One Saturday, on a planned getaway, it rained (heavily) the entire day.

I was grateful for it.

That's a strange thing to notice, given the circumstances. A friend and I, our partners, our kids, all piled into a car and drove 3.5 hours to see one of our best friends. The second day we were there, the weather made a decision for us. We stayed inside, rotated between the couch and dining table, and the day had nowhere it needed to go.

I met these two women in university. One in frosh week, one second semester. We have been friends since, through the kinds of things you can't really schedule around - marriages, babies, a decade of one of us living in Australia, all the ordinary and not-so-ordinary things that a life accumulates. They took me in when I didn't have anyone. They stood beside me when I got married. They were among the first people to hold my daughter. I know their families. They know mine. We have a WhatsApp group called the Three Best Friends. The notifications don't go off that often. I’m not complaining.

This weekend was the first time all three of our families had spent real time together. Our kids have never played the way they played this weekend. The three of us haven't spent time like this probably since university. And on Saturday, because it rained, we sat around and talked. We talked about everything and nothing in the way you can only do when the conversation doesn't have a job assigned to it.

At some point I looked around the room. Our faces. Our partners' faces. The sound of our kids somewhere in the background. I felt peace.

I read a newsletter recently from Steven Bartlett about the slow fade of adult friendships. The friendships that fade because life happened - two people who used to know everything about each other, and then one day just didn't anymore. The argument he makes is that we have an entire cultural infrastructure for romantic heartbreak - songs, films, rituals, sympathy - and almost nothing for this. There's no ritual for it, no acknowledged loss. Your closest friend from ten years ago becomes someone whose Instagram stories you watch at 11pm, and because nothing happened, you don't let yourself feel what it actually is.

We all have friendships like that in our lives.

A few years ago I was in France and on a whim signed up for a wine tasting course. I'm not that much of a wine person - I enjoyed it, retained a small amount of the technical knowledge, and moved on. But the winemaker running the workshop said something at the end that I've thought about many times since. He said people often save a good bottle for a special occasion - something so significant it finally deserves the wine.

He said: life is short, don't wait. The bottle of wine is the occasion.

I think we do the same thing with the people we love. We wait for the right weekend, the right conditions, enough time, enough space, until eventually we've been waiting so long that the visit itself feels like it needs to be worth the wait. So we plan something. We book something. We fill the time with activity because unstructured hours with someone you haven't properly seen in months feels like it needs a container. And in doing that, we accidentally prevent the thing we were actually there for - the conversation that has no job assigned to it, the afternoon that doesn't need to produce anything.

This weekend reminded me that there's another version of the wine story. Strong friendships are the occasion; they should be. I live 20 minutes apart from one friend and we still barely see each other. Our WhatsApp group chat goes quiet for weeks. Life with kids means your time isn't fully yours anymore - you're managing your life and your child's life at the same time.

Weekends like this one take either real effort to pull off, or all the stars aligning to let it happen spontaneously.

Strong friendships survive adulthood because they're built on something underneath the frequency - a kind of understanding that doesn't expire just because months pass between conversations. You pick up mid-sentence. The distance and the time gap close in about four minutes. That's either real or it isn't, and you can't manufacture it.

But I also think that it can become a convenient story. A way of letting something precious run on goodwill alone and calling it strength. The weekend happened because someone decided to make it happen. Someone booked the time. Someone drove 3.5 hours. The friendship held, yes - but the weekend didn't happen on its own.

I don't think those two things contradict each other. The connection is real and the effort is also required.

At that moment on the couch, looking around the room, a feeling of recognizing something precious. Most of the time we're either too busy or too distracted to feel what's actually in the room with us.

I was glad the weather made the choice for us.