhorst, an associate professor at Utrecht University, led a seven-year study into friendship involving 1000 people. He found only 30 per cent of our closest friends remain after the pivotal seven-year period.

Amid hundreds of online advice pieces, the consensus seems to be the worst part about ditching a friend is people don’t see your grief as legitimate.

From pain felt over lost friends, I know that’s true. Hideous. But it frees up space for enduring friends like Pies where we keep making new memories. And newer ones who live in the now. I don’t want to end up sniping over chardy at some resort, pretending we’re still close while wondering why we bother.

Life’s too short. And at this point, frankly, so is the road ahead.

Kate Halfpenny is the founder of Bad Mother Media.

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