More moments of my life than I care to admit have been spent in various gutters.

Moments that, over time, have faded into blurred fragments of memory, all stemming from youth mixed with that first bitter yet exhilarating taste of alcohol.

All except one gutter-dwelling moment (devoid of both alcohol and youth, it has to be said), which happened well over a year ago but remains stuck in my mind like a key jammed into a rusty lock because it went on to change one of my closest friendships.

On this particular night, I was standing in the kitchen of my mother's little retirement unit, spooning dinner onto plates, when my phone lit up with a message from this friend, containing just four words.

'Can I call you?'

Nothing dramatic. Nothing that should set off alarm bells or raise suspicion, and yet that's exactly what it did. All because I knew the only reason this friend would interrupt a precious family visit was if something had happened that was so urgent it couldn't wait until I'd boarded the plane home.

She answered my call on the second ring and the news was important enough to warrant a conversation that spanned over an hour. A conversation that marked my first time sitting in a gutter sober during a mosquito-ridden Queensland night, where I'd slipped outside so as not to disturb my mother as she slept, as we discussed a truly unexpected turn of events.

Once upon a time, this friend and I had worked closely together just after I had packed up my life and moved from Queensland to Sydney.

Watch: Should you ever vent about a friend? Post continues after video.

Our respective roles crossed over most prominently while we were both working the lonely Sunday shift. A time when she would appear in the empty office where I'd been toiling away solo for the day to begin her night shift, and for a few hours, we would sit in silence at our desks. Politely conversing only when we needed to share handover notes, but otherwise maintaining the expected professional silence of two strangers who had found themselves thrown together in a rattling old office in Surry Hills on a weekly basis.

Yet, much like how the hottest fire forges the strongest steel, we soon discovered that the strongest of friendships are forged late on Sunday night. When a website had crashed, stories had somehow disappeared, and a sense of growing hysteria would slowly start seeping into every thought and action.

A few years later, this friend left our joint workplace where we had toiled side by side, and when the news was shared, our colleagues all whipped their heads around to stare at me in horror. As if I was about to start crying Kim Kardashian -level ugly tears. But the only tinge of sadness I felt over the situation was the moment when the venue I had booked for her going-away drinks lost our reservation and showed no sign of remorse. Simply shoving us into a room already filled with unbearably loud men in grey suits.

Our friendship had outgrown the office, and so when she left, there was nothing to mourn.

Now, after many years had trickled by, she'd received a call asking her to come back.

Throughout that conversation, as we vigorously dissected the pros and cons and possibilities of the situation, I naively never once considered how it would play out when we were once again seated side by side in an office. Much like standing outside a change room while your friend contemplates a pricey purchase with a no-refund policy, I took my role as a neutral sounding board extremely seriously.

It wasn't until we were firmly ensconced back in that familiar world of joint meetings and shared office days that I noticed the rhythm of our friendship slowly starting to shift.

Over the weeks that followed her first day back, our text chain slowed to the speed of a hungover sloth before stopping almost completely, replaced by the dozens of work-related messages pinging across Slack to each other every day.

Without really noticing it, we fell into a new rhythm of only seeing each other across a sea of cluttered desks, our daily conversations now consumed by work but still speckled with personal updates. All so tightly intertwined together that the incidental small friendship moments that are born outside of this space didn't have any room to breathe.

The first true clue that something was different came in the form of a long weekend that fell a few months into our new co-working arrangement.

In the years prior, during a time when our pay cheques were dolled out by different companies, we would have reached out to each other in the lead-up to those three glorious days of freedom and organised to catch up. Sharing cocktails over lunch, or sitting in the park and gossiping while her bratty sausage dog curled up on my shoulder and growled at unsuspecting small children as they passed by.

But this time around, an unspoken desire to rid our minds of work completely for those three days trumped any plans involving overpriced drinks and angry dogs, and so the three days passed while our text chain remained untouched.

As you grow older, making new friends becomes a kind of extreme sport that no one trains you for. An activity that should be approached with caution and excitement, but could also easily result in pain and embarrassment.

In an era where loneliness is spreading faster than the eye-maxing trend, we crave friendship like never before. Yet in the same breath, we demand a greater distance between our work life and personal life with every passing year.

