This viral Tweet, shared over the weekend, attempts to redress that imbalance. “Low maintenance friends are my favourite kind,” user @Liahsux posted. “Haven’t properly hung out in a week? Cool. Wanna just hang out at ur place and do our own work next to each other? OK.

“Need me to keep u company while we run errands? No problem,” she writes. “We’ve got our own lives, plus each other.” (Later, @Liahsux clarified that as a student all her close friends live by and are currently jobless, so a week is actually a long time for her not to hang out with one of them. For my low-maintenance friendships, I’d up that to a month, or maybe even three.)

I’ve imbibed so many bad messages from pop culture over the years. I thought that working at a magazine would be exactly as it appeared in The Devil Wears Prada, complete with a never-ending fashion cupboard at my disposal. I believed that interviewing celebrities would be as dramatic and exciting as Notting Hill makes it look, when in reality it’s just a lot of picking things out of your teeth while you wait around in empty hotel rooms.

I learnt most of my friendship lessons from the all-or-nothing relationships on display in Sex and the City. This is what friendship should be like, I thought. It should be about pouring all your time and energy into close relationships with a small group of women you see all the time to the exclusion of all else: money, career, relationships, other friends.

“Why it’s time we celebrated the magic of low maintenance friendships”