Wedding anniversaries get cards, dinners, sometimes whole parties by year 25. Work anniversaries get a Slack message and maybe a gift card. Even pet adoption anniversaries get an Instagram post now.
Friendship anniversaries — the day you met the person who has, statistically, talked you through more crises than anyone else in your life — get nothing. No calendar reminder. No tradition. Most people couldn't even tell you the actual date they met their best friend.
Why This Is Genuinely Strange, According to Research
Social psychologists who study close relationships have repeatedly found that close friendships are one of the strongest predictors of long-term life satisfaction and even physical health outcomes — in some studies, stronger predictors than family relationships, which people don't choose. Robert Waldinger, director of the famous 76-year Harvard Study of Adult Development, has pointed out repeatedly that close relationships, friendships very much included, are the single largest predictor of happiness the study has found, ahead of money, fame, or career success.
And yet there's no cultural script for celebrating a friendship's existence the way there is for a marriage. It's a strange gap. Here's how some friend groups have started closing it.
5 Ways People Are Marking Friendship Milestones
- Tracking down the actual "meet day." A surprising number of best friends can pinpoint the exact day or event they met, once they think about it — a class, a job, a mutual friend's party that's now legendary for an unrelated reason.
- Making it an annual thing, even just a recurring dinner or a single text on the date, the same way couples mark anniversaries.
- Calling out the friendship explicitly, not just assuming the other person knows how much it matters. Research on relationship satisfaction consistently shows that explicit acknowledgment (not just implied appreciation) measurably strengthens bonds.
- Creating an inside-joke-based tradition that's just for the two (or five, or ten) of you — something with zero meaning to outsiders and total meaning to the group.
- Giving the friendship a permanent, findable marker — something that exists independent of either person's memory and outlives whatever phone or photo app you're currently using.
Making the Anniversary Real
That last one is exactly why some friend groups have started claiming a star together on GalaxySpace — both names, the meet-day date, an inside joke nobody outside the friendship would understand. It turns an anniversary that usually exists only in conversation into something permanent and shareable.
You can create one for your best friend here — for less than the cost of the coffee you've definitely bought each other a hundred times over the years.