Making Friends at Sixty

Nobody tells you that one of the hardest parts of starting over is that you have to make friends again, from nothing, as an adult, with no structure to do it for you.

For most of a life, friendship is a byproduct. School gives it to you. Work gives it to you. Your children's schools give it to you, which is how a large number of women end up with a social world composed entirely of people they met through a nine-year-old. It feels like you are good at friendship. What is actually happening is that you are being placed in repeated proximity to the same people, which is the only thing friendship has ever reliably required.

Then the structure goes. The job changes, the marriage ends, the child grows, the city changes. And you discover that you have not made a friend from scratch since you were thirty-one, and that you do not remember how it is done.

I moved to New York at sixty-two, back to a city I had left decades earlier, where everyone I once knew had moved or changed or become a stranger with a familiar face. My daughter is my closest companion, which is a gift I do not take lightly and which is also, I know perfectly well, not a substitute for a peer.

So here is what I have found, and I offer it with the caveat that I am still in the middle of it.

The first thing is that the awkwardness never resolves and you have to proceed inside it. There is a particular vulnerability to expressing interest in a friendship at this age. It feels like asking someone out, with the added indignity that we are supposed to have outgrown needing this. You have not outgrown it. Nobody has. The people who appear to have plenty of friends are mostly people who were in a structure recently.

The second is that proximity still does all the work, so you have to manufacture it deliberately. Not one coffee. The same yoga class on the same day for four months. The same volunteer shift. The thing that puts you next to the same people repeatedly without either of you having to declare anything. Almost every friendship I have made in this decade came from repetition, not from a great conversation.

The third is that you have to be the one who follows up, and you have to do it more times than feels dignified. Most people at our age are not rejecting you. They are tired, overcommitted, and carrying something. The follow-up is not desperation. It is infrastructure, and someone has to build it, and the person who wants the friendship most is usually the one who does.

The fourth is that not everything has to become deep. I spent years believing a friendship was only real if it was total. That standard eliminates nearly everyone. There is enormous value in a person you are genuinely glad to see on Thursdays and know very little about. Let some friendships be small. Small is not failed.

And the last thing, which took me the longest. It is worth being the first one to say something true.

Adult friendships stall in pleasantness. Everyone is fine, everything is good, the children are great. Somebody has to go first, and go slightly further than is comfortable, and say the actual thing about the divorce or the diagnosis or the year. Most of the time the other person exhales and goes further too, because they were waiting for permission.

It is slow. It is much slower than it was at twenty-two, and I resented that for a while before accepting it. But it does work. I have people here now that I did not have twelve months ago, and none of them arrived by accident.