I’ve been thinking about friendship a lot lately. Partially because I finally joined the 21st century, Instagram, and am therefore bombarded with images of happy cliques; and, partially because I’ve just moved 3,000 miles away from the place I have called home for the past 15 years. It’s gotten me to this too real place of acceptance and clarity.

In your 20’s everyone is your friend: people from high school, pals from college, work colleagues, friends of friends. You take em all. It’s like a decade of fishing where you don’t throw any back.

Then, in your 30’s you start pruning. Weeding out the emotional vampires and the “all drama all the time” crew. Some of it happens naturally–an illness in the family forces some friends to step up and others to show their true colors. Marriage, kids–some fall away naturally. You switch jobs/careers/partners and you find yourself with fewer and fewer friends. Which is actually pretty great–you spend more time with the people you genuinely love and who genuinely love you.

So, you’re chugging along, happily, with your perfect little crew of good friends. Then, all of a sudden, you make this giant life-change. And, it’s the right thing and everyone supports you but distance. Distance, man. It’s real. Time differences and work schedules, bedtimes and familial obligations and just life. Life in a new place happens. You have to restart your career and re-acclimate your kid. You have to find (or maintain) that inner circle all over again. But, how?

There are a trillion articles about making friends in your thirties. My problem isn’t making friends it’s maintaining friendships. How does one find the time as an adult? How do you prioritize friends over family or over self-care or over laziness and fatigue? How do you balance it all? This isn’t one of those, “how can we have it all” questions. This is just a very real query: how does one find the time and energy to be social in your late thirties–with a partner and a kid and a house and a career?

Where are all those extra hours the enviable #girlsquads on instagram seem to have?