Chapter 1
The Hunger for Friends
Why Everybody Feels a Pang
Maybe there are some women who have never felt lonely for friends, but I doubt it. I believe virtually every woman has moments, or months, or years when she feels her dance card is empty, or at least not completely filled. No one is immune, not even the person who has spent her whole life in the same town and still hangs out with her old high school gang.
Losing companions may happen abruptly. Women yank up roots to relocate for a new job or to trail a spouse. The recently divorced may slip into social isolation.
But often the loss tiptoes up, the unexpected fallout of a hurried life. You race home from the office to ferry your kids to soccer practice and piano, sling dinner on their plates, and wedge in a hurried chat with your husband before you nod off in front of your favorite TV show. Who has time for friends? They’re barely a blip on your screen, until your mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and suddenly there’s no one to call.
Or perhaps now that you’ve quit your job, you feel like a stranger in your own town. You’re pushing your toddler on the swings when you realize you don’t know a single mother at the park—though they all seem to know each other. You never really got to know anyone in the neighborhood because your close pals were all at work. “I felt like I had two heads,” lamented one of my neighbors when no one talked to her at the playground.
Sometimes you don’t even realize what’s missing. The only symptom of a friend shortage may be low-level doldrums, a shadowy malaise that you can’t quite identify. The full measure of my own isolation smacked me in the head like a beanball when I filled out an emergency card for my daughter’s school after I moved to a Chicago suburb. There were spaces for three neighborhood contacts. I didn’t have a single name to write in.
Unlike many of our mothers, who sank roots into neighborhoods like ancient oaks—raising children, playing bridge, and drinking coffee with the same women for decades—our paths in the 21st century no longer follow neat parallel tracks. Our lives shift, veer off onto new paths, and old companions fall away. We have babies at wildly different ages or not at all. Our work lives often ricochet from a communal office to a home-based business and back again. We dip in and out of retirement.
Virtually every new life chapter has the potential to disrupt friendships: moving; leaving an office to stay home; divorce; the death of a spouse; retirement; illness. These seismic shifts can topple the walls of community.
But it’s not necessarily a cataclysmic event that frays connections. Life chips away at your circle. You may thrive for years in a tight group of buddies, then several take jobs out of state. Interests change. If all your friends are having babies and you’re not, you may no longer have much in common with them, or feel they don’t have time for you. Shy women may have always been short on companions; for them the frustration is not losing friends, but pushing past their reserve to make them.
Whatever the reason pals are scarce, the impact is the same. It’s like missing an essential nutrient. Without friends, problems weigh more and pleasures yield less joy. It’s a palpable void.
Nobody expects to come up empty of friends. Men, yes; friends, no. When I was young, I used to creep out of bed and spy on my mother’s weekly bridge game, hoots of laughter and gossipy whispers floating up the stairs like a promise. I thought I was witnessing a glimpse of my future. Instead it was the ghost of a fleeting past.
A Cold Bath instead of a Warm Welcome
The problem is not just that friends ineluctably disappear from our lives, but that making new ones is so arduous. We search in a climate that often seems icy and inhospitable. Our skills are as rusty as the old can opener in the back of the drawer. Making friends as children and teens was as effortless as breathing. As midlife women, though, it’s suddenly a complicated dance whose steps we try to retrace but can’t quite remember.
