I’m on my eleventh new group of friends. Or maybe it’s twelve – it’s hard to keep count.
Some people stay close to the area they grew up in and keep in close contact with their school friends, family friends, and so on throughout their lives. This happens more often to those who don’t move away for college or university or work, but also to people with close families who stay in the same location. It’s more common in certain parts of the world to stay close to your roots, and more likely to happen when life throws additional demands such as children or ill health into the mix.
But lots of us move around and change our lives over time, and this often results in our older friendships drifting and thus a need for new friends. Many people go to university and have at least one group of university friends who, if they gel well, will stay around later on. Work can be another source of friends, and people who change jobs might have distinct groups of friends from different workplaces. Then there’s our local area, community groups and activities, friends of friends… It should be easy, but making friends as an adult feels a bit more daunting somehow. People don’t always make the effort to keep in touch when their own circumstances change, and while we can often pick up with old friends after extended periods of time, we inevitably lose something of that day-to-day connection, and we can end up feeling lonely.
The internet has made it a bit easier to handle the demands of making new friendships. In a piece in today’s Guardian, Emily Bratt talks about the ease of finding friends in her 30s through direct friend-finding sites like Bumble BFF and Timeleft, as well as connections made indirectly through sites like Spareroom. When I moved to London in the 2010s, some of my own internet friends from a women’s forum became very close real-life friends as I found myself in the same location as them. I met my husband indirectly this way (having tried and failed on all the dating sites!).
But there is nothing that compares to being physically in the same place and spending time with people face to face to develop new friendships. In my small French village, over the past five years I’ve developed close friendships through all kinds of shared activities that range from the more traditional drinks and dinners to chopping logs, rescuing furniture from floods, going on historical walks, and moving a huge jacuzzi. We’ve put up marquees, searched for hidden treasure (no, I’m now not a millionaire), cried on each other, danced in the streets, and fallen asleep on each others’ sofas. Most of us have a bit more free time, and most of us are also looking for the connections we left behind us in our previous lives (there are a lot of people from elsewhere who’ve ended up here).
Loneliness is absolutely terrible for our mental health, and friendships are so important. Cultivating them in later life is just as necessary as it was on the first day at primary school, and even if we do need to put a bit more work into nurturing them as adults, the payoff is so worthwhile.
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