Formative Teen Friendships

This past weekend, I had the absolute pleasure of spending the Thanksgiving holiday with my very good friend, Hannah, who I have known for 27 years. As I spent the weekend with her - chatting, laughing, eating good food, seeing family and friends - I couldn’t help but make connections to The Teenage Brain Thing and the deep desire for all teens to find their tribe, their families beyond blood. Hannah is my family beyond blood.

I met Hannah (who lives in England) in 1998, when I was a lifeguard working at my local town pool the summer between high school and college. Hannah was an au pair hired by a family to watch after their two boys for the summer. Both boys spent the entire summer at the pool, so Hannah and I became fast friends.

The entire summer was spent obsessing about first loves, going to parties, staying up ridiculously late, breaking into the pool after hours and climbing on the roof, and engaging in “risky teen behaviors”, all of which are normal for that time. I look back at myself at 18 and shake my head at my stupidity, but also recognize how all of it was absolutely developmentally appropriate, given my not-quite-developed teen brain at the time. Teenagers are biologically wired to become fixated on finding friends who will stay with them in the lives they are creating away from their families. Parents, you probably feel the ache of losing your children to their friends - the once “jelly beans to [now] brussel sprouts”, as Dr. Lisa Damour has said. My friends had absolutely become more desirable than my parents, and that is exactly how it was supposed to be. 

Hannah and I stayed in touch - I visited her in England in 1999, she visited our family for Thanksgiving in 2001 (we visited New York that fall, when the world was so precarious after the 9/11 attacks). Ten years went by and we didn’t see each other again until she visited in 2011. By then, we had both had relationships, started “real jobs” and become quite grown up … but the formative friendship we forged as teenagers remained. A few years later, I attended her wedding in 2014, she attended mine in 2017, my husband and I visited her, her husband, and (at the time) baby boy in 2019, and now, in 2025, we reunited. 

Now, we’re in our mid-40s - with families, still real jobs, growing children (her son is nearly 7, mine are 19 and 21), aging parents, family complications, and “proper responsibilities,” as Hannah would say in her accent I apparently can’t get right (although, I think I’m pretty good at it, I’ll trust her expertise!). Oh, how times have changed, but our laughter, reminiscing, and genuinely magical friendship remains the same.

So, for all my parents and teachers reading this - take a moment to look at your teens’ friendships and smile. The laughter you have to quiet down in your classrooms, the general distractions you see among the teens making eyes at each other across a room, the inside jokes, the kids sitting around a lunch table playing video games … they may just be forming formative friendships, and, if they’re lucky, they’ll last 27 years too.

(above, Hannah and I, August 1999)

(above, Hannah and I, November 2025)