At a work event last year, I made a new friend by accident. I didn’t quite realise at the time that this is what was happening. We had one of those rare conversations that you fall into before you realise what’s happening – the other person is instantly interesting, and there are none of the usual uncomfortable lulls or dead spaces. It felt like a bright, hopeful thing in a social context that can feel like work. For something to unfold naturally and without curation in an unnatural and curated environment is a small social miracle.
“That was nice,” I thought afterwards, going about my business and putting the interaction in the rare “very interesting stranger chat at a work thing” category.
A few days later, an utterly bizarre thing happened – something that goes against every modern convention of adult life – the person got in touch to tell me they’d like us to be friends. Just like that. They just said it. Declared an intention and then followed through. After that initial message, we stayed in touch regularly. We now meet up for coffee and lunches. Over the ensuing months, we have become – we are – friends.
Anyone over 35 and will recognise how profoundly unusual this is. How weird and refreshing. It is objectively difficult to make new friends. Many of us are in the corridor of career and financial pressure, often with small children or ageing parents, or both. Any one of these major responsibilities can leave us little room for the other things that make life feel joyful and fulfilling. It is difficult to protect our sense of who can be outside our duties to other people.
I made a new friend – a rare enough thing when you’re over 35
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The timing can be cruel. Life becomes frustratingly static and also maddeningly chaotic. Everything can feel as though it is on fire, and contrasted against this is the perpetual intractability of the commute, the routine, the schedule. Precisely when we enter a period of life when high-quality, nourishing friendships become more necessary than ever, real connections based on affinity, mutual recognition and meaningful communication become so much harder to form.
Old friends can be demoted to acquaintances through neglect and the natural drift as you pass into different life stages, or people may emigrate. When we do make friends during this time of life, they’re often friendships of circumstance rather than recognition – the school-gate parent with a child the same age as yours; the office buddy who makes the working day less lonely but who you somehow never seem to make time to meet outside of work.
These friendships are real, as is the support they offer, but they’re held together by circumstance. When the kids change school or the office friend moves on, these friendships tend to expire too. When external circumstances don’t push you together, the relationship stops.
The person I met at the work event felt the same potential for a friendship that I did. While I set the experience aside and ignored its potential, they didn’t
Making new friends entails both time and risk. People have more obligation, more distraction and less time than they did in their 20s. The legwork of early friendship, during which we build familiarity, trust and a shared lexicon through repeated exposure to a person, happens without you much noticing when you are younger. When you’re older, such time commitment and risk become too high a cost to pay for a relationship that may not blossom into a deeper bond. Even where we feel it might, often there just isn’t the time to do the building.
Emigration sharpens your sense of the fragility of established friendships and teaches you these lessons. When I left Dublin for London, I didn’t have friends in my new city, and it took more than a couple of years to feel established and feel that I had my people. During three years in the Australian capital, Canberra, a transient government town that empties out at weekends and on holidays, it was harder still. Now, I’m back in London, and once again building a new life – only this time in a familiar place.
Above all, the most interesting friendships are mysterious. There’s an alchemical quality to them that can leave the source of that feeling of connection hard to find or understand. Perhaps we’re all waiting to be asked, and this is the problem. When we sense that rare alchemy at work, we don’t do the asking often enough. We’re waiting for it to happen to us. Several of the great friends I’ve had made active decisions to befriend me. They declared their intention, made the effort, and followed through.
The person I met at the work event felt the same potential for a friendship that I did. While I set the experience aside and ignored its potential, they didn’t. The person followed their curiosity and did something frightening and courageous. They did the thing most of us never do – they asked.
[ Time is a border: I wake up to family and friends’ yesterdays, untouchable to meOpens in new window ]
I probably wouldn’t have had the nerve, which is shameful, but it didn’t even occur to me, which is more so. It takes a particular kind of courage to be sincere with someone you don’t yet know and tell them you’d like to know them better. We can’t necessarily make more time but we can foster more courage. We can learn to ask.
