Family
I thought I was done dating. But after moving across the country, I had to start all over again – this time looking for platonic love.
T77 minutesAfter we went to lunch, Francesca and I hugged in a shopping center parking lot. We were both pretty sure, I think, that we wouldn't see each other again. She was a high school classmate of a friend's husband and had been one such promising friendship prospect: she was a professional violinist and fellow New Yorker who wrote her dissertation on pollen. But I was clumsy, smiling too much and saying things like "That's so funny" instead of actually laughing, while Francesca (not her real name) was overworked and seemed full of contempt for the town in Bozeman, Montana, where I happened to be used to be. come to. moved and from which she and her husband were determined to escape.
As I drove home, the mountains in the distance like a postcard I might have sent back to Brooklyn, I was struck by an acute and familiar emptiness: an echo, I suddenly realized, of my years of online dating and the disappointment that results. when the person you pinned your hopes on for the future turns out to be a total mismatch. In fact, I thought I was finally done dating after moving across the country for Ben, a literature professor at Montana State University. But I now saw that I had to start the discouragement process all over again, this time looking not for love but for friendship - and at age 40, no less, a decidedly late time in my life to start looking for new soulmates.
According to "The friendship story", a global study commissioned by Snapchat in 2019, the average age at which we meet our best friends is 21 – a stage in which we not only bond over formative new experiences like first love and first heartbreak, but alsobecome more criticalabout who we become friends with. More importantly, young adulthood is a time for many of ushertime. The average American just spends moneySocializing for 41 minutes a day, butJeffrey A. Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, estimates that it typically takes more than 200 hours, ideally more than six weeks, for a stranger to become a good friend. As we grow older, the space we used to fill with laughing, gossiping, and staying up until the sky was light can be occupied by more "adult" concerns, such as marriage, reproduction, and a full-fledged career. we tend to end up giving less of ourselves.
Read: How to make friends, according to science
For nearly twenty years in New York, I proudly resisted this retreat from platonic love. My friends had gotten me through my father's death, a traumatic divorce, and a near-fatal car accident, and I was as devoted to them as they were to their own children (who are now spreading at an almost exponential rate). But even before I met Ben, I began to understand how difficult it is to plan my future around these relationships. In the early days of the pandemic, I remember huddled next to a propane heater, drinking to-go co*cktails with my two absolutely social friends, and the newest couple in our circle chimed in to announce they were leaving Brooklyn. “Do they care?friendship?” we cried, amazed that by moving to the hinterland this couple would actually relinquish the bonds we held so dear.
But just a year later, Ben called to say he'd gotten a permanent job, and I decided to live with him in Bozeman, a college town about 3,000 miles away, where I knew literally no one. While so many in my year had chosen good schools and fly fishing, I had chosen love and mountains, and now I had no friends.
If our thirties are 'the decade in which friendship dies', according to the science journalistLydia Denworthnotes in her bookFriendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond, then it's no wonder that making friends at 40 is more like dating than I thought: It depends not only on chemistry and shared interests, but also on a shared vision of what your new relationship can bring. Half the battle is finding someone who wants the same thing as you, and at the exact same time. This reminds me of MirandaSex and the city: “Men are like taxis,” she says. "They wake up one day and decide they're ready to settle down, have babies, whatever. And they turn on their lights." In Montana I had to find people who were not only kind and committed to friendship in general, but who were also willing to go beyond the best friends they made at 21 - people who for some reason still had their had lights on.
Iarrived in Bozemanwith a long list of people my friends and friends of friends had suggested I meet. In addition to the pollen scientist, participants included an Iraq War veteran who ran a pottery studio out of his garage, a horse healer who focused on empowering women, an adventurous father who worked with sustainable energy, and a retired couple who had been neighbors . to my mother's friends in Australia, a famous writer who was married to an even more famous writer, and a local politician.
Unfortunately, these contacts were not as excited as I was about the prospect of a new friendship. I spent a pleasant afternoon talking about conspiracy theories with the veteran and a pleasant evening about snowmobiles with the retired couple. But the adventurer never returned my email and the horse healer suggested a date many weeks in the future. Until now I found the famous authors too intimidating; When I asked the politician if she wanted coffee, she sent back a formal message suggesting I contact her campaign manager. A French professor with purple dreadlocks who took me to remote hot springs had recently fallen in love with a snowboard instructor in Jackson, Wyoming, and was moving soon.
