It’s International Friendship Day today, so we’re naturally thinking about all our delightful mates. Some we’ve known since birth. Others, simply because we were seated next to one another in Year 7.
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Then there’s the ones we make during our party years. The randoms we meet in the toilet queue, or while throwing up in a back alley. The friendships forged through a haze of Jagerbombs and ‘Put Your Hands Up For Detroit (I Love This City)‘.
Are these the truly great mates of our lives? Erm, perhaps not. But sometimes those wild 4am deep and meaningfuls really, truly do become the foundation for lifelong friendships. We rounded up a few folks who met their friends as drunk randoms.
I met Georgina when she was dating my cousin, way back in the late-’00s. She was trying to put the Spice Girls or something on the iPod and my cousin was giving her shit for it, so I stepping in and joined the drunk screaming and we eventually screeched him into submission and started teaching each other our best Spice Girls dance moves.
They split up, stopped speaking and have both married other people since then, but G’s been one of my closest mates for almost 10 years. – Mel
It was 2AM and I was waiting for a stall to open up. In the spirit of being in line for a toilet at Revolver at 2 in the morning, I struck up a conversation with the gals in front of me. Johanna and Beatrice were two Swedes who had just arrived in Melbourne and were eager to explore Australia on their gap year.
I was in a jovial, vodka soda-inspired mood and insisted they message me the next day so I could show them around. They did, and we went for dinner along with my best friend Madison. We all got on like a house on fire. We felt like we had met our Swedish equivalents – they were excited, enthusiastic feminists with big ideas and we talked for hours, comparing cities, families, boyfriends, lives. It was so nice to realise there were girls just like us living on the other side of the world.
Madison ended up traveling to Sweden the next year with her boyfriend, and when things turned sour, Johanna opened up her home to Madison. Johanna was instrumental in helping her through a tough time. It blew my mind that we’d cultivated this kind of friendship in a dunny line.
Over the years our communication has dropped off, save for the occasional Instagram like. Johanna now lives in San Fran, and I know when I go there I’d have a place to stay, which is such a lovely feeling. – Lucinda
One of my best friends Paige and I met at a Fridge to Fridge two years ago. Our housemates played footy together and for months kept saying “Omg you two have to meet, you’ll get along like a house on fire.”
Both our houses then ended up being in the fridge to fridge and it was literally like best friends at first sight. I think after an hour of drinking together we both said the Stepbrothers quote “OMG DID WE JUST BECOME BEST FRIENDS?”
We literally partied together every weekend for the rest of that summer and are still best friends now, all just from a drunken Fridge to Fridge event. – Kath
I met one of my mates in the bathroom at a club in Playa Del Carmen (Mexico). He and his girlfriend were there from Cardiff, Wales and we hung out with them for the next couple of nights.
That was in 2014, and since then he and his girlfriend have come out to Sydney twice to stay for weeks at a time with us, and my mate’s been across to stay with him twice. I’m currently planning a trip to meet them in Bali in January. I’d dead set consider him to be one of my best mates. – Eamon
I got into the club with my sister’s ID, so naturally was v. annoying in the way that underage people are when they manage to do that. I heard these two girls talking about a fuckboy of sorts (I’m pretty sure they were just called regular assholes back then) while weeing and decided to join the conversation because, you know, I was feeling all grown up and cool.
I never saw the girl on the very left again, but feel like I saw the girl in the middle all the bloody time after that night – not that that was a bad thing, she’s lovely. She wound up dating someone I knew for a while. We’d always stop and say hello to one another when we crossed paths, unlike with other bathroom meets where you dart into another direction. – Chantelle