The glaring problem here is that the workplace is where the strongest of adult friendships are usually forged, backing us into a maze filled with endless dead ends if we try to carve out pockets of life where the professional and the personal will not intertwine.

It's like we've all been handed a recipe book instructing us how to cook up a balanced and successful life, but the correct ingredients are always out of reach.

Friendship is also now being commodified in the content space like never before. The podcast realm in particular is heaving under the weight of popular shows hooked on the simple yet addictive format of 'just two friends chatting ', and these podcasts then spin off into online groups, merchandise, and real-life events.

So eager are we all to find a space where we belong outside work and family that we're now content to just listen in on a friendship that we know we'll never join.

Listen: The Viral 'Friendship Shed' Theory, article continues

As someone who spent a large chunk of their adult life moving to new cities where I knew not a soul, for me the link between friendship and work has always been held together by a particularly tangled string. For better or worse, work is the place where all of my adult friendships have been created.

Which is why, even though it makes no sense on paper, when this particular close friend returned to my workplace, I soon started to feel a quiet sense of sharp loss.

Yet from the outside, this situation looked like it should have been cause for celebration.

After all, isn't that the idea that all of these podcasts and products about the blend of friends and work are so successfully selling us? That the dream we should all be reaching for is hooked on working side by side with our best friends?

Yet, it's not what I'm looking for, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

The truth is, I have plenty of friends at work to go on long meandering coffee walks with, to whisper with in the kitchen, or to stop me from beating my head against my desk when my monitor won't switch on.

What I (and many others) are starting to have less of in this current climate are friends you can lie on the couch with on a Saturday afternoon and confess a crazy insecurity that's been keeping you up at night.

A friend who will come and knock on the door when she knows you're unwell and haven't been answering the phone. A friend who will pick you up from the airport when you've been out of town for months, with a car full of essentials so you don't have to worry about a grocery run.

There are many people in the world who don't need to distinguish between work friends and real-life friends. Who can move seamlessly between those two worlds without feeling them bleed into one another, but I personally have not been blessed with that superpower.

As an added plot twist to this tale, although this friend and I had met when our careers were taking off from the same starting line, we have since run off in very different directions.

I had planted myself firmly in a world of podcasting and writing, while she had climbed so far up the leadership ladder that I could barely make out her silhouette in the distance.

A career fact that had once felt no bigger than a crack when we were just friends, but now felt like a deep chasm of incompatibility when it turned her into my boss.

The person whose veil I had fixed just before she walked down the aisle on her wedding day was now also the person charged with chasing me about deadlines.

And no matter how much I tried to push it all away, a series of little worries hovered over her first weeks in the office like flies circulating an expensive cheeseboard.

In the midst of her exciting new job, I felt guilty that part of my mind was filled with proud excitement, while the other was weighed down by selfish logistics. How would I now have a meltdown to my best friend about work on Friday night with the knowledge that, while being supportive, she'd also be mentally adding my problems to her Monday to-do list?

Then there was the smaller, gnawing worry that slipped into my mind the day she added our first WIP to my calendar. Just like a tiny crack in a bedroom ceiling, I initially chose to ignore it until it began to grow and suddenly it felt like the roof was about to collapse down on top of me.

I worried about the choices I had made that resulted in my former equal now being my boss. Not that there was a world in which I really wanted to switch places, but the more I silently stewed on it, the more I realised that what I was really worried about was what it looked like to the outside world.

That she was soaring, and I was stuck.

Now, if this was a side plot in a half-hour comedy series, then this particular issue would be fixed up with a quippy conversation and a lengthy hug. But alas, the real world does not wrap us up neatly because the credits need to roll.

This friend and I have now found a way to travel this new road without the life and work lanes always merging, but it's not always a clear-cut route.

There are times when we remember that a workday doesn't count as a friend hangout and carve out time where the office never makes a cameo in conversation.

Other times, we'll meet for dinner and ban any talk of work…only to fall off that wagon about 10 minutes in.

Much like the Sydney transport system, it's an imperfect setup. But worth it for a friendship worthy of a Saturday afternoon couch meltdown.

Feature Image: Supplied.

Laura Brodnik is Mamamia's Head of Entertainment and host of The Spill podcast. You can follow her on Instagram here for more entertainment news and recommendations.