I have been meaning to call my friend Diane for four months.
Not a text. A call. The kind that has no agenda except to say: I’ve been thinking about you, and I miss you, and I’m sorry I let this much time go.
I know her number by heart. I’ve known it for thirty-one years. I dial it in my head sometimes when I’m walking the trail in the morning, running through how the conversation might go, how she might sound, whether she’d be glad or whether something in her voice would tell me it had gone too cold to restart. And then I get home and pour a second cup of coffee and I do something else.
Four months. I want to be honest about that number because it’s the kind of number that sounds worse when you say it out loud, and saying it out loud is the point.
Diane and I were close the way women in their forties sometimes get close: urgently, without planning it. Her marriage was ending. My sister had just been diagnosed. We found each other at a church potluck neither of us wanted to be at, and we stood in a kitchen eating grocery store cookies for two hours because neither of us could stop talking. We talked about the things you don’t usually say to someone you’ve known for six weeks. About being afraid. About being exhausted. About what it meant to be the capable one in your family, the one everyone assumed was fine.
We had four years of close friendship. Real close. The kind where you don’t explain things from the beginning because the other person already knows the middle.
Then she moved to Flagstaff for her daughter. I stayed in Columbus for mine. We said we’d visit. We visited once. We said we’d call. We called, and then we called less, and then we were down to texts at birthdays, and then the texts at birthdays started to feel like performance, like we were both maintaining the idea of the friendship more than the friendship itself.
I’ve seen this happen to almost every close friendship I made after fifty. Not because the care disappeared. The care is still there. I would drop things for Diane. I know she would drop things for me. But we stopped doing the ordinary maintenance work, the small consistent contact that is actually what a friendship is made of. We let the extraordinary affection substitute for the ordinary attention, and it doesn’t work that way. Affection without attention is a savings account you haven’t looked at in a decade. You assume it’s still there. You haven’t checked.
I spent twenty years as a counselor sitting with people who waited too long to say the thing. I know this territory. I know every road in it. I know the rationalizations by name.
She’s probably busy. I don’t want to make her feel obligated. We both have a lot going on. I’ll reach out when things calm down.
Things don’t calm down. You know that already. Things don’t calm down and the years move and one day you realize that the friendship you were sure was just on pause has quietly become past tense, and you never said goodbye because you never thought you were saying it, and now you’re not sure which of you would even be the one to start again.
The real reason I haven’t called Diane is not that I’ve been busy.
The real reason is that I’m afraid four months has become its own thing. That she has wondered where I went. That I’ll have to say I don’t have a good reason, just the slow accumulation of days where I meant to and didn’t. I’m afraid of the accounting. I’m afraid she’ll hear in my voice how much I’ve missed her and that will confirm how long I let it go, and I’ll have to sit inside that discomfort without being able to make it tidy.
I am seventy-one years old. I have written about grief and loss and the cost of silence for thirty years. I have sat with people in the last weeks of their lives and watched them work through the calculus of what they said and didn’t say. And I have let four months go by because I didn’t want to feel uncomfortable on a phone call.
I’m telling you this because I want you to know that knowledge does not prevent stupidity. Insight does not inoculate you. You can spend a career talking about the conversation you need to have and still find, when you check, that you haven’t had it.
Here is what I know about friendship after sixty that nobody told me.
Making new friends after sixty is genuinely hard. Not hard the way people mean when they say something is hard and mean mildly inconvenient. Structurally hard. You don’t have the ready-made containers anymore, the shared workplace or the school pickup or the neighborhood block party where proximity does part of the work for you. You have to seek out the specific person and then you have to build the structure around the friendship from scratch, and most people at sixty-five are not practiced at this because they haven’t had to be.
And the old friendships, the ones from before, are doing what all things do with age: they’re either deepening or they’re quietly ending. The middle ground gets smaller. The woman you’ve known since your kids were in the same second-grade class, whom you liked and never got closer to, is probably going to stay exactly where she is. The man your husband has had lunch with twice a year for twenty years who never quite became a real friend is probably not going to become one now. The window for a certain kind of casual friendship seems to close at around fifty-five, I’ve found, and I don’t mean that to sound discouraging. I mean it so you’ll take the ones you still have more seriously.
