The single mothers who met in the staffroom Lucy Crowe and Mikayla Jolley, London “There was an automatic trust between us,” Mikayla says of meeting Lucy. “It was instinctive.” The women started teaching assistant jobs at the same school in 2011. Both had previously survived difficult relationships and Lucy had been rehoused with her four children. “We got on well without knowing much about each other,” says Mikayla, 52, who has five sons. “We were the older ones, and quickly found we had the same understanding of what was going on and the same work ethic.” When Mikayla discovered her partner at the time was cheating, “I remember going into school and telling Lucy. I wouldn’t have shared it with anybody else there. She told me, ‘It’s going to be all right, we’re going to sort this out.’ She’s always optimistic; I’m a pessimist.” Lucy remembers picking up the phone to Mikayla late at night for help, too, during an encounter with an ex. “I knew if I called her I’d be safe. I didn’t ask her to come, but she did.” Mikayla remembers it well: “I knew for her to pick up the phone was serious, so I got in the car.” “I saw resilience in Mikayla,” says Lucy, 53, now a child protection chair and grandmother. “We both wanted better lives. Neither of us took the easy way out.” “Maybe, unconsciously, we saw something of ourselves in each other,” Mikayla reflects. Neither had another friend who’d been through what they had. Their pasts were not a big feature of their day-to-day friendship but details would emerge, Mikayla says. “We’ll both drop curveballs every now and again, and the other will say, ‘Did that actually happen?’ We process in similar ways, compartmentalise.” “We share similar responses to life,” Lucy says. “For me, the biggest thing I found in Mikayla is emotional safety.” Both single mothers, they began helping practically with one another’s kids, going out during school holidays and supporting each other emotionally. “If we had difficulties with the kids, neither was judgmental,” Mikayla says. “For me that was big; I’d spent most of my life feeling judged. One of my boys worships the ground Lucy walks on, she’s the only one who can tell him about himself. As a single mum, to have that in a friend is powerful.” When Lucy returned to university in 2014, to study social work, she says, “Everyone said it was too much; Mikayla said, ‘Go do it.’” Mikayla, now a quality assurance officer, says, “Lucy is the same with me. She was always pulling me along with her at work.” Five years ago Lucy suffered a stroke, leaving her without the use of one arm. She remembers, “I collapsed and told my son: I want Mikayla.” Her friend supported her through her rehabilitation and now, Lucy says, “She’s like my personal assistant when we go out.” They live a four-minute drive from each other, and shop, go to gigs and on holiday together. “I think I’ve benefited 70% from Mikayla and she’s benefited 30% from me,” Lucy jokes. “She’s practical and solution-focused. We ground each other and advise on relationships” – although, she jokes, “That’s like the blind leading the blind!” Theirs, Mikayla says, “is a dark humour. I’ll call her crying my eyes out ... ” But, Lucy adds, “We end up laughing.” “We’re close like sisters, we speak most days but we don’t live in each other’s pockets,” Mikayla says. For the first time since meeting, their lives are heading in different directions: Lucy is planning a move to Ghana and Mikayla is in a new relationship. Regardless, Lucy says, “I don’t see a time when I’m not close with her.” Mikayla agrees. “She’s loyal. She’s honest. Because of her, I know what to look for in a friendship, and relationship.” Lucy reflects on the best friend she met that day in the staffroom: “She’s consistent, dependable. Mikayla’s more than a friend: she’s family.” The fathers to autistic children who bonded through running Gaz Hitchin and Andy Williams, Shrewsbury Gaz and Andy first met up in Birmingham airport on their way to run last year’s Paris marathon. “Our flight wasn’t until 5am. I got there at midnight and Gaz was a little earlier,” remembers Andy, 42. “The only place open was Costa, so we drank about six cups of coffee and sat for hours, unloading. It was like therapy.” Both men are fathers to profoundly autistic children – Andy to Lydia, five, and Gaz to Thomas, six – and had struck up a conversation online a few months earlier. It was, they agree, “a meeting of minds”. Gaz, 44, a digital marketing manager, had been posting on Instagram, sharing his parenting experiences and celebrating Thomas’s milestones. But, with less time to socialise and less common ground with other parents, “It was a very lonely place,” Gaz says. “And our half of the species are a bit