This is about friends. Making them, keeping them, and losing them. I’ve done all three, and so will you. But before you get too far down the river of life, I want to teach you how to hang onto the friends you should keep; it won’t happen on its own.
Somewhere in your twenties, you’ll have the most friends you’re ever going to have. Maybe just out of college and working a new job, or maybe your number of friends will peak in school, when you’re surrounded by people your age with tons of time to socialize. Either way, as you age, have kids, focus on your career, and life generally gets in the way of social activities, that number will drop. You might be sad about it; that’s okay, but there’s not much you can do to stop it.
The flow of life will take you and your friends in different directions; it pulls connections apart, it creates new ones, and the best you can do is make the most of the time you have with the people you love.
That’s not to say losing your best friends is inevitable. To some extent, you get to choose which friendships to hang onto. (It’s hard without reciprocal effort.) But, just like your mother needs back rubs and cookie dough to survive, your friendships need attention.
What that attention looks like is up to you. Different friends like different things, sometimes it’s a night out for drinks, sometimes it’s a round of golf, sometimes it’s just sharing some stupid meme about koala farts. You’ll figure out what works for who. But, while you can pick up right where you left off with some friends after months or even years, even those relationships will wither without attention.
Your Mom and I didn’t get married until I was in my late 30’s, and by that point, many of my close friends had been married (and had kids) for years. Some had even been married, divorced, and married again. I learned that as my friends and I changed life stages, it became harder to stay connected. This can be hard to understand while it’s happening, and can even feel like your friends are pulling away from you, which is why I’m explaining it to you.
When you’re single, you mostly hang out with your single friends. You stay out late, you go to bars to meet people, you enjoy life with minimal responsibility. Eventually, you do meet people, start relationships, and want hang out with other people in relationships. It’s not that you don’t care about your single friends anymore, but you and your partner want to do schmoopy things like go on dates, snuggle, and wrestle naked. These aren’t things you’ll want your single friends around for.
If you’re still single, you’ll get annoyed with your friends who are dating and don’t want to stay out until the bars close trying to meet people to date. I eventually figured out that this isn’t personal, it’s just life taking people in different directions.
Dating couples and married people mix well, but it becomes a challenge to find couples that you and your partner want to spend time with. It seems that most of the time, one of you is taking one for the team. Inevitably, your buddy will marry someone your spouse can’t stand, or vice versa. Every so often, your friend’s spouse will get along with your spouse like peas and carrots. And when you find a couple like this that both you and your partner like spending time with (and they reciprocate), treat that relationship like the fucking magical unicorn it is. Finding those friends is way harder than it sounds.
An aside about making new friends after 30: It’s hard. It’s really hard. Mostly because up until that point, you made friends by osmosis. After 30, it requires intention, planning, and logistics. It is, however, worth the trouble. Be open and willing to make new friends.
Children is the next phase. If you do have kids, you’ll find yourself wanting to socialize with other people that have kid(s) who can play with your kid(s). Since you’re only 3 and we spent all of 2020 socializing with our dog and our sofa (COVID), my experience here is pretty thin. I do know that we want you to have friends and enjoy socializing, so as we make plans, we try to find people who have children you can play with. As if it weren’t hard enough to find couples your Mom and I both like, now we’re looking for couples we both like who have kids you get along with. This, like making friends after 30, take effort.
That is not to say we don’t care about our single friends or friends who don’t have kids. That couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s more that they (and we) find ourselves pulled in opposite directions by the flow of life, and staying in touch and seeing each other means one or both of us has to paddle upstream for a bit. That effort is worth every drop of sweat and every bit of intention it requires.
That’s because when your mother and I have needed the love and support of our friends, it’s not just the ones in similar life stages that have been there for us. That’s not the way friendship works. The same has held true for our friends; we’re not just there for the married friends with one child close to your age. True friends will support you when it’s not convenient, and you’d do well to do the same.
But friendships take effort to maintain, and when left unattended, they wither and fade. My advice to you is this: Hold on to the friends you care about. Match the efforts of friends willing to work to stay connected. Forgive those friends whose lives drift away from yours and enjoy their company if life brings you together again.
Last, never take your friends for granted. Call them to get a drink, go see a ballgame, or at the very least, send them the best koala farts meme you can find.
I love you,
Dad
I originally planned to finish this series in twelve months, intending to write one entry a week for 52 weeks. But, other things came up and I didn’t have as much time as I thought I would. We moved, you started a new school, I had other projects, etc. But finally, I’m starting my last entry in September, nine months after I’d planned. Which is the perfect intro to this one.
Time is funny like that. It marches on like a metronome, indifferent to how much you wish it would slow down or speed up. It offers no do-overs, no matter how frivolously you spend it. And it gives zero fucks what you planned to accomplish in the time you had. Once that time is over, you’ll get no more. But, it also stretches out ahead of you into an unknown future, offering untold possibility and infinite choices.
Which is why I hope you both learn to make choices about how you spend your time and understand what those choices mean. Because while there’s never enough time for everything, there’s still enough time to do almost anything.