The Single Mothers Who Met in the Staffroom
Lucy Crowe and Mikayla Jolley met while working as teaching assistants at the same school in London in 2011. Both had survived difficult relationships, and Lucy had been rehoused with her four children. “There was an automatic trust between us,” Mikayla recalls. “It was instinctive.” The two quickly bonded over their shared work ethic and understanding of their circumstances.
When Mikayla discovered her partner was cheating, she confided in Lucy. “I remember going into school and telling Lucy. I wouldn’t have shared it with anybody else there,” says Mikayla, now 52 and a mother of five sons. “She told me, ‘It’s going to be all right, we’re going to sort this out.’ She’s always optimistic; I’m a pessimist.” Similarly, Lucy recalls calling Mikayla late at night for help during an encounter with an ex. “I knew if I called her I’d be safe. I didn’t ask her to come, but she did,” says Lucy, now 53 and a child protection chair and grandmother.
“I saw resilience in Mikayla,” Lucy adds. “We both wanted better lives. Neither of us took the easy way out.” Mikayla reflects, “Maybe, unconsciously, we saw something of ourselves in each other.” Neither had another friend who had been through similar experiences. Their pasts were not a daily focus, but details emerged over time. “We’ll both drop curveballs every now and again, and the other will say, ‘Did that actually happen?’” Mikayla says. “We process in similar ways, compartmentalise.”
As single mothers, they supported each other practically and emotionally. “If we had difficulties with the kids, neither was judgmental,” Mikayla notes. “For me that was big; I’d spent most of my life feeling judged.” When Lucy returned to university in 2014 to study social work, everyone said it was too much, but Mikayla encouraged her. Five years ago, Lucy suffered a stroke, leaving her without the use of one arm. She collapsed and told her son, “I want Mikayla.” Her friend supported her through rehabilitation. Now, Lucy jokes, “She’s like my personal assistant when we go out.”
They live a four-minute drive apart, shop, attend gigs, and holiday together. “I think I’ve benefited 70% from Mikayla and she’s benefited 30% from me,” Lucy jokes. “We ground each other and advise on relationships.” Their friendship includes dark humour. “I’ll call her crying my eyes out …” Mikayla says, but Lucy adds, “We end up laughing.” They speak most days but don’t live in each other’s pockets. Lucy is planning a move to Ghana, and Mikayla is in a new relationship, but Lucy insists, “I don’t see a time when I’m not close with her.” Mikayla agrees: “She’s loyal. She’s honest. Because of her, I know what to look for in a friendship, and relationship.” Lucy reflects, “She’s consistent, dependable. Mikayla’s more than a friend: she’s family.”
The Fathers to Autistic Children Who Bonded Through Running
Gaz Hitchin and Andy Williams first met at Birmingham airport before running the Paris marathon last year. “Our flight wasn’t until 5am. I got there at midnight and Gaz was a little earlier,” remembers Andy, 42. “The only place open was Costa, so we drank about six cups of coffee and sat for hours, unloading. It was like therapy.” Both men are fathers to profoundly autistic children—Andy to Lydia, five, and Gaz to Thomas, six—and had connected online a few months earlier. It was, they agree, “a meeting of minds.”
Gaz, 44, a digital marketing manager, had been sharing his parenting experiences on Instagram. But with less time to socialise and less common ground with other parents, “It was a very lonely place,” he says. “And our half of the species are a bit ridiculous about bottling things up.” Andy, an HR manager, could relate: “My life was surviving on two hours’ sleep, trying to function as an adult, go to work, sustain a relationship. You end up feeling like you’re cut off, living in this weird bubble. It’s all-consuming.” Lydia’s mother knew Gaz from school and showed Andy his posts. “It was like, bloody hell, there’s someone else like me,” Andy says. He sent messages expressing appreciation and asking about Gaz’s child.
“I wasn’t used to getting messages like that,” Gaz says. “When someone goes, I recognise this, you notice.” After exchanging only a handful of messages, Andy suggested signing up for the marathon for the charity Ambitious about Autism. “He was the only other father I knew who had an autistic child,” Andy explains. From their airport meeting, they talked non-stop. Andy describes it as an “unshackling”: “At the start it was the usual small talk, then I would mention this little thing I’d experienced and it was like, ‘Absolutely, I deal with that’ and I thought, I’m not alone here.”
