A recent article suggests the period for making BFFS the way you did in your teens and 20s is over – so have I accumulated the right kinds of friends?
Once, after spending four straight days alone in my flat, communicating only with an editor (via email) and myself (via the bathroom mirror), I asked myself (in the back of a spoon): "Do you really need friends? You seem to be doing just fine all by yourself." It was my cue to drop the spoon, get dressed and make plans to see a friend as soon as possible.
Earlier this week, I read Alex Williams's New York Times piece in which he explores the difficulties of making friends after the age of 30. Actual close friends are in shorter supply, argues Williams. "No matter how many friends you make, a sense of fatalism can creep in: the period for making BFFs, the way you did in your teens or early 20s, is pretty much over. It's time to resign yourself to situational friends: KOF's (kind of friends) ..."
The article made me think. I will be 30 this November, and while I have a stable of friends accrued over a lifetime, I began to worry about the looming deadline, this most depressing of cut-off dates. Are my true friend-making days numbered? Have I collected all the real friends I am likely ever to have? Most important, have I accumulated the right kinds of friends? Every so often there are those "Six Types of Friends Every Woman Needs" articles, with categories like "the mum friend" and "the therapist". Who among my friends is the Rachel to my Monica, the Cagney to my Lacey? I am well versed in fictional friendships, as taught by Enid Blyton's books. In The Famous Five, everyone had their roles: Julian was the overbearing but responsible one, Dick the funny mediator, Anne the timid pushover and George the loyal one. By the time I moved on to Malory Towers, I was in the grip of the kind of friendship that Darrell shared with Sally – fierce loyalty and possessiveness accompanied by passionate bust-ups and tearful making up.
My oldest and best friend is my sister, born three years before me. The key factor in our becoming friends was clearly proximity, but our friendship is one that endures outside our sisterly bond, and in spite of our many differences. My school years were easy; I was a confident child, and managed to form a series of intense friendships that hallmark youth. At boarding school, I got so close to another girl (we were Darrell and Sally) that we shared the same bed for several months – a fact that was more or less forgotten by the time we returned in the new term and both moved on to greener friendship pastures.
I had a different "best friend" for every year at secondary school – entirely normal behaviour for teenage girls. We moved continents when I was a child, relocating to Nigeria for a decade, before returning to London as a teenager in Year 11. My Nigerian friendships are all but over – Facebook keeps up the charade – and I have no contact with anyone from secondary school. I don't mourn the loss of those friendships too much.
Much as you rarely marry the first person you date, it is inevitable that the friends you make in the early days are not the ones that endure. I think that as you get older, friendships become more utilitarian – "my kid likes your kid" or "we met at NCT class" or "we work together and I don't entirely hate your guts". The intensity of the friendships of my youth was borne of a lack of baggage and an abundance of time. You have greater emotional reserves when you make those friendships and when they fail, you bounce back, get back out there and try again. For most people, that resilience leaches away over the years.
I look at my parents and their friends: my dad has had the same friends pretty much all his life. These friendships continued across marriages, deaths and continental moves. My mother is the opposite: she has one solid childhood friend – who we call "auntie" even though we share no blood – but still manages to form friendships: deep, intense and emotional. The cost of such bright-blazing friendships is that they are often short-lived and excised from the record as soon as they end. I find the thought exhausting, even as I admire her way of flinging herself out there time after time.
The friendships that have lasted for me are more considered and meaningful. I made my two closest friends at university more than a decade ago, when we would loll in the student union pub for most of the day, eating chips and ogling boys. We all live in different cities now, two are coupled up and one has two children, so it's hard to find the time to see one other very often. Our bond is still strong, but we are also more realistic about our expectations. I have made friends online – people who started out as anonymous witty sentences on a comment thread – who have gone on to become a part of my "real life". Nobody's perfect, but we all draw the line on the things we will and will not put up with. The friendships that last are the ones where you both recognise that you have a good thing going. Getting older might mean you don't make that many new friends, but maybe that's a good thing. The payoff is that you treat them with more care.
And why the mad rush to make all these friends in later life? I refer to Ron Swanson, the libertarian head of the fictional Parks and Recreation Department in Pawnee, Indiana. Swanson's Pyramid of Greatness issues this bit of wisdom: "Friends: One to three is sufficient." Good advice.