#17 - How to cope when your best friend gets engaged?
Chatting friendship and marriage with Adult Best Friends director Delaney Buffett.
I’m getting married this year, and while I don’t think it’s going to change anything between my friends and me, I do think it signals that bigger changes are on the horizon. Marriage? It’s just one big party with your friends and family, right?
I had (naively) minimized the impact “being engaged” can have on a close friend, but that was before I watched Delaney Buffett’s directorial debut, Adult Best Friends.
Adult Best Friends is co-written by and co-starring Delaney and her real-life bestie Katie Corwin. The story follows Corwin and Buffett, two lifelong best friends whose relationship starts to shift when Corwin gets engaged and isn’t quite sure how to break the news to Buffett.
They take a girls' trip back to their childhood beach town, but what’s meant to be a lighthearted getaway doesn’t go as planned. Along the way, they encounter all sorts of quirky characters and unexpected situations, including an eccentric Airbnb host and a lively group of guys they meet at a bar.
It’s a simple plot that asks a big, relatable question:
What happens when things like career, new friends, or marriage threaten the friendship you just can’t live without?
While I don’t have all the answers, I did speak with Delaney Buffett about it. We talked about how nice it was to make a film with her best friend, and how hard it is to keep that relationship strong in adulthood.
I discovered that there was a quiet grief that comes with the news of your best friend getting married. It didn’t occur to me at first because I don’t actually have a friend that close. I’ve always kept a limit on how close I allow people to be because I know it comes with responsibilities. “There was definitely an adjustment period,” Delaney admits.
So, how do you make it work?
She told me they made huge efforts to stay in each other’s lives, and a big part of that effort was learning to shift their expectations.
“Katie and I give each other a lot of grace. Life sometimes gets in the way, and you can’t expect your friends to drop everything.”
Communication is also a big part of it.
“We don’t let things bubble the way you might in your teens,” Delaney explained. “We want to be in each other’s lives for the next 20 years, and that means having the hard conversations, even when it’s uncomfortable.”
For Delaney, the emotional shift when Katie got married was real.
“It didn’t really hit me until the wedding. That’s when I realized she has a husband now. She’s probably going to have kids, and priorities might start to shift. That was hard to wrap my head around.”
The pair have been close friends for over 23 years, something their chemistry on screen can attest to.
“We’ve always treated our relationship like it matters just as much as family,” she added.
There’s a really funny scene in the film when Katie’s brother, Henry (played by Zachary Quinto), insists on telling his sister that his wife is his best friend, repeatedly prodding her for confirmation.
Is your spouse supposed to be your best friend?
That’s a question for another time. But I do think it’s crucial to maintain a balance between your friends (especially your best friend) and your partner. Too often, especially women, end up prioritizing their partner over their friends.
We tend to forget that we’re still living our own lives while also living a shared life with a partner.
Though Adult Best Friends is purposefully semi-autobiographical, it’s not based on a true story. From the start, both Buffett and Corwin aimed to amplify aspects of their personalities and relationship.
In the early development of the project, they also considered casting other actresses to play their roles, but ultimately decided it felt more natural to step into the characters themselves.
“When we were acting, we gave ourselves permission to go off script a little... just to make sure it felt natural,” Delaney said.
When I got engaged, my closest friends were there. It didn’t feel like a massive secret or weight I was carrying, especially since I’d been with my partner for years.
The closest I can relate to Adult Best Friends was something that happened when I was a teenager. I remember telling my girlfriends I had a boyfriend, and while we weren’t getting married, it meant I’d be spending less time with them.
And that was catastrophic.
They actually wrote me a letter and ended our friendship over it.
I’ve come to realize that in many of my friendships with women, there’s often been an unspoken emotional need I don’t fully understand or know how to meet. Female friendships can be intense; I tend to keep them at a distance.
But at the same time, I find myself longing for the kind of deep, steady connection I see between best friends like Delaney and Katie, on screen and in real life.
There’s something really grounding and beautiful about that kind of bond.
After I got married, a very close friend — my maid of honour — silently stepped away from our friendship. It was gradual. It hurt. And while I never brought it up (though I probably should have), it offered me something quite special in the end.
What changed? At first, it was the frequency of our interactions, the everydayness of our friendship began to fade. She made new friends; I eventually left the city we both lived in. Yet the silence was palpable, and it challenged me. The clearest sign that something had shifted was when I wasn’t invited to her wedding. Not just me, but a few of our mutual friends were left out, friends who, unlike me, hadn’t shared that long ‘best friend’ status with her. Her parents had once felt like my own. When I heard the news of her wedding, it prompted some deep questions, and, unexpectedly, offered a kind of tutorial in love and friendship.
Covid had passed in the time between her meeting her partner and getting married. I had never met him. So was the non-invite an indictment of my character or personhood? Initially, it felt like an insult to our shared history. And yet, to let a wound dictate how I viewed her would have been a greater betrayal on my part. She is a beautiful person, someone I know still respects and loves me. Our friendship has changed, but it has by no means ended. The truth is, her wedding wasn’t about me. And being a friend, at its core, means showing up as I am, no matter how the dynamic or frequency shifts.
We met up after the wedding. She was in my city for a gig, and we managed to go for dinner. We’d both lived through massive milestones: she’d got married, and I had got divorced. And still, it felt like we picked up where we’d left off. In fact, even during the quieter years of our friendship, we’d still meet once or twice a year, and the energy of our connection, our affection, and our ability to be honest and real has never waned. I didn’t even feel the need to ask, “Why wasn’t I invited?”
Instead, I look at the beautiful unfolding of her life and feel a quiet happiness. I don't need to be in the centre of it all.
Would I like to be there for the intimate moments more often? Yes. Would I love for her to be more engaged in my daughter’s life? Absolutely. Would I call her if I were in a really sticky situation? In a heartbeat. It took time for me to acknowledge and accept our lives are no longer enmeshed. But there’s still a foundation of friendship — and for that, I am deeply grateful.