A lot changes in your 30s.

Your goals, your metabolism, your idea of "comfortable."

You can't fathom staying out until 2 a.m. Your ambition for the corner office has evolved to just getting weekends off. You start buying clothes that stretch.

You've become that person you swore at the reckless, carefree age of 21 you'd never turn out to be.

While there are many things about age we can't control — like our ability to eat a box of powdered doughnuts without feeling sick — there's one aspect of our lives that will always age along with us: our friends.

It's interesting how much more I value my friends now than in the years when I actually had the time to spend with them.

Not that I didn't appreciate them before. It's just that, at this age, to maintain strong friendships, you really have to work at it.

We don't all live in the same neighborhood anymore, catching the same bus to school every day or bonding over our disdain for trigonometry and 18th-century British poetry.

We're busy. Raising kids, commuting to work, going to therapy, lowering our cholesterol. We're juggling jobs, home repairs, soccer practice and workout sessions with a personal trainer who costs more than your monthly car payment.

Who has time for friends?

I thought about this last week when a girlfriend of mine, who's raising a toddler, holding a full-time job and starting a line of tote bags, all while still fitting into a size 0, called to meet for lunch.

I hadn't seen her, much less had a lengthy conversation with her, in months, and I was eager to catch up.

The time apart hadn't changed a thing. We fell back into a conversation that seemed like it had just been on hold for a few months. We chatted about our jobs, our relationships, our hair, like no time had passed.

And yet, we can easily take it for granted, waiting for the next wedding to see each other or putting off that phone call until we've got a free moment — sometime in the next leap year. Life can really get in the way.

But friends should never get pushed to the next available Saturday. They give us an outlet to vent and to unwind. They give us an excuse to skip a workout or order dessert. They're the ones who understand our need for that new pair of shoes, our obsession with reality TV, our strange attraction to Libras. And they still like us.

While our lives — and jeans size — may have changed with age, it's nice to know our friends haven't.

Catherine E. Toth is a former staff writer at The Advertiser. Reach her at cat@thecatdish.com. Read her blog, The Daily Dish, at www.blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com.

Reach Catherine E. Toth at ctoth@honoluluadvertiser.com. Read her daily blog at blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com.