In my 40s I fell out with a friend. It had always been a complicated, slightly competitive relationship, but we shared a sense of humour, a keen sense of the absurd.

But after our children attended different schools, we grew slightly apart. I felt she should have made more effort to stay in touch. I suspect she felt the exact opposite.

Hurt crystalised into self-protection before hardening into something a great deal more unyielding. Neither of us knew how to rescue the situation, the friendship. Pride prevented us from even trying.

Rejection is rejection. When you separate from a man, your women friends instinctively respond, gather round, lift you up and put you back together again. When female friendship crumbles there’s no one you can tell about your grief; no woman friend wants to hear you sing the long lost virtues of another woman.

I ended up in therapy. No word of a lie. I thought the therapist would think I was weird and needy. It turns out there’s nothing weird about needing. She understood – it’s an age and stage thing.

“A lot of women, when they’re young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated,” is the verdict of author Zadie Smith. “It’s easy to be friends when everyone’s 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices. A lot of women’s friendships begin to founder.”

Women understand each other because we share experiences, humiliations, laughter and tears in a way that men don’t. It doesn’t make us superior, just different; my own husband claims I’m his best friend. It’s sweet but I can’t reciprocate; once, to explain, I attempted to give him a run down of my best-friend requirements. He froze, then left the room just as I reached “searing honesty”.

So I understand the snarky ambivalence towards Samantha in And Just Like That.

The story is she’s gone off to London, where “sexy sirens in their Sixties are still viable”. Ouch. I’m not sure where art ends and life begins; Cattrall is a decade older than the others.

Either way the bitterness rings true. Margaret Atwood writes sagely of friendship in her 1988 novel Cat’s Eye, the narrator reflecting on her complicated connection to what we would now term a frenemy.

“This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.”

Or, in the case of Carrie Bradshaw, cosmopolitans. That’s the thing about enduring female friendship; it may be rooted in the past but it promises a future.

You can read Judith Woods’s column every Thursday. Click here to read last week’s edition