All the things you recognize when you've been friends for more than 10 years

I have never had a very large group of girlfriends, and to be honest, I have never seen the added value of it either. My friends and I have an incredibly close bond and we know each other – because we don't have a large friend group – inside out. I met my best friend years ago at the open day of the school we would both later attend. Fate brought us together, as we soon discovered that we were both going through a tough break-up at that time. We started as superficial acquaintances, but it quickly turned into a dear and priceless friendship for which I am still very grateful to this day. In the more than ten years that we have known each other, we have seen each other in every possible way: from grumpy because things aren't going the way you want to to toasting to life on a sun-drenched terrace, from complaining about insecurities together to encouraging each other at special moments and from broken to blissfully happy. It is a vulnerability that you can often only show with friends you have known for a long time, and there are many more things you recognize when you have been friends for more than ten years.

1. You take food out of each other's fridge without asking. I hope I don't need to explain this, but when we've been friends for so long, your fridge is my fridge and vice versa. Although you often find nothing more than half a bottle of wine and a suspicious-looking cucumber in my fridge. Everyone has their strengths.

2. Your parents regularly ask about your friend. Now my parents are a case apart because they have more or less adopted all my friends, but every time I visit, I can be sure that they will ask for an update on my friends' lives. So sweet.

3. You are together so often that people look at you strangely when you are alone. My best friend and I were always together before her big move to the south of the country (which I still disagree with). When we would briefly part ways to go to the bathroom in a café, one of us would always be questioned about where the other was. A Siamese twin has nothing on us.

4. Strangers think you are a couple. It's countless how many times we've been asked this. Very handy when you want to avoid annoying men while out, but generally our answer to this question was: ‘No, we are not a couple, just a couple of besties.’

5. You finish each other's sentences. This has become so bad that I genuinely think we could communicate without ever saying anything to each other. We can literally read each other's minds.

6. Another telepathic wonder: you call each other at the same time, making it seem like the other is on the phone. After a few tries, you just give up and end up not being able to reach each other at all. If that isn't true friendship...

7. You have gone beyond all shame. Whether it's having extreme crying fits after a break-up, irrationally ranting, or peeing with the door open: it doesn't matter anymore, you can be completely yourself with each other.

8. You need only half a word and know each other so well that your friend sometimes knows how you feel better than you do. The times my friend has explained to me why I feel the way I feel have become countless.

9. You regularly show up in the same outfit. Great minds think alike, and that's no different in your case. Aside from the fact that you influence each other time and again to make unnecessary purchases, you also manage to wear those purchases at exactly the same time.

10. My favorite: laughing until no sound comes out. No one has as good a sense of humor as you and your bestie, and it manifests itself especially in laugh after laugh over everything that other people will never find funny. Oh, what do they know? Not everyone has your excellent sense of humor.