Palling around

Making friends as you grow older may be hard; but it’s even harder to keep the ones you do have

I’ve always been skeptical of those who say that it is impossible to make new friends when you hit middle age. You know how the theory goes, right? The best, the most intense, the most valuable relationships are those that are forged when we are children or in our early adulthood. It is these childhood friends or college buddies who become our support structure as we grow older along with each other. This tight-knit group has no secrets from one another; they have seen each member at his or her absolute best and horrific worst; they share memories and secrets; they have witnessed the seminal moments of each others life; and the bonds thus created are unbreakable. You could never replicate that kind of friendship with someone you meet when you are fully formed.

Well, that’s the argument, anyway. And I must confess that it’s not one I necessarily agree with. As someone who moved town because of my career and lost touch with most of her childhood friends (who are now scattered all over the globe) I could not have negotiated life without the friends I made in my thirties and forties. 

These friendships are arguably even better than the ones I had forged in my youth and teenage years. For one thing, they are not based simply on proximity, on the coincidence of attending the same class or living in the same neighhourhood. These are people that I actively sought out and befriended because I felt I had some sort of special rapport with them. And more importantly, these relationships were formed when I had a better idea of who I was and what I wanted in a friend – and at a time when I had zero compunction about walking away from people who simply weren’t doing it for me. So, these are the friends not just of my heart but my mind as well. 

But as I grow older, it is not the thought of making new friends that preoccupies me; it is the dread of losing any of the friendships that I have spent so many years cherishing and preserving. And yet, as life gets more and more frenetic, as our familial obligations increase, it is an inescapable fact that we have less and less time for friends. 

We all know that relationships are more like houseplants than trees. While trees do well even if they are neglected and left to their own devices, houseplants have a most disobliging way of dying on us if they are not nourished and looked after. So, how does one keep a friendship going, so that it lasts us a lifetime?

Well, here are just a few tips, based entirely on my own experience:

• Stay in touch: And by that I don’t mean that you should share the occasional joke on Whatsapp or like each other’s pictures on Facebook or Instagram. By ‘stay in touch’ I mean that you should be present in one another’s life. If your friend gets promoted, buy her lunch to celebrate. If she loses a parent, don’t think your duty is done if you attend the funeral; call her every day for a little chat just to check that she’s okay. If she is depressed, don’t just send her motivational quotes; show up at her house with a box of chocolates and spend time raising her spirits. 

• Don’t let feelings fester: If you are feeling neglected by a friend, if she hasn’t been in touch for a while, don’t respond by deploying the silent treatment. If you value that friendship, take the initiative to change things for the better. Pick up the phone and speak to her. Be honest and admit that you miss her presence in your life. Ask her for the reasons behind her absence. If she is upset about something you have done, address the issue head-on. Similarly, if you are upset with a friend about something, don’t just sulk in silence and assume that she will pick up on your unhappiness. Express your displeasure clearly and firmly; only then can you move beyond it. If yours is a true friendship, it will survive this honesty stress; if it doesn’t, well then it wasn’t much of a friendship at all.

• Do fun things together: If you only turn to your friends when you are in a funk and need cheering up, or you are in a spot of trouble and could do with some help, it won’t be long before they start dreading your call or email. So, it’s important to ensure that you guys have some fun times together as well to remember why you became friends in the same place. Meet for a few drinks in the evening, maybe go for a walk on a weekend morning, or just share a meal together to catch up on the minutiae of each other’s life. 

• Make an effort: You do that in your romantic relationships, don’t you? (At least, I hope you do!). You put a lot of thought into buying a birthday present. You send flowers on significant anniversaries. You plan surprise parties on special occasions. Well, a friendship doesn’t deserve any less effort just because it a platonic rather than a romantic relationship. So, do your best by your friends, and more often than not, they will do even better by you.

That’s what friends are for...

When it comes to friendships, it takes all sorts to make your life just a wee bit easier

I’ve written in the past about 3 am friends – people whom you can call in the early hours of the morning when you are in the middle of a crisis, with complete confidence that they will listen instead of biting your head off – and how we should consider ourselves lucky if we have even a handful of them. But as I looked at pictures of Maria Shriver, the estranged wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who left him after discovering that he had fathered an illegitimate child with their housekeeper (what a gent, eh?), walking the beach with a few friends looking miserable and near tears, I began to wonder about the nature of friendship.

Yes, it’s all very well to have some people in our lives who will drop everything and listen to us when we are in a funk. But sometimes, that’s not enough. You also have to be sure that afterwards you will feel better about yourself, not worse. You need to believe that your friends are completely on your side. That there isn’t a tiny part of them that is judging you – and finding you wanting. Or even, that at some subliminal level, they are enjoying the sight of your come-uppance.

Which is why, in my book, you need to have four kinds of friends tucked away for such emergencies.

First up is the Sympathetic Listener who, as the phrase suggests, is brilliant at allowing you to let it all out. She doesn’t say very much, sometimes she even refrains from making sympathetic noises. Instead, she just creates a vast stillness between you, a safe space where you can deposit all your fear, your anger, your sorrow and your despair.

And then, by some mysterious process, she gathers all these negative emotions into herself, leaving you feeling strangely unburdened. Spend time with this sort of friend, or even speak to her on the phone, and you end up experiencing a curious lightness of being that leaves you feeling much better about yourself, even though nothing has really changed in your life.

Once you have achieved this sort of closure, you need the services of your Cruel to be Kind Friend. This one takes no prisoners. She is not afraid to tell it as it is, no matter how fragile you may be feeling at that point. And she will not allow you to wimp out even when all you want to do is curl up and die.

