Despite assumptions that friendship becomes less salient in later-life, several studies confirm the significance of friendship for older people’s mental and emotional well-being. Friends are valued for support and companionship and relieving loneliness and social isolation (Rawlins 2004). Within South Asian diasporic contexts, the family has been taken to be a “self-fulfilling” unit (Purewal and Jasani 2017) and friendship has remained unexplored, specifically in relation to ageing, however. This talk explores the workings of decades-long friendships in the Scottish South-Asian diasporas. Drawing on a wider project on relational lives, it focuses on interviews with 40 male and female participants (50+ years) from the Indian Sikh and Pakistani Muslim communities to ask: How and why do friendships last across cultural differences? Taking inspiration from and building on “practices of intimacy” (Jamieson 2011), the talk positions intimate relationships as socially situated. It outlines three main findings: that in friendships across cultural communities, difference is not contingent but constitutive to the relationships; that “value-navigations” cultivate and sustain long-lasting friendships; and what I term “practices of cultural intimacies” are at the core of how and why these friendships last.