ridiculous about bottling things up.” Andy, an HR manager, could relate: “My life was surviving on two hours’ sleep, trying to function as an adult, go to work, sustain a relationship. You end up feeling like you’re cut off, living in this weird bubble. It’s all-consuming.” Lydia’s mother knew Gaz from their schooldays and showed Andy his posts. “It was like, bloody hell, there’s someone else like me,” he says. “I sent a message or two saying, ‘I appreciate what you’re doing’ and, ‘How’s your kid?’ and told him about mine.” “I wasn’t used to getting messages like that,” Gaz says. “When someone goes, I recognise this, you notice.” They’d only exchanged a handful of messages when Andy suggested signing up for the marathon, for the charity Ambitious about Autism. “He was the only other father I knew who had an autistic child,” Andy explains. “I booked it and said, ‘Let’s go,’” Gaz remembers. From their airport meeting, they didn’t stop talking. Andy describes it as an “unshackling”: “At the start it was the usual small talk, then I would mention this little thing I’d experienced and it was like, ‘Absolutely, I deal with that’ and I thought, I’m not alone here.” Gaz recalls, “When you can laugh about the things that six months ago you were crying about, and the guy you’re talking to can laugh about it at your expense, that’s funny.” Andy agrees: “You miss that as a bloke. It’s a relief to go, ‘I’m back in the normal world.’ Gaz was two years ahead, so he was guiding me, too, telling me: you’re going to experience this and this is how to deal with it.” In Paris, they walked, talked, ate and ran together. “We came back and it was messaging on the phone,” Gaz remembers. Inspired by how it felt to open up, two months later they launched a podcast, Autism Dadcast, and supported the Disabled Children’s Partnership, too. “We also have a WhatsApp group full of autism dads and we catch up daily,” Andy says. Gaz “is probably the person I hear from more than anyone else in the world ... This friendship is stronger, closer and more meaningful than those I had before.” Gaz reflects, “There are three types of friend: the ride or die who’ll kick someone’s door in; the person you’d call at 3am; and the person you can be vulnerable with. If you’ve got one person who is all three, you’re laughing.” The ex-church members who left religion behind – and found each other Jonathan Kraft and Alicia Arthur, Tennessee “I was raised as a missionary kid and grew up overseas. I attended religious boarding school and my grandfather was a pastor,” says Alicia, 37. Religion “wasn’t really a choice”. But in 2021, she remembers “my whole belief system started crumbling”. A mother of two who had returned to education, Alicia was questioning her relationship with the church, and made the decision to leave. “It was very destabilising, quite traumatic and scary. My friendships were all in that community.” Nobody reached out: “I didn’t exist to them any more.” Jonathan, 44, had a similar experience. “I grew up in a charismatic evangelical church,” says the estate agent and father of two. “Around 2019, I started to see a major shift in the things I’d been taught growing up – caring for the widow, the orphan, the foreigner. I was seeing a mismatch between words and actions in the church.” After the pandemic, he and his wife Jenna pulled away from it. Around the same time, their child came out to them as non-binary, which is how they ended up at their local town’s Pride event in summer 2024. Alicia had recently come out as bisexual and was there with her husband. “It was a little coffee shop bookstore. I remember walking in and feeling a little unsure. I saw Jonathan and his family in the back corner.” She recognised Jenna from an online community for people who had left the church, but they’d never spoken. The four instantly made a connection. “We swapped numbers and all went for dinner,” remembers Alicia, an intern family therapist. They had game nights with the kids and Jonathan recalls, “It was clear that Alicia and I had a lot of common interests; we built a deeper bond than anybody else.” “We’re both passionate about mental health, we’ve both been in our own therapy,” Alicia says. “Both of us have this drive to always be learning and growing,” Jonathan adds. They became sounding boards for one another. “Both of us tend to hold on to things loosely. We came from environments where ‘this has to be what it is’; now everything could be discussed,” he expands. It was new to both in a friend. “We’ve stretched each other,” Alicia says. “We both have wounds from how we were raised. It’s been healing to have this friend who is accepting and not judgmental. We have multiple message threads going on,” she says of their