They never used to appeal, but women-only friendship groups suddenly make sense

With age comes an appreciation for things taken for granted, and the importance of long-term female friendships becomes more evident. Photo / Getty Images

Now that I’m in my 50s like Kate Moss, hanging out just with female friends has taken on a whole new charm.

You may have seen the pictures of Kate Moss sitting cross-legged in a circle of women on a beach in Mustique. I looked at them and thought, “My, how we change.” Not so much because Kate chose to celebrate her 50th birthday at a spirituality retreat – rather than at Basil’s Bar with the local roguery – but because she chose to do it with women. The all-girls occasion is part of a brand new journey for Mossy and I, too, finally got the point of Women Only in my 50s. Before that, the concept of Women Only did not appeal much. Some of my best friends are women. I went to an all-girls school and loved it. I had a hen do, I’ve been on hen weekends. I’m often to be found talking to women at parties (just to be clear that this is not about having time only for men and shoving past the females in the room to get to them).

Still, until relatively recently, the idea of heading off on an all-women weekend/spa break, even spending an evening round a table with Only Women, always felt a bit unnatural. Whenever I did, I missed the men. For the counterbalance and the contrast. For flirting, and teasing. For the corroborating stories and calming-down interventions and because without them it just felt too much of one thing without the other.

Lots of women, I’m aware, are delighted to meet up for yoga retreats and riding holidays. They have solid girl gangs who have regular fixtures and they club together to buy each other presents or organise surprise parties. Their time together is set in stone in the diary a year ahead and sacred. Not my female friends. Since coupling up and having children, we see each other on our own, now and then, but most of the time we socialise with our partners, because we like it more that way, or we did.

What changes is hard to say. Some people want to leave their husbands at home at this point, no doubt. Some couples lead increasingly separate lives and he skis or sails while she can’t bear to leave the garden and the dog, but that’s not what’s behind this shift for most of us. With age comes appreciation of lots of things you took for granted and the women who have been there for you and you for them in the past 30-odd years (longer if you were at school together) is high up the list.

You used to have fun together, talk about relationships, panic about children, share domestic details, and then, when you come out the other side of child rearing and parent caring, you all of a sudden need each other more than ever. We meet up more often now, just us women, to eat, drink and hoot with laughter but also to talk about the even bigger stuff that seems to crop up just when you thought you were through the really brutal years: Illness, bereavement, anxiety, children (still), retirement (how?), money and how long it will have to last.

And we’re all talking more. I’ve noticed that women who were once friendly, but maybe not close enough to get down to brass tacks, are seeking each other out based on the desire to make the most of the intimacy that comes with having known each other since before we knew where our lives were heading. I have a new Women Only gang whom I meet roughly twice a year who knew each other at university in the Eighties and gradually lost touch. I have another gang of lapsed friends who’ve swept me up and made me be an occasional lady luncher. And I have a group of old school friends who came out of the woodwork about 10 years ago – I can’t remember how. We cleave together in a crisis on Zoom and it feels, after all these years, like having sisters. I can honestly say, friendship gets better with age.