Gaz recalls, “When you can laugh about the things that six months ago you were crying about, and the guy you’re talking to can laugh about it at your expense, that’s funny.” Andy agrees: “You miss that as a bloke. It’s a relief to go, ‘I’m back in the normal world.’ Gaz was two years ahead, so he was guiding me, too, telling me: you’re going to experience this and this is how to deal with it.” In Paris, they walked, talked, ate, and ran together. Inspired, two months later they launched a podcast, Autism Dadcast, and supported the Disabled Children’s Partnership. “We also have a WhatsApp group full of autism dads and we catch up daily,” Andy says. Gaz “is probably the person I hear from more than anyone else in the world … This friendship is stronger, closer and more meaningful than those I had before.” Gaz reflects, “There are three types of friend: the ride or die who’ll kick someone’s door in; the person you’d call at 3am; and the person you can be vulnerable with. If you’ve got one person who is all three, you’re laughing.”
The Ex-Church Members Who Left Religion Behind—and Found Each Other
Jonathan Kraft and Alicia Arthur met at a Pride event in Tennessee in summer 2024. Both had left their religious communities after questioning their beliefs. Alicia, 37, a mother of two and intern family therapist, says, “I was raised as a missionary kid and grew up overseas. I attended religious boarding school and my grandfather was a pastor.” Religion “wasn’t really a choice.” In 2021, her belief system crumbled, and she left the church. “It was very destabilising, quite traumatic and scary. My friendships were all in that community.” Nobody reached out. Jonathan, 44, an estate agent and father of two, had a similar experience. He grew up in a charismatic evangelical church and started seeing a mismatch between words and actions. After the pandemic, he and his wife Jenna pulled away. Around the same time, their child came out as non-binary, leading them to the Pride event.
Alicia had recently come out as bisexual and was there with her husband. “It was a little coffee shop bookstore. I remember walking in and feeling a little unsure. I saw Jonathan and his family in the back corner.” She recognised Jenna from an online community for people who had left the church. The four instantly connected. “We swapped numbers and all went for dinner,” Alicia remembers. They had game nights with the kids, and Jonathan recalls, “It was clear that Alicia and I had a lot of common interests; we built a deeper bond than anybody else.”
“We’re both passionate about mental health, we’ve both been in our own therapy,” Alicia says. “Both of us have this drive to always be learning and growing,” Jonathan adds. They became sounding boards for each other. “Both of us tend to hold on to things loosely. We came from environments where ‘this has to be what it is’; now everything could be discussed,” he says. It was new to both in a friend. “We’ve stretched each other,” Alicia says. “We both have wounds from how we were raised. It’s been healing to have this friend who is accepting and not judgmental.” They interact daily through multiple message threads, video messages, memes, and online games. They live 30 minutes apart. “Coming from church, there was often this idea that men and women can’t be friends,” Alicia says. “It’s been beautiful to expand that.” Jonathan adds, “I think men and women can learn a lot from each other. Meeting Alicia has changed my view on what a friend is. It’s given me a healthier view of myself, what I deserve and what I have to give. It’s set the bar.”
The Dog-Walkers Who Became Like Family
Jude Davis and Maureen Anderson met while walking their dogs in a London park four years ago. “I think it was our dogs that met first,” says Maureen, 59. Jude, 43, a marketing and brand consultant, remembers, “She was the first other Black person I’d seen with a dog. The connection was immediate.” Maureen explains, “As children of the Windrush generation, having dogs as pets is not encouraged. In the Caribbean they’re yard dogs. Ours are our babies,” she says of her cavapoo Simba and Jude’s bichon frise, Mutya.
The pair stopped to talk. “Everyone talks to Maureen in the park, everyone adores her. She was warm and inviting straight away,” Jude remembers. From then on, they walked together regularly. While the dogs brought them together, it was their life experiences, particularly of grief, that bonded them. In 2024, when Jude started training for the London marathon for Lupus UK, he told Maureen about his younger sister Rachael, who died from the disease when she was 16 and Jude 18. “It was really tough and I had held it in for some time.” Maureen had lost her parents within four weeks of each other from Covid complications in 2020 and had contributed to a book on Black grief and healing.
“I thought what she went through was awful,” Jude says. “No one experiences grief in the same way but it was nice to have someone to listen and really understand. Maureen created a safe space where I felt comfortable talking about my sister’s horrific death.” That Christmas, Jude invited Maureen to join his family. “I’d been happy having Christmas alone since my parents died; my son lives abroad and my family are in Birmingham,” she says. But being welcomed by another Jamaican family meant a lot: “I wasn’t expecting all those feelings. As I was eating, I could taste home.”
