1. How you become friends:
At 16, friendship is all about proximity. You become friends with the people you sit by in the most lessons at school.
At 21, you make friends anywhere and everywhere: in halls, in lectures, in nightclub toilets...
At 26, you make new friends at work. But you're still close with your school and uni friends too.
2. Where you hang out:
At 16, you spend every weekend roaming your local high street, with a Starbucks Frappuccino in hand, and playing on Photo Booth at the Apple Store.
At 21, you either hang out in terrible student nightclubs, or slumped over your kitchen table nursing a horrific hangover.
At 26, you host dinner parties that finish at a sensible time.
3. How you spend an average Friday night:
At 16, Friday nights are reserved for sleepovers.
At 21, you go out every Friday night without fail.
At 26, you go out for a civilised dinner, as long as you're home by a reasonable time.
4. Which parties you have the most fun at:
At 16, bowling followed by Pizza Hut is the best birthday party ever.
At 21, you go out clubbing multiple times a week.
At 26, you don't really go out anymore. But you do go to a new wedding every single weekend.
5. What you eat together:
At 16, it's all about sneaking out of school at lunchtime for a portion of McDonald's chips.
At 21, you scoff cheesy chips at the end of every single night out.
At 26, you sometimes order so much takeaway that you have to lie on the floor with your jeans unzipped after you've finished.
6. What you fight about:
7. At 16, the biggest fights are about who sits by whom on the school bus.
8. At 21, you fight about the people you fancy.
At 26, you fight on behalf of your friend, not with her.
9. How often you hang out:
At 16, you hang out every day at school, every Friday at a sleepover, and then every Saturday in town.
At 21, you still see each other every day, but that's because you live together.
At 26, you see your friends twice a month if you're lucky, but your group chat goes off all day, every day.
If you are dating one of my girls just know that your arguments are displayed in our group chat and as a team we have written the response
And you'll be there at the drop of a hat if your friends ever need you.
10. How many friends you have:
At 16, you have a tightknit group of school friends who you do everything with.
At 21, you have a massive group of friends you go out with and a few closer friends who know everything about you.
At 26, you've cherry-picked your friends and you're left with a very small group of absolute babes.
11. The kinds of favours you expect from your friends:
At 16, you proofread your friends' UCAS applications at school and straighten their hair before a night out.
At 21, you check each other's dissertation references in the daytime and monitor each other's drunk texts at night.
26-year-old friends are there to provide medical diagnoses, proofread job applications, and help compose sexy message at all times of day, no questions asked.
And there's never any judgement.
12. The grossest thing you'd do for each other:
At 16, you fake tan each other's bodies before every single house party.
Your early twenties are your grossest years. At 21, you'll happily hold your friend's hair back as they vom into a toilet.
At 26, you've been through so much together that there's nothing you wouldn't do for each other anymore.
13. How you establish whether your friendship is for life:
At 16, all the bonding happens at lunchtime.
At 21, you bond over getting drunk and then surviving your hangover the next day.
At 26, you bond over how shit men are.
But srsly, why are they so bad?