Friends: Our Lifeblood in Midlife: PYL In-Flight: Feb 18, 2025
Welcome Back My Friendly Passengers:
In a conversation with Lily Tomlin in 2015, Jane Fonda said, “I have my women friends, therefore I am. They make me stronger. They make me brave. I see my women friends as a renewable source of power.”
I absolutely agree.
I didn’t learn how to be a good friend, more specifically a good girlfriend, until my mid 40s when my identical twin sister stopped talking to me for a more extended period of time than she’d done previously. We’ve always had a tumultuous relationship and she would often take issue with something I said or did and would stop talking to me for a week, or a month, a few months, or even a year. We are going on 12 or 13 years at this point with no real end in sight, but that’s a story for a different day.
The gift that came from this incredibly painful situation was that I could no longer rely on her as my fallback friend; I had to learn how to make and keep friends, by investing time, energy, and vulnerability into relationships with women in a way I’d not done previously.
This is a strange thing to learn how to do ‘later in life’ but better in midlife than waiting until I am 80 when, as one women in her 80s said about being lonely, there just isn’t enough time left to build long friendships when you are 80.
Last week’s topic for the Stanford Continuing Studies class I am teaching was on relationships, specifically friendships. I walked through the different types of friendships, how we have a loneliness epidemic, and how deep and meaningful relationships can decrease loneliness leading to higher quality of life and decreased health issues. I even had the class do a friendship audit exercise loosely based on what’s included in the book Big Friendship by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman and what I included in a Crew Chat blog post from a few years ago.
Given that I was encouraging the women to assess their friends and friendships, identify gaps, and consider making new friends, I did some quick research on how to meet people and make friends in midlife and came up with all sorts of great ideas including:
- Join interest based groups like book clubs, travel groups, cooking or wine clubs, and garden or craft clubs
- Take a class or a workshop like a Stanford Continuing Education class, art, writing or music class, learn a new language, or try a dance or a yoga class
- Attend local events and social gatherings like visiting a museum, lecture or book signing, joining a spiritual or meditation group, or other community event
- Volunteer for an organization that aligns with something you love and your values like the local humane society or specialty animal rescue, a food bank like Second Harvest, an environmental group, or a children’s’ sports program
- Travel with like minded women by joining a women’s travel group or take a solo trip and meet people along the way
- Join a sports or fitness community like pickleball, tennis, golf, or sign up for an outdoor retreat like hiking
- Host a small gathering like a dinner, brunch, potluck, game night, or invite some women over to read, drink wine or tea/coffee, and chat about books
While I know a lot of women through tennis, I’ve had a very difficult time moving those friendships off the court and into the rest of my life. When I saw a post on Instagram from @kelsewhatelse where she talks about how to make friends and develop meaningful friendships, I realized I was most likely missing some key steps in making new friends.
Rebecca Adams, a sociologist and gerontologist in North Carolina says that making close friends requires three things: proximity, repeated unplanned interactions, and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other. Jeffrey Hall from the University of Kansas found that it takes about 50 hours to elevate a relationship from just knowing someone to casual friend status, 90 hours to move to friend, and becoming close friends necessitates more than 200 hours of interaction.
@kelsewhatelse also emphasized the need for repetitive proximity where you see the same people over and over again. She went on to list her recommended steps including:
- Talk to people when you see them, ask them questions, get them to feel good about themselves when they are around you
- Trade info like numbers or follow on social if that feels less intrusive
- Send them a message or a note in what she calls ‘low risk contact’
- Invite them out on a friend date like a walk where either person can bail if it’s not working out
- Text or message them something relevant based on something you talked about during the friend date or in the social situation
- Invite them out again and maybe offer to pick them up a coffee or a croissant or something on your way to meet them
- Ask them for help…something small…to show vulnerability. She said it opens up the door for them to ask for help.
- Show up for them when they ask you too
- Repeat
Who knew that we might need a recipe to make friends as adults? In midlife, as our jobs change, kids grow up, life changes and we are no longer in proximity with our ‘situational’ friends, we need to be intentional about who we invite into and keep in our lives. One of the gals in the class last week commented on how some of her friendships have been seasonal with some of the seasons lasting decades and others a much shorter period of time. We also talked about how fluid our friendship circles can be.
What’s the bottom line here? Friends are vital to our health, life satisfaction and happiness. We need to invest in friendships as we invest our money, invest in our health, and invest in things that make us happy and satisfied.
If you don’t already have a deep bench of friends, now is the time to invest in finding people who can become your friends and work on deepening those relationships now.
And, finally, with all that is going on in the world, especially the US, we need our community of people so we have folks to lean on when in need, and others know they can depend on us too. It’s going to be key as we navigate through this total shitshow.
May you find peace, acceptance, and love today as you navigate being human.
With much love and gratitude,
Terri
terrihansonmead.com
Piloting Your Life (the book)
Terri Mead YouTube Channel
Instagram: terrihansonmead