Because here is the arithmetic of it, and I find it useful to say plainly:
If you’re sixty-five, and your closest friend is sixty-eight, and you are both in reasonable health, you might have twenty good years together. You might have ten. You might have less. You don’t know which. And every month you let go by on the assumption that the friendship will still be there when you get around to tending it is a month you won’t get back.
I am not trying to frighten you. I am trying to tell you what I tell myself when I’m walking the trail at six in the morning: the time is not abstract. It’s Tuesday. It’s right now. And the person you keep meaning to call is living in the same Tuesday you are.
I want to say something about loneliness here, because I think about it a lot.
I think we confuse loneliness with being alone. They’re not the same thing. I know women who live alone and are not lonely. I know women in marriages and surrounded by grown children who are profoundly, quietly lonely. The loneliness I’m talking about is the loneliness of not being known. Of having no one who holds the whole of you, who knows the backstory, who can hear a sentence you start and finish it correctly.
It’s possible to be in a life full of people and to not be known.
I’ve seen this in the men I’ve worked with more than anywhere else. Men in their late sixties and seventies who will tell you, if you ask in the right way, that they don’t have a close friend. Not a friend they talk to about anything real. They have acquaintances. Golf partners. Colleagues they still meet for lunch. But not the other thing. Not the person you call when things are genuinely bad.
It doesn’t make them weak. It makes them people who were never taught how to do this, who grew up in a culture that insisted on self-sufficiency as a virtue and emotional disclosure as a liability. And now they’re in their seventies and the loneliness has become structural, built into the scaffolding of their lives in a way that’s very hard to change.
I find this heartbreaking. I have found it heartbreaking for thirty years. The solution is not complicated. But it requires starting. It requires picking up the phone. It requires tolerating the small discomfort of saying: I want us to be closer than we’ve been. I miss talking to you. Can we do that more?
Almost nobody says this. It’s an unusual thing to say and it makes you feel exposed and it is so obviously the right thing to do and I have been four months from calling Diane.
I’m going to call her today.
Not because writing this column obligates me to a tidy ending. It doesn’t, and I distrust tidy endings, which are usually just clean-looking lies. I’m going to call her because I’ve been sitting with this in print now and I can see it clearly, and what I see is this: I love my friend Diane and time is not neutral and there is no good version of a future in which I keep not calling.
I don’t know how the call will go. I don’t know if she’ll answer or if I’ll leave a message or if something in her voice will tell me the gap has done what gaps do and changed the shape of things. I don’t know if we’ll find our way back to those four years of close friendship or whether we’ll arrive at something new, something more maintenance-level, which is also fine. A friendship at whatever level it is, tended honestly, is better than a friendship in amber that nobody is living inside of.
What I know is that the discomfort I’ve been protecting myself from is smaller than I made it. It always is. The anticipation of the awkward conversation is almost always worse than the awkward conversation, which usually turns out not to be that awkward once you’ve started it.
The starting is the whole thing.
Is there someone you’ve been meaning to reach out to? Someone specific, whose face came into your mind when you read the first line of this column?
I want you to sit with that for a minute. Not to make you feel guilty. To ask you one question:
What are you waiting for?
Not rhetorically. Specifically. What is the thing you’re waiting for? What condition needs to be met before you pick up the phone, or get in the car, or type the first line of the message you’ve been composing in your head for longer than you want to admit?
I don’t think you need to answer me. I think you need to answer yourself, honestly, at two in the morning when the real stuff surfaces. I think you need to look at the arithmetic and decide if the protection is worth the cost.
I’ve been doing this work for a long time. I’ve sat with people who ran out of time. Not many of them told me they wished they’d been more guarded.
I’ll let you know how the call goes.
