Making Friends in the Middle Ages
By: Jeremy Helligar
Tags: Nonfiction, Aging, Friends, Relationships, Friendship

Making Friends in the Middle Ages

Nights in. People coming and (mostly) going. This is life after 50.

“Golden” friendship: How lucky were Rose, Blanche, and Dorothy to find each other so late in life? (Photo: NBC)

When it comes to making me take long, hard, uncomfortable looks at myself, nobody does it better than my friend Nancy. She was at her probing best the day she sent me an email asking for my take on friendship and aging.

Do you find it harder, if not impossible, to make new friends as you get older?

With that one question, she shoved me into a time machine where the in-flight entertainment was my own biopic: This is your life, from party boy to party pooper.

Once upon a time in New York City, circa 1992, I was an early twentysomething upstart journalist who never met a night he wouldn’t spend out on the town making a mess and making friends. Hundreds of years later, at 50, I’m a near-reclusive veteran journalist who loves my old friends but doesn’t have much interest in making new ones.

Did I get here by choice? Am I the loner I now purport to be only because I’ve lost the ability to befriend?

What once was as easy as walking into a room and working it, over the years has become, well, work — hard work: scary, challenging and often fruitless. My current motto regarding friendship (borrowed, like so many things in my life, from a song by The Smiths): You should not go to them. Let them come to you.

My life as a “recovering introvert”

It’s hard for friendship to find you, though, when you’re happiest spending nights at home sitting on the couch. I had a rich, complex inner life during my younger New York City days, but I still lived to hit the town and meet new people. As my big brother Alexi so beautifully put it in the mid-’90s, I was a “recovering introvert.”

I was a 23-year-old People magazine reporter in the thick of my awkward-social-butterfly phase (which had begun toward the end of high school) when I met Nancy. On our first day as colleagues, I trained her to fact check People’s Passages section. That night, when everyone else was complaining about the magazine’s ungodly Tuesday-night closing schedule — only the lucky ones went home before 3 a.m. — I breathed a loud sigh of relief. At least it was only Tuesday.

“Time magazine closes on Friday night?” I said, repeating Nancy’s statement as a question. “I could never imagine having to work under those conditions. You could never go out on Friday night. I would die if I couldn’t go out on Friday night.”

Nancy looked at me like I was insane. We were close in age, but clearly, she’d settled into an adult life where weekends weren’t just an excuse to go out, get drunk, meet new people, and forge bonds that may or may not develop into lasting friendships. We were opposites, and we almost immediately attracted. It was that easy for me to make new friends back then.

Fly away, social butterfly

My congenial ways continued when I moved to Buenos Aires in 2006. If I hadn’t grown so weary of being ripped off in the city and navigating its insufferable bureaucracy over the course of four and a half years, leaving BA might have been as difficult as leaving New York City had been. I made some wonderful friendships in Argentina, ones that continue to this day, thanks, in large part, to the uniting and reuniting power of Facebook.

When I moved to Melbourne in March of 2011, I arrived with a decent social foundation. I’d been introduced to several fantastic people there by mutual acquaintances during my first trip to Australia several months earlier, and a guy I’d met during the final days of that holiday quickly became my new boyfriend.

While I didn’t have quite the social life that I’d enjoyed in Buenos Aires (there were days when I didn’t utter a single word out loud), I never wanted for company or a warm body beside me. And Australians are so friendly and welcoming, I rarely felt alone with everybody there.

While I didn’t have quite the social life in Melbourne that I’d enjoyed in Buenos Aires, I never wanted for company, or a warm body beside me.

During the seventh to the final one of my 17 nonconsecutive months in Bangkok, an extended period that began in July of 2011, a new sensation took over me. Suddenly, I had a burning desire to stay home. On the rare occasions that I did venture out socially, the few friends I’d made during my initial six-month stint in Bangkok would greet me as if they were looking at a ghost.

“Where have you been? Are you in love? Is that why you’ve disappeared?”

Apparently, in Bangkok, the only reason to stay home was to cuddle up to someone.

I usually offered some excuse about how I was busy writing, but the truth was, I couldn’t be bothered. Jumping into the shower and getting ready to go out required too much effort. So did hanging out with people and trying to make conversation.

