“She’s my closest friend,” says Maggie of Ayla, says Ayla of Maggie. But when you talk to the two, the first impression is: They are not serious. Is this supposed to be friendship? Ayla’s wedding ten years ago? Didn’t visit Maggie because she was traveling. How does Ayla get along with Maggie’s other friends? “Don’t know,” Ayla confesses. “I don’t even know most of the other people Maggie is friends with.” It’s the same the other way around. “It’s funny, we were never interested in such details from our two lives,” confirm the women.
Anyone who talks to event manager Ayla, 40, and real estate agent Maggie, 42, is initially thoroughly confused: there are two women who want to be closest friends – one is from Bonn, the other from Rostock, both came to Hamburg for an interview – but they don’t seem to know a lot about each other at all. At the same time, their gestures, looks, and the way they treat each other are so familiar and heartwarming that not only does the room temperature rise a few degrees, but one also becomes very curious as to how they managed to become real life friends for each other. 40 years of Ayla and Maggie – a period of time that few marriages and actually only few female friendships survive. The two seem to have done something right.
Familiarly, the two put their heads together in the café, stand together in the wind outside at the harbor, a little fresh air is good now. The night was short, until three in the morning they celebrated their reunion, laughed, talked and also shed a few tears of joy. 40 years, madness! The two have not lived in the same city for almost 30 years. The frequency of their friendship has changed, but not the intensity. “You don’t have to see each other every day or be in touch every day to be close friends,” says Maggie. Watching the two of them as they are with each other is very touching, but it also gets a little pang in your heart. Didn’t you have a childhood friend who used to mean everything to you?
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childhood friendship
Saving the best childhood friendship into adult life – very few of us have managed this feat. Different cities, different lives – you gradually grew apart from the one who once knew you best. The last visits, the last phone calls – more and more people parted with the sad feeling: we are not together like we used to be. “I don’t think you should make that kind of claim on a friendship at all,” Ayla emphasizes and pauses. On the contrary: “It would be sad if Maggie and I said today: We’re still together like we used to be. In retrospect, I would even say that it is precisely not holding on to the past that made our friendship so strong.”
When you ask Ayla and Maggie about their friendship biography, you realize that they are really good at this discipline, always adapting their friendship to life and the constant innovations that it brings. Is this what we missed even with our childhood friend? to go on together? Ayla and Maggie had to deal with being in a long-distance friendship relationship from an early age. Maggie is 14 when her friend, who is two years her junior, tells her that she is moving out of the high-rise building in Bremen, in whose yard the girls have played in the sandbox from an early age, learned to ride a bike, and have grown from small children to young girls. Ayla’s parents, Turkish guest workers, want to go back to Turkey. To save Ayla from changing schools in the middle of the year, should she go straight to the Turkish school after the summer holidays. “Suddenly a huge part of me was missing. I cried for days,” Maggie recalls. “The farewell back then was so bad that I completely repressed the day I left,” says Ayla. The girls send letters to each other, visit each other during the holidays, but when Maggie arrives one day with her new boyfriend, everything changes. “I was quite shocked at how different Ayla had suddenly become. Much more traditional, I didn’t recognize her at all,” says Maggie. And Ayla? Ayla, on the other hand, can’t do anything with Maggie’s friend: “Suddenly he stood between us. I felt like I couldn’t get close to Maggie anymore.” “That moment was a catastrophe for our friendship,” Maggie remembers very well.
Nothing broke between them
“I think we’ve both always been good at letting each other be who they are,” says Ayla. When she returns to Germany to study a short time later and the two meet again, they realize that nothing went wrong between them. They realize how strong their friendship really is, how deep and strong their roots are. “We didn’t problematize or work through anything, we just kept going together,” says Ayla. Maggie’s boyfriend is gone, Ayla’s Turkish life is far away. Ayla falls in love with a Portuguese man with whom she now has a little son, Maggie falls in love with a Colombian. But after the birth of their daughter, Maggie’s relationship breaks down. Is there never any envy or jealousy from Maggie, the single mother, about Ayla’s ideal family world? “No”, assures Maggie. “On the contrary. Ayla is always a big hold on me.” Ayla and Maggie also learned this early on: each leads their own life, each goes their own way. You ask each other for advice, but you each have to do the rest yourself. Even if you feel very closely connected, everyone is their own person.
The essence of a friendship is that it is completely voluntary. But are there also obligations? “Yes, there are,” affirms Ayla. “If you want to be close friends, you can never stop asking the other: ‘How are you?'” And by that Ayla doesn’t mean the quick, superficial questioning between doors and hinges, but something that comes straight from the heart. “How are you?” Is that the question you should knock on the door of your very old girlfriend? The one who was once a childhood friend – but could become a real life friend?
