Having and keeping good friends in middle age can be compared to maintaining a garden.
How’s your friendship garden? Is it healthy, vibrant, blossoming with a variety of interesting, beautiful and food-generating plants? Or is it woefully unattended, fallow and full of weeds.
I won’t lie. As you grow older, and particularly when you relocated a lot because of work, finding and making B.F.F.s (Best Friends Forever) isn’t easy. Alex Williams, a New York Times columnist recently wrote about the difficulty in building strong, vibrant friendships in your 30s and 40s. And believe me, it doesn’t get easier in your 50s — unless you put in the effort.
Williams writes:
“In your 30s and 40s, plenty of new people enter your life, through work, children’s play dates and, of course, Facebook. But actual close friends — the kind you make in college, the kind you call in a crisis — those are in shorter supply.
“As people approach midlife, the days of youthful exploration, when life felt like one big blind date, are fading. Schedules compress, priorities change and people often become pickier in what they want in their friends.”
He cites one researcher who says:
People tend to interact “with fewer people as they moved toward midlife, but that they grew closer to the friends they already had.”
That’s all fine if you stay in close proximity to those people. But what if you move? If requires effort and dogged persistance on your part to keep those past relationships. Many guys just let things slip. My position — one that I keep hammering on this blog — is that if you haven’t already, you need to change and put keeping and making new friendships up high on your priority list during middle age.
Either way, Williams’ column, “Friends of a Certain Age,” is food for thought. Here’s the link to the entire piece:
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