In Cape Town, where I lived between November of 2013 and October of 2014, I retreated farther into myself. I even spent New Year’s Eve home alone for the first time ever.

In my next city, Sydney, I opened up again, mostly because after years of freelancing off-campus, I was back to working in an office and taking advantage of the social benefits of an on-site full-time gig. Ever since I left Sydney in June of 2017, after two and a half years, to spend most of the past 24 months wandering around Asia and Europe, I’ve become a borderline recluse.

A loner by choice?

If getting close to new people has gotten harder as I’ve gotten older, it’s probably not them. It’s me.

A half-century of winning and losing friends has made me warier of people and less willing to put up with their issues. A good friend recently disappointed me in a pretty dramatic way, and I was surprised by how little interest I had in analyzing what went down. He hurt me, but I couldn’t muster up the energy to really mourn the death of our friendship.

When I first drifted into my circle of one back in Bangkok, my friend Lori said I shouldn’t worry. In a way, I might have been psychologically preparing myself for fatherhood. Being a parent can be a largely isolating experience, which leaves one little time for previously taken-for-granted activities like bonding with adults.

Without realizing it, I might have been training myself subconsciously for the focus that being a parent requires. I liked Lori’s theory because it meant I wasn’t merely becoming increasingly all about me. Nobody wants to be friends with a self-centered narcissist, right?

But then, maybe it wasn’t completely by choice and still isn’t. That’s a nice way of saying that even if I were to embark on a crusade to win friends and influence people, they might tell me to get lost.

Several years ago when Nancy read my first book, Is It True What They Say About Black Men? — a memoir about my first seven expat years — she told me she didn’t find the protagonist to be a sympathetic character at all. My first thought was this: She’s talking about me! My second: Well, Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City and Hannah Horvath on Girls weren’t exactly sympathetic either, so it could be a writer thing.

Apparently, according to Nancy, who didn’t actually allude to Sex and the City, Carrie and I have a lot in common: “Were I a reviewer, I’d be wondering how a guy who is such a bad judge of lovers gets such great friends,” she said. Hmm …

Welcome to the middle ages

Beyond leading me to question my sanity, Nancy’s comment made me realize that not only did I at one point have the capacity to make friends, but I also had the ability to make excellent ones. It reminded me of a time when friendships were everything to me, so much so that I wanted to know about everyone else’s.

Years ago, during an interview with Patti LaBelle in her New York City hotel suite, I asked her a typical twentysomething-journalist question: “ Who do you hang out with?” (Excuse the grammar — I was young.) She looked at me as if I’d lost it.

“First of all,” she said, “I don’t hang out. When I’m not recording or on tour, I’m at home.”

While she had many acquaintances and people with whom she was friendly, they had their lives and she had hers. I can’t say I really understood where she was coming from at the time. I wondered: How could such a friendly, outgoing woman keep herself cooped up at home? Now, I totally get it.

There’s no place like home. And since I’ve lived alone since I was 23, for the bulk of my adult life, home has been a place where I can be alone with my own thoughts, obsessing over every physical sensation, and thinking about mortality, the meaning of life, and the meaning of my life. Despite occasional-to-frequent panic attacks, the older I get, the more attached I become to my circle of one.

Now that I’m once again an off-campus freelance writer on various continents, my social opportunities on weekdays are limited. Even if I had the energy to once again start going out with wild abandon, or the interest in it, I wouldn’t know how to turn drunken encounters into true friendships.

Even if I had the energy to once again start going out with wild abandon, or the interest in it, I wouldn’t know how to turn drunken encounters into true friendships.

It probably would require calling people up and making plans with them, and who has time for that? Well, I do, but it’s so nice on the couch — or in bed.

I know. I know. No matter what Morrissey once sang, friendships don’t just come to you. Sometime you must go to them. People talk about love that just happens (a development that’s never happened to me). One day you’re you, the next you’re one-half of we. Nobody talks about friendships like that, but I wish they would. That would give me hope.

Or maybe I don’t need hope, just true faith. Like Nancy said, I already have great friends. I may have won them with ease when I was younger, but in my middle ages, I appreciate them so much more.