SARAH CATHERALL ON…

ADULT FRIENDSHIP

Icame across research recently that it’s harder to make new friends than to date after the age of 35. I totally concur. I’m in my early 50s and this was one of the surprises of mid-life. How do you take that leap of meeting someone you click with in a yoga class or in a book club and shift it to the next level. How do you say: hey shall we hang out? Do you want to have lunch or go for a drink? It’s almost a bit weird.

It takes me back to being in Year 9 and sitting next to someone in my new class and asking: “Will you be my friend?’’ Or “shall we sit together at lunch?’’ It was a torturous moment, especially in a catty, all-girl Catholic high school when that girl often said no.

Also, to turn that yoga connection into a casual friend would take 50 hours at least – 90 hours of time if I wanted her to become a good friend (according to a 2018 study, which found that’s the time we need to invest in cultivating friendships). That’s a lot, especially when we’ve had a pandemic and we’re slowly inching back into connecting and physically hanging out again.

Actually, we don’t need as many friends as we might think, according to the British psychologist and anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who says we ideally have an inner circle of five close friends, and larger concentric circles of more casual types of friends. He also argues that humans are only cognitively able to maintain about 150 connections at once, which feels about right.

I know a lot of people. I’ve lived in Wellington for 25 years, and interviewed thousands of people in my journalism career. When I’m with my daughters, I’ll usually see someone and say “hi’’, to the point that they think I have heaps of friends.

No, I explain, knowing lots of people doesn’t mean I have a lot of friends. A friend is not the hundreds of people I’m friends with on Facebook – it’s a misnomer to call many of those connections “friends”. I do worry about these terms as the parent of three Gen Zers. There’s an expectation that they should have lots of “friends’’ on social media, when really, many of those connections won’t move beyond a like or a follow.

We make new friends at different life stages, often through work, university, moving house or town, or having kids. My diary was chokka with friend dates when my kids were young and I made new friends through them. I sat beside the swimming pool and watched my daughters kick up and down the lanes and got chatting to a couple of mothers there. The next thing we were back at my house feeding the kids fish and chips and chugging glasses of wine.

As soon as our kids were old enough to flag the swimming lessons, we lost touch and I have no idea what those women are doing now. There was that moment where you say: “We’re going to … house for dinner and your child says “But I don’t like X any more’’ (the one she was happy to watch Barbie: Fairytopia with on rerun).

Since then, I’ve made the occasional new friend through circumstance. Probably the time when I made a heap of new friends was after my divorce, when I gravitated towards single mothers like me and we offered each other love and support.

Covid has apparently shaken up our friendships. An Australian study found we’ve pruned and solidified friendships thanks to border closures and lockdowns – without the chance to physically connect at whim, some of our casual friends have dropped away and some bonds have strengthened.

I relate. But I also think it’s another symptom of getting older, as

I’ve become more discretionary about who I spend time with and I’m increasingly enriched by my closest girlfriends. I hope I’ll be like the groups of women I see in their 70s out walking together with their hiking poles, or huddled around a cafe table talking and laughing.

You can tell those women have been friends for years. They’ve watched their children grow and welcomed one another’s grandchildren. They’ve suffered loss, and they’ve supported one another through it. They don’t give a toss whether they’ve made new friends in the past few decades because they have each other.