daily interactions. “We’ll send each other video messages or memes; we’ll play a game online.” They live 30 minutes apart. “In person we don’t get to hang out a ton,” Alicia says. “Sometimes Jenna and the kids come over. “Coming from church, there was often this idea that men and women can’t be friends,” Alicia says. “It’s been beautiful to expand that.” Jonathan adds, “I think men and women can learn a lot from each other. Meeting Alicia has changed my view on what a friend is. It’s given me a healthier view of myself, what I deserve and what I have to give. It’s set the bar.” The dog-walkers who became like family Jude Davis and Maureen Anderson, London “I think it was our dogs that met first,” says Maureen, 59, of Jude, 43. The pair live at opposite ends of a long road and Jude remembers walking a loop of the local park, four years ago: “She was the first other Black person I’d seen with a dog. The connection was immediate.” “As children of the Windrush generation,” Maureen explains, “having dogs as pets is not encouraged. In the Caribbean they’re yard dogs. Ours are our babies,” she says of cavapoo Simba and Jude’s bichon frise, Mutya. The pair stopped to talk. “Everyone talks to Maureen in the park, everyone adores her. She was warm and inviting straight away,” remembers Jude, a marketing and brand consultant. From then on, Maureen says, “Whenever I’d see Mutya, I’d stop and walk with Jude.” While the dogs brought them together, it was their life experiences, particularly of grief, that bonded them. “As time went on we started to have longer conversations and longer walks. We realised we had so much in common,” says Jude. In 2024, when he started training to run the London marathon for Lupus UK, he told Maureen about his younger sister Rachael who had died from the disease when she was 16 and Jude 18. “It was really tough and I had held it in for some time.” Maureen had lost her parents within four weeks of each other from Covid complications in 2020, and had contributed to a book on Black grief and healing. “I thought what she went through was awful,” Jude says. “No one experiences grief in the same way but it was nice to have someone to listen and really understand. Maureen created a safe space where I felt comfortable talking about my sister’s horrific death.” That Christmas, Jude invited Maureen to join his family. “I’d been happy having Christmas alone since my parents died; my son lives abroad and my family are in Birmingham,” she says. But being welcomed by another Jamaican family meant a lot: “I wasn’t expecting all those feelings. As I was eating, I could taste home.” The pair found common ground in work, too – Jude had left a corporate job after 12 years and Maureen had worked for local authorities – and advocacy: Jude runs the Bop Black Opportunities Platform while Maureen is also involved in racial equality and hosts the MAMM menopause support network. “We’d discuss experiences for Black individuals in workplaces,” Jude says. “I’d been there to support others but didn’t have that outlet myself.” Now, he says, “I hear from Maureen every day. It’s so different to my other friendships – she has more experience and is easier to talk to. I always have that support from her.” Maureen agrees: “I would describe Jude as a son, nephew, brother. I’ll look out for him, he’ll look out for me. When I had a cold recently, he brought me soup.” Jude reflects, “I don’t know if you can have a community with two people but that’s what we’ve managed to create.” The adoptees with a shared backstory Sue Jardine, London, and Debbie Cook, Carlisle “There was an understanding of how and why we felt certain things that a ‘normal’ person doesn’t quite get,” says Debbie, 67, of meeting Sue, 63, 16 years ago. Both were found as babies in Hong Kong stairwells and later adopted by British families. “It was a trust thing,” Sue says, “a feeling we could share things that had always felt risky, about our experiences, our upbringings.” There was another leveller, too, Debbie says: “I could look Sue in the eyes.” Debbie is 1.45 metres (4ft 9in) and Sue 1.55 metres (5ft 1in). “It was having that mirror image looking back at you, deeper than just at surface level.” Their backstories were instantly recognisable to one another. Debbie was brought to Manchester in September 1961, as a toddler, by an adoptive Chinese father and British mother whose mixed marriage would have made them low priority for domestic adoption. “There had been an influx of Chinese families moving to Hong Kong for a better life and lots of baby girls abandoned at roadsides or in stairwells or public toilets, places where they could be found. They approximated I was 10 days old,” Debbie says. She was taken to Fan