I miss my friends
We’re not crashing into each other the way it felt as though we were in our youth and I find something is lost.
It’s the last Tuesday in January and I am 35.
My wife is in the den, on the couch with our dog, recovering from the cold I gave her that still lingers in my body too.
I’m seated at our dining room table; I’m in a Google Meet with Rachel. We meet on Tuesdays to talk and to write. Some weeks we talk more, some weeks we write more. It mimics the way I spend time with a lot of my friends: an attempt at a regularly scheduled date, intimate one on one moments, often engaging in adult parallel play… It’s nice. I do not want you to think I don’t value this time, am not grateful for it — I do, I am.
But I can’t help notice a beat that drums inside me recently. I’m not sure when it began. It says: I miss my friends. And when I try to tease that apart, what it means more robustly is: I miss spending a lot of time with my friends. And when I follow that thread to its logical knot of feelings, I must ask myself: Why do I spend less time with my friends now? What has changed in my life to make my relationships with my friends feel different, our time together more limited, our connections less all consuming?
I keep coming back to the idea that I think it’s related to getting older. I don’t know why I’m fixating on that — I know literally so many elders who have based their whole world around their friends, so I know I am wrong, right away — but I think about my life in my twenties versus my life now and things are simply different in ways that feel marked by age. I used to have a part time nanny gig and a bunch of freelance writing work. Now I have a job that keeps me planted firmly at my desk for 32 hours over the course of a five day work week. I used to live much closer to many of my friends. Now I own a house in a part of town my wife and I could afford, which is further away and not so surrounded by fun bars and restaurants. I used to enjoy going out and partying. Now I don’t. I used to have more energy. Now I don’t. I used to have a lot more time. Now I don’t.
I’d never lived with a partner before moving in with my wife, so I wonder if that lends itself to my feelings here. When you live as a single person (or even a coupled person) either alone or with housemates, you have endless open evenings. How you will spend your time is something you wonder at, and can squander. When there is so much of it, you can use it in all kinds of careless ways. My wife doesn’t expect that I spend every evening with her, but the truth is, it’s very easy to do. I start working at 7am. I like to work out when I’m done work. Then I’m tired, and we have a comfortable sofa, and a small soft dog, and 45 back seasons of Survivor to make our way through. Am I one of the main characters in Sally Rooney’s most recent novel, Beautiful World Where Are You, who (spoiler alert) finds the answer to her happiness is to marry her high school sweetheart and watch TV with him on the couch most nights? It’s not that I think I’m so special, that I would be so different to my peers who enjoy this… but this is not the life I thought I was building toward, and as someone who didn’t intend to get married and spent years as someone who didn’t live with a partner, I’m surprised. What would my life look like if I did not have a wife, a couch, a soft dog? What was I doing before I settled into this domesticity? (And it must be said — I am so very happy in this domesticity. What was I doing avoiding it?)
I do think part of what I was doing was being young. I was going to see an open mic performance on a Wednesday evening, or an author talk on a Tuesday, or meeting up with a group of friends to eat pizza and paint our nails on a Sunday afternoon. I was texting different girls, so many different girls, and then I was taking screenshots of our conversations and texting them to all my friends to ask what they thought everything meant. I was on Tinder, I was on Lex, I was on Instagram. I was online, Extremely Online. I was in Alex’s secret garden, I was on Nate’s couch, I was canning and preserving juicy ripe fruits with Leah, I was meeting Hadley at the Florida Room and talking shit while we drank cheap beers and avoided our exes. We were just sort of wasting time — I don’t mean wasting, it was never a waste, but I mean we had so much of it that it was okay to spend it carelessly. We didn’t have to carefully carve out dates on the calendar to spend together because we overlapped so much already. My friendships were part of my life.
To be clear: My friendships are still part of my life. My friends make the effort and so do I. But we’re not crashing into each other the way it felt as though we were in our youth — was that true then, or am I romanticizing it now? Have I not always been compelled to take out a calendar and make formal plans? — and I find something is lost. For example: A dear friend and I made dinner plans in November, but then I got COVID and we had to cancel. December was too hectic to reschedule, so we agreed to try for January. She texted me today to see if we can get something on the books for February. Why is being an adult like this, why is being alive like this? She and I desperately want to see each other for dinner! Why shouldn’t we be able to?!
I don’t have answers to these questions. Actually, I have more questions. My wife and I would like to have a baby one day, and I don’t imagine having kids will exactly open up my world for more free time, offer more expanses where everyone can just sort of hang out and stay up late drinking cheap wine and talking shit. So like I said — is this just growing up? But then I come back to — that can’t be right. I know lots of people older than I am who prioritize friendship deeply. Am I doing something wrong? Is this hard for everyone?
The 40 minute timer Rachel set has gone off, which means it’s the end of our writing time. We come together again to see how the session went for each of us.
“I’m writing this kind of depressing thing about getting older and losing all your friendships,” I tell her, and she laughs in her patient and charming way and says she can’t wait to read it. “I’m not really sure it makes any sense,” I say. “I think perhaps what I’m articulating is just that we are all very tired.”
“I love spending time with you,” she tells me. “Even if we’re both very tired.” We could keep talking forever, probably, but we each have to make dinner. We both have work in the morning. I’m not really writing about losing all my friendships; I’m writing about wishing I had more empty hours to spend with my friends. I’m writing about wishing that time was not so finite, that “wasting” it was a luxury we could all afford, materially and spiritually.
And of course, it’s also simply the end of January in Oregon. Perhaps what I’m writing about is actually just seasonal depression, and when spring arrives and the sun returns a gaggle of queers in flannel button downs and nothing else can show up at the river to cool off on a hot Wednesday afternoon I won’t feel bereft or lonely or tired at all, I’ll feel alive and in love with my friends as I always am — as I’ll always be — and nothing will be lost after all.