No, she will berate you for letting life get the better of you. She will inform you sternly that you have much to be grateful for – a good job, lovely children, your health – and that you need to snap out of it. Stop wallowing in your misery, is her essential message. As the Eagles sang so presciently many decades ago, Get Over It. And there comes a time when all of us need to hear that message.

But while friends like these work like a charm when you are feeling badly about yourself, when you have had a bad break-up for instance, or lost a job, you need a different approach when guilt – rather than sorrow and anger – is the emotion you want to overcome.

We all have moments when we feel that we have screwed up badly; that we have hurt the people we love the most through our thoughtless behaviour. And at such times, all you want to do is hit yourself on the head with a shovel over and over again so that you can wallow in the same pain that you have inflicted on others.

That’s when you need to spend time with a friend who has perfected the quality of being non-judgemental to a fine art. In other words, you need the services of the Whatever Floats Your Boat friend. As far as she is concerned, it’s all good, it’s all a part of life; and you don’t need to beat yourself up over it.

She is never shocked by your worst confessions. Cheated on your boyfriend while on a business trip; yeah, it happens, don’t make a big deal out of it. Feel that you should never have had kids because they make you miserable; hey, everyone feels that way sometimes. Hate your mother-in-law; duh, that’s the way of the universe.

No, none of this takes away the guilt about behaving badly, but you do feel a wee bit better for having shared these feelings – and having had them dismissed as banal rather than shocking.

But, if by some mischance, any of this leaves you feeling a bit rubbish, like you can’t get anything right no matter how hard you try, you need to call in The Eternal Optimist.

She is programmed to always look on the bright side of life; to see the glass as half full rather than half empty. And at times of stress, this relentless optimism can be rather invigorating. It helps that she always has a feel-good story to go with the advice; with the additional homily that if it happened to someone else, there is no reason it can’t happen to you

I just hope that Maria Shriver has at least one such friend in each category filed away in her Rolodex (apart from her ubiquitous celebrity chum, Oprah Winfrey). Or else the months ahead are going to be very challenging indeed.

A friend in deed

Facebook limits the number of friends you can have at 5,000; but in real life, you are lucky if you can muster five

So, what do you make of the petition to do away with the upper limit of friends a person is allowed to have on Facebook? The current maximum stands at 5,000; go above this number and your account is disabled and you are frozen out of the site. In protest, the more gregarious Facebookers have started an on-line petition to beseech the site’s administrators to not be so, uh, preachy and let them have as many friends as they want. So, those of you who want to ‘friend’ more than 5,000 people know exactly where to sign up.

As for me, I’m still reeling from the realisation that there are people out there who have 5,000 friends – and still want more. I’m not sure I even know 5,000 people, let alone have that number lining up to ‘friend’ me on Facebook. In fact, if I add up all the numbers, I would probably be lucky if I reached a thousand, if that.

Don’t get me wrong. I may not be the world’s foremost expert on social media, but I am not a total idiot either. I understand that a friend on Facebook is not really a friend in the traditional sense of the term. Facebook friends can be people who you know very peripherally or maybe not at all. They may include work colleagues, business contacts, friends of friends, complete strangers, hell, even cyber stalkers and the like.

But even so, 5,000 ‘friends’? You have got to be kidding.

Of course, if you believe social scientists then the number of friends a person can realistically hope to make is way below this mark. British anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, came up with a magic number: 150. This, according to him, was the number of people any one person can have stable social relationships with. Dunbar’s number, as it somewhat inevitably came to be called, is based on the size of the neo-cortex of the human brain and the size of communities in hunter-gatherer societies.

Dunbar’s theory is borne out by recent anecdotal evidence on social networking sites which shows that no matter how many ‘friends’ a person may have – 500 or 5,000 – meaningful and regular communication is restricted to just around 150 people. Human beings, it would seem, are hardwired to interact within relatively small, well-integrated groups in which most people know each other and have some sort of social link with one another.

And yet, the moment you sign up for any social networking site, you find all kinds of characters crawling out of the woodwork, asking to be your friend. People you barely said hello to in school or college suddenly want to be `added’ to your list. Colleagues whom you haven’t seen in years want to link up again. Everyone wants to get back in touch even though there is probably a good reason why you lost touch to begin with. And then, there are the loonies: complete strangers who want to be your friend simply because they like your profile picture.

My guess is that all those people who already have a few thousand people on their ‘friend’ list and are now clamouring to ask for more, simply sign on anyone who sends in a request. After all, social media sites are all about showing off these days, about how well-connected and popular you are. So, as far as friends go, the dictum seems to be: the more the merrier.

But really, when you think about it, how many people would you call a friend? In my experience, very few people qualify if you are being completely honest with yourself. Few childhood friends survive the transition to adulthood. If you are very fortunate indeed, you probably still have ten people in your life who knew you as a child. College buddies have a slightly better survival rate, but even so you probably aren’t in regular touch with more than a dozen. Work colleagues tend to fall off the radar pretty soon once you switch jobs with just a handful making the cut as friends. And few of us know our neighbours well enough to call them acquaintances, leave alone friends.

In fact, when it comes down to it, there are very few people you can call friends in the real sense of the term. In my book, only those who qualify on the following five counts make the list.

• Someone you can call at two in the morning simply because you are in a blue funk and can’t fall asleep.
• Someone you rely on to tell you that your bum does look big in those pair of jeans (and those blonde highlights really don’t work).
• Someone who drops in to see you with a steaming cup of cappuccino/chicken soup when you are at home nursing a cold (and whom you can greet at the door in your pyjamas).
• Someone you would trust to look after your kids if you were to die in a horrible accident.
• Someone you can have a slam-dunk row with – name-calling, phone-banging, abuse-shouting, etc. – secure in the knowledge that it will make no difference to your relationship.

Frankly, if you have five people in your life with whom you can do all of the above, you should count yourself lucky.