In 2021, in a moment of morbid curiosity, Charlotte and Raffi Grinberg, who’d been married for six years, decided to calculate how much they would see their best friends for the rest of their lives if they continued visits at their current rate. The math was bleak: They’d spent more days with their friends in the years when they were ages 13 to 30 than they would spend from ages 30 to 100.

Charlotte and Raffi, who’d each been inseparable from their respective best friends in adolescence, realized that a lifestyle change was in order. For years, they’d sworn a commitment to their friendships—which had come with so much shared history. First, Charlotte met Raffi’s best friend on a pre-college trip. Through that best friend, Charlotte met Raffi. Years later, Charlotte’s own best friend and Raffi’s best friend planned Charlotte and Raffi’s engagement party—where they had their first kiss, the start of a romance that eventually led to marriage. But despite how intertwined their lives were, they’d never all lived in the same place.