Ling Babies’ Home, as was Sue, two years later, after being found in a first-floor stairwell on Hong Kong Island at between two and four days old. Her parents had answered a radio appeal for adoptive families, bringing her to Hatfield in 1963. Their childhood experiences resonated, too. “Growing up, surrounded by nobody who looks like you, you know you’re different but can’t articulate or comprehend it,” Sue explains. She discovered adoption papers aged 10 but remained “colour blind” to her own difference. “I didn’t discuss it with friends. It wasn’t something I wanted them to acknowledge,” says the mother of one and retired social care information specialist. Debbie, a former engineering buyer, says, “I didn’t want to process that something wasn’t quite right. I grew up in a very white village in the 60s. The only Chinese person was my father.” Both experienced name-calling and neither knew other girls like them existed. Meeting one another brought relief. Debbie had established the Hong Kong Adoptees Network a year earlier; Sue had corresponded by email before joining a Manchester meet-up. “We just got on well,” Debbie remembers. “Sue’s very sweet and understanding, very thoughtful, and we became good friends.” They travelled with adoptee friends, including to San Francisco in 2013, when Debbie was grieving her father’s death: “I got the news just before we flew out. Dad would have wanted me to go. It meant Sue was there to talk with.” When Sue’s mother moved to Carlisle, then became ill, they’d meet for meals or walks: “Debbie would come to the care home with me.” A 2015 trip to Hong Kong was particularly poignant. They visited the babies’ home together and went to the stairwell where Sue was found. “It’s hard to know what you’ll feel,” she reflects, but “to have someone who understood the enormity” helped. Debbie had done the same in 2010. “There’s a lot we don’t need to talk about,” Debbie says of their friendship. “It’s unspoken because we both come from the same background.” “It’s not having to explain things,” Sue says. “There’s delight in being able to say things to one another.” Debbie agrees: “Finding someone I can identify and bond with has really made my life more fulfilling.” The neighbours who became best friends Trillia Robinson, Auckland, and Lyn McGrath, New South Wales Trillia remembers meeting Lyn after moving into a house across the road, in New South Wales, with her husband, in 2014. “I wanted to make a garden; all there was was a gravel patch and some strips of grass,” Trillia, 73, recalls. Lyn offered some gardening books; then “every time I walked by, she’d give me cuttings”. Lyn, 84, remembers it, too: “She didn’t know anyone else in the area. I took her in.” The pair became confidantes and established a routine, sitting in the guest suite under Lyn’s home, beside the Tweed River. “We’d talk for hours and drink coffee,” Lyn says. “One day she asked if I like doing jigsaws.” That became their thing: “We’d do them almost every day, with a gold KitKat.” Trillia was caring for her terminally ill husband, Peter, with whom she’d moved from Cornwall to Australia some years earlier. Lyn’s husband, Bill, had long since retired, so “it was respite for both of us in different ways, a break”, says grandmother of four Lyn. “That’s how the friendship started and continued.” “We laughed at the same things,” Lyn says. “We could talk about our life and know it wouldn’t go any further. We were just two ladies who thought they knew anything and could solve all the world’s problems.” When Peter died, in 2020, Trillia made plans to move to New Zealand, to be closer to her son and two grandsons. “I spent six months putting everything in place, tying up probate,” then, with Covid, New Zealand closed its borders. “Enter friend Lyn!” says Trillia who, for nine months, ended up living in Lyn’s guest suite. “It was wonderful,” she says. They lived in their own parts of the house and Lyn remembers, “We still did our jigsaws in the afternoon but retained our own lives, cooked for ourselves.” When Trillia finally moved, it was with a heavy heart. “Our friendship was not something I expected,” she says. “When you’re older, it’s harder to make friends. You’re not waiting at the school gate, going to work or going out as much. You have a lot of transitional friendships but not ones – like this – that actually matter.” “We remain very close even though we don’t see each other any more,” says Lyn from across the water. They email a couple of times a week: “When there’s something to say and even when there isn’t,” she adds. “I think there’s a small group of people in your life who, when something happens, good or bad, they’re on the list,” Trillia says. “Lyn is one of those.”