Meanwhile, Ben introduced me to two wonderful women who were old friends, one a librarian and the other a comedy writer. When the comedy writer invited us over for enchiladas and a game of euchre, I thought I had finally found my team. But then I heard through the grapevine that they went to the Halloween party without me, and...thenthey happened to invite me to the city's Christmas walk. "You were accidentally included in this thread, but we'd love to talk to you!" The librarian texted, followed by an emoji that I think was crying. Only then did I realize that I had vastly underestimated the difficulty of breaking into an established group. I get it: I always thought I had all the friends I needed, too.
The friendship files: There is no time for small talk in the Middle Ages
Shortly after the Halloween party, or lack thereof, I did something I still find embarrassing: I downloaded Bumble for a second time and chose the mode that matches friends instead of romantic partners. “Make new friends at every stage of your life,” the app cheerfully promised me. I tried to ignore both the bad memories brought up by the unassuming yellow interface and my hypocritical assumption that anyone who went online to find friends wasn't someone I wanted to be friends with in the first place. But as I waded through a sea of women who shared my basic situation – “The struggle to make new friends in your 30s is real,” lamented a brunette in a fur coat – I became increasingly fascinated by this brave new world and the bigger questions it raised about friendship. (Which images, words and "Basic Information Badges" would be?vanincluding if you are trying to reach a kindred spirit?)
And while I noticed some interesting differences between dating and dating friends—what little suspicion I had about the men on Bumble was gone, replaced by a kind of manic genius—I was more often struck by all their similarities. For example, I found myself swiping right on some women because they were beautiful, and swiping left on others just because they had children. (Minebestfriend has three children!)
I only matched with one person who really intrigued me: Steph, a blonde woman with tattoos and a beautiful smile who had recently moved to Bozeman from Salt Lake City. “Lots of conversation, forward thinking, flexibility and genuine connection,” she wrote in her profile, but what really got me were her two sphinx cats sitting like adorable aliens on a truly unique leather couch. When we met for drinks a few days later, we chatted about fathers, divorce and our ambivalence about motherhood, exchanging vulnerabilities and laughing as if we'd known each other for months. This – the shock of recognition and affection, the dizzying attraction, the broad sense of possibility – was what I had been missing.
I've only seen Steph twice since then, but I suspect we'll become good friends, not just because of that ineffable bond – as integral to friendship, I'm now convinced, as it is to loving – but also because, in Unlike the other thirty- and forty-somethings I met in Montana, who are understandably wrapped up in their own lives, we are both transplants who see making friends as a necessity, as important to us at this particular moment as our partners or career. During our last dinner, we both admitted that we would rather hang out just the two of us than plan a double date.
Ispent the holidaysNew York, visiting old friends and reconnecting with a world that had gone on without me in a way that felt both sad and comforting. On New Year's Day we stopped at a used bookstore where I bought a small amount of quotes about friendship that I ended up opening on the plane back to Bozeman. Some were sentimental, others humorous – Samuel Johnson compared the feeling of friendship to being full of roast beef – but only one, from a letter by Emily Dickinson, spoke of the sense of satisfaction I sometimes suspect our friendships alone bring. can give. “My only sketch, profile, of the sky,” wrote Dickinson, “is a great blue sky, bluer and larger than the sky.largestI saw June, and my friends are in there – all of them – every single one of them.”
As I looked out the plane window at the big blue sky, I thought about how making friends in midlife, while challenging, can also be a gift, an opportunity to enlarge the world and oneself. It sometimes feels like we're forty, as if our lives have taken their final shape, anchored as we so often are in our careers, cities and relationships. But meeting new people like Steph—who has already taught me about the Mountain West and what it's like to grow up in a Mormon community, and who sees me as I am now, not as I used to be—is recognizing the growing ones, like usbeestill have work to do. When I imagine my life in another forty years—full of old friends, yes, but also friends I have yet to meet—it really does look like a sketch of heaven.
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Katharine Smythis the author ofAll the Lives We've Ever Lived: Finding Solace in Virginia Woolf. Her writing has appeared inThe New York Times, The Paris Review, The Point, and other places.
