A woman related to my memoir so much, she offered to lend me her holiday shack. When we met in person, we couldn’t stop talking

• Find the rest of our series of stories on the kindness of strangers here

The email landed in my inbox late one Friday night in the middle of winter, 2023.

I was not cheerful. For weeks, I’d been wrestling with a difficult article I should long ago have submitted to an editor. As a freelancer, the longer I spent on it, the longer it would be before another cent would hit my bank account. I’d been to the dentist that morning. I’d booked a vet appointment for my dog that afternoon; I feared she might have yet another ear infection.

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Helen Pidd and Alexandra Topping have been close friends for almost 20 years. But struggles with fertility and new motherhood tested their bond to the limit

In the summer of 2006, Helen Pidd met her fellow Guardian journalist Alexandra Topping . It was “a little bit like falling in love”, says Lexy, as the pair bonded over their jobs, through chaotic nights out and on holidays together. Their similarities drew them together, explains Helen: “The two blonde babies of the Guardian newsroom, both from the north-west of England, both a bit gobby.” They told each other everything.

It was a friendship they both cherished, and it was only strengthened as their lives changed. They both fell in love, and Helen left the country and returned. They prided themselves on their ability to speak hard truths, safe in the knowledge that “the other person isn’t going to, you know, strop off into the distance and never speak to you again”.

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Criticising a person’s partner is a pretty good way to strain a friendship, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. There’s no benefit in keeping the moral score

• Read more Leading questions

My friend of 30-plus years has thrown her husband out and started a new relationship with someone I detest. I feel torn between this sense that she’s behaved appallingly towards her husband and the tenure of our friendship. I want to be honest with her about my feelings but feel almost too angry to do it in a constructive way. What do you advise?

Eleanor says: How much moral adjudication do we get to do of our friends? On the one hand you want to keep the bastards honest, and when you’re being a bastard, you want to be kept honest. On the other hand it does seem friendship involves keeping moral score of each other a little less than we ordinarily might.

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She isn’t young, and yet she remains outspoken, passionate, and alive to the world in ways that many aren’t

My friendships have mostly been with people of a similar age, but that all changed when my 85-year-old neighbour left a CD in my letterbox after hearing my young son drumming wildly in our garage. She wrapped the CD in a note written in her finest hand, explaining that she thought he might enjoy the sounds of her friend’s band, The Necks.

Others in our street had understandably complained about the endless noise because the sound reverberated through their walls, creeping into their quiet spaces, and ruining their days.

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My life’s markers may differ from those of my peers, but a year of freedom and fun has taught me to appreciate myself

From the ages of 18 to 21, I spent quite a lot of time crying in my local nightclub in the small town of Listowel in Ireland. My reason for weeping was that all my friends were pulling and I wasn’t. If I could go back in time, I’d give myself a stern talking to, hand myself a shot and say: “Of course no one’s trying it on – you’re wailing Céline Dion in the corner.”

Back then I was terrified of becoming the last single friend in the girl gang. I was petrified of being left behind, abandoned for a man who wore bootcut jeans with brown dress shoes. Every time a friend announced, “I have a date,” my body would seize up. Then I found myself in a relationship. While my friends were out on the town, living the free and single life, I was staying in, curled up under a duvet with my partner, eating takeaway and feeling smug because I didn’t need to be on a dating app.

Édaein O’ Connell is a freelance journalist

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Light, sequins, music, martinis… How to throw a proper party with top tips from Zandra Rhodes, DJ Fat Tony, Ashish Gupta and many more

Make it so that you don’t have to pretend, with individual dancefloors for the shy and retiring.

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Nancy, 69, and Barbara, 58, met over a hotel breakfast in Munich in 2022. Despite being from different continents, they clicked instantly and have travelled together ever since

After retiring from her job as a nurse, Nancy loved to spend time travelling, but she never expected it would lead to her meeting a new best friend. In 2022, she went to Munich, Germany, a city she regularly visited. “I live in North Carolina but I would travel to Europe on my own because my husband still works,” she says. “Travelling is my way of relaxing and rewarding myself after all those years of hard work.”

One morning, while eating breakfast at her hotel, she was approached by Barbara, a healthcare project manager from Austria, who was sitting at a nearby table. “I was visiting the city with my school friend, Andrea” says Barbara. “I noticed this very elegant woman and really liked her coat. I’m a size 18 and struggle to find nice clothes, but I noticed she was a similar size.” Barbara asked Andrea to lean over and look at the label on the coat, so she could find out where it was from. “She almost fell off her chair trying to see, so I decided to just go and ask,” says Barbara.

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While self-help books might suggest manifesting new people in your life or cold-water plunges to change your entire personality, the key to finding a community is much simpler

It started in my mid-30s: The Great Slipping Away. Gradually, and then suddenly, the friends I had in New York started to disappear. Some moved out of the city. Others moved into different phases of their lives: they became laser-focused on their careers and had no spare time. Or they had kids, and hanging out became harder.

Then I became one of the people who had kids and moved out of the city and all my local friends slipped away. A couple of years ago I moved to Philadelphia, a city where my wife and I only vaguely knew a grand total of two people. We were drawn to Philly by its affordability but we underestimated just how difficult it is to build a new community from scratch. As an introverted freelancer who doesn’t have colleagues I see every day (even if just over Zoom), I certainly didn’t anticipate how much effort I would have to make if I didn’t want to become a complete hermit.

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Who hasn’t wanted to destroy a best friend — at least a little?