The pair found common ground in work and advocacy. Jude runs the Bop Black Opportunities Platform, and Maureen is involved in racial equality and hosts the MAMM menopause support network. “We’d discuss experiences for Black individuals in workplaces,” Jude says. “I’d been there to support others but didn’t have that outlet myself.” Now, he says, “I hear from Maureen every day. It’s so different to my other friendships—she has more experience and is easier to talk to. I always have that support from her.” Maureen agrees: “I would describe Jude as a son, nephew, brother. I’ll look out for him, he’ll look out for me. When I had a cold recently, he brought me soup.” Jude reflects, “I don’t know if you can have a community with two people but that’s what we’ve managed to create.”
The Adoptees with a Shared Backstory
Sue Jardine and Debbie Cook met 16 years ago through the Hong Kong Adoptees Network. Both were found as babies in Hong Kong stairwells and later adopted by British families. “There was an understanding of how and why we felt certain things that a ‘normal’ person doesn’t quite get,” says Debbie, 67. “It was a trust thing,” Sue, 63, adds, “a feeling we could share things that had always felt risky, about our experiences, our upbringings.” Another leveller was their height: Debbie is 1.45 metres (4ft 9in) and Sue 1.55 metres (5ft 1in). “It was having that mirror image looking back at you, deeper than just at surface level.”
Their backstories were instantly recognisable. Debbie was brought to Manchester in 1961 as a toddler by an adoptive Chinese father and British mother. She was taken to Fan Ling Babies’ Home, as was Sue two years later, after being found in a first-floor stairwell on Hong Kong Island. Their childhood experiences resonated. “Growing up, surrounded by nobody who looks like you, you know you’re different but can’t articulate or comprehend it,” Sue explains. She discovered adoption papers aged 10 but remained “colour blind” to her own difference. Debbie says, “I didn’t want to process that something wasn’t quite right. I grew up in a very white village in the 60s. The only Chinese person was my father.” Both experienced name-calling and knew no other girls like them.
Meeting brought relief. Debbie had established the network a year earlier; Sue joined a Manchester meet-up. “We just got on well,” Debbie remembers. They travelled together, including to San Francisco in 2013, when Debbie was grieving her father’s death. “It meant Sue was there to talk with.” When Sue’s mother moved to Carlisle and became ill, they’d meet for meals or walks. A 2015 trip to Hong Kong was poignant: they visited the babies’ home and the stairwell where Sue was found. “It’s hard to know what you’ll feel,” she reflects, but “to have someone who understood the enormity” helped. “There’s a lot we don’t need to talk about,” Debbie says. “It’s unspoken because we both come from the same background.” Sue adds, “It’s not having to explain things. There’s delight in being able to say things to one another.” Debbie agrees: “Finding someone I can identify and bond with has really made my life more fulfilling.”
The Neighbours Who Became Best Friends
Trillia Robinson and Lyn McGrath met after Trillia moved into a house across the road from Lyn in New South Wales in 2014. Trillia, 73, wanted to make a garden, and Lyn offered gardening books and cuttings. Lyn, 84, remembers, “She didn’t know anyone else in the area. I took her in.” The pair became confidantes, sitting in Lyn’s guest suite beside the Tweed River, talking for hours and doing jigsaw puzzles with a gold KitKat.
Trillia was caring for her terminally ill husband, Peter, while Lyn’s husband, Bill, had retired. “It was respite for both of us in different ways, a break,” says Lyn. “We laughed at the same things. We could talk about our life and know it wouldn’t go any further.” When Peter died in 2020, Trillia planned to move to New Zealand to be closer to her son, but Covid closed the borders. “Enter friend Lyn!” Trillia says. For nine months, she lived in Lyn’s guest suite. “It was wonderful,” she says. They retained their own lives but still did jigsaws together.
When Trillia finally moved, it was with a heavy heart. “Our friendship was not something I expected. When you’re older, it’s harder to make friends. You’re not waiting at the school gate, going to work or going out as much. You have a lot of transitional friendships but not ones—like this—that actually matter.” They remain close via email a couple of times a week. “When there’s something to say and even when there isn’t,” Lyn adds. Trillia says, “I think there’s a small group of people in your life who, when something happens, good or bad, they’re on the list. Lyn is one of those.”
