Illustration by Dola Sun
My husband and I have been going on dates with other people. Together. Let me back up: Together, my husband and I have been going on dates with other couples. And no, despite my click-bait lead, we’re not swingers. We’re just trying to make friends.
As it turns out, that’s a tricky thing to do in our stage of life. We’re not yet footloose and fancy-free retired people, with endless time on our hands. But we also don’t need babysitters for our kids anymore. We have more financial resources than in our youth. But our emotional resources—or at least my emotional resources—are perhaps at an all-time low, mostly because we have two teenagers at home. (If you know, you know.)
My life, once so full of friends in every direction, seems to have greatly contracted in the last several years. It’s as if the great wave of midlife has gobbled me up and spit me back out, leaving me to scan the horizon, wondering if everyone purposefully left me behind or if I just landed on the wrong beach.
It doesn’t help that I have homebody tendencies. This preference for home is somewhat shared by my husband, but I am the undisputed champion. You’ll never find me on anything resembling a party bus. I’m not much of a drinker. I don’t love crowds. Or bars. I’d like to chuck every high-top table into the sea because they aren’t made for my shortish runner’s legs with perpetually sore hamstrings. And I have some kind of sensory issue that makes it nearly impossible to tolerate loud music.
My ideal social scenario is something like a library, but with appetizers, comfortable couches, soft guitar music in the background, and rows of string lights radiating only flattering light—where it’s never too hot or too cold, gravity works in a special way that makes going braless in public a real option, and maybe, if it’s not too much to ask, there are cats to pet.
I can’t be the only semi-reclusive, noise-avoiding, library-loving, stressed-out-parent-of-teenagers who enjoys people, just not too many of them, and on her own terms. I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right: It’s me, hi, I’m the problem.
Why is making and keeping friends so different now than it was, well, when I used to watch the show Friends? I started out as a typical enough kid. I had a nice group of childhood friends, including a best friend I did everything with. But we drifted apart in high school, a place where I never felt like I quite fit in. I used to think it was because it was an all-girls Catholic high school. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized it was more because it was a place full of teenagers.
I didn’t like being a teenager, and I didn’t particularly know how to relate to other teenagers. I just wanted to be grown up. I would find my ride-or-die friends when my real life started, I told myself.
I didn’t exactly find them in college, because I went to Northern Kentucky University and lived at home—no roommates or late-night study sessions for me. It wasn’t until my first “career” job that I found my friendship groove, with a bunch of other clever young professionals, all making our way, Mary Tyler Moore–style. We went dancing and drinking and took turns hanging out in each other’s tiny apartments. I had a party at my place in Oakley—God, I loved that apartment—and someone snapped a picture of all of us, impossibly scrunched together onto my couch. In the photo, my cheeks are red and my eyes are bright, and I look so strikingly happy. I was. I belonged. I had people.
Then when I became a freelance writer a few years later, I started going to writer’s conferences and met other freelancers from all over the country. There was a huge group of us around the same age—early 30s—and we shared camaraderie around making our way. We were determined to dominate the magazine industry, and honestly we basically did dominate it. We stayed in touch via freelance message boards—and eventually social media—and every year we’d meet in New York City for the big freelance journalism conference. I’d walk into whatever Midtown Manhattan hotel we were overpaying for and feel like I was home, Cheers-style.
On the home front, once my kids were in school, my husband and I started to meet other parents. There was a golden age of All Going Out to Dinner Together, where the adults would sit at one end of the table and the kids at the other. We were braving second grade, fourth grade, sixth grade together. School events, town festivals, my son’s peewee football games: My social life was built-in and abundant. We were all in this project together.
And then…what? I don’t know exactly. Our kids stopped being little and portable. Their friend groups changed, and their social lives became their own. In fact, my kids specifically said things like, God, Mom, please never, ever talk to so-and-so’s parents. I had kept a few of the friends from my 20s, though we were scattered by now. As for my writer friends, that “take over the world” energy started moving in a zillion different directions as the industry fragmented. Some of my friends became best-selling novelists. Others became noted podcasters. Many built incredible brands around sharing content.
I haven’t done too badly myself. But things just changed. COVID certainly didn’t help, but I think I was heading toward establishing my own personal hermitage before spike proteins changed our world.
Suffice to say, I’ve been all over the place with friends. I’ve been the young loner and the young professional and the young writer and the young mom and now I’m not the young anything. Which is OK! Because getting older isn’t my enemy. But it’s forced friendships to shift.
My lanes have all narrowed, and I can’t figure out if I’m sad about this stenosis of my social life or if I just think I’m supposed to be sad about it. After all, I have sisters who have been my best friends for decades. Which means I already have more than most. So maybe all of this hang-wringing is for naught.
Except I don’t want to be the weirdo who’s forgotten what it means to be social. The one who is tragically in her own way, waiting for the library to serve bacon-wrapped dates and start a cat program. Hence, the friend dates with my husband.
Let me tell you, it takes planning to orchestrate the right kind of double date when you’re 50, usually go to bed around 10, and always have one ear cocked to your phone waiting for The Call that lets you know your teenage son is in Big Trouble This Time. But here we are, giving it a go.
It’s not like we’re propositioning strangers. Most of the people we’ve gone out with are people we’ve known for a while but just haven’t tried to be social with, one-on-one. Or people we haven’t seen for a while. It feels very high schoolish. Hi, do you want to be our friends? We’ll go to dinner. We’re really nice and fun people! So far, no one has actively laughed at us or scuttled away like pigeons fleeing an oncoming car.
I also forced myself to go back to a journalism conference in New York City this summer to see friends in person I’ve mostly just seen on social media for the last several years. “Forced” suggests that I didn’t want to go. I very much did. I just needed to figure out what this new iteration of me would be like.
For starters, I didn’t want a roommate. I’d always loved rooming with different writer friends, roulette-style. Who wants to room this year?! Now, though, my alone time was too precious.
That first morning of the conference, I headed downstairs alone, stopping off at the hotel’s grab-and-go café for a quick bite. As I stood in line for my $12 small coffee and $10 spoonful of yogurt, I felt trepidation. How long had it been since I’d felt as lovely as that bright-eyed girl captured squished and smiling on the couch?
Turning the corner into the conference hall, I heard someone yell, “Judi! Here!” And there at a table were a bunch of my old ride-or-die writer pals. It didn’t matter that I had gone to bed at 8 p.m. the night before after cozying up to a Downton Abbey episode on my Kindle. It didn’t matter that leaving my room that morning required a 10-minute pep talk. They were calling me over, pushing out a chair.
I joined the circle. We called others over as we saw them, collectively knowing we still had plenty of time left to ride.
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