Old Friends
Summer and fall were filled with old friends. In July, I had lunch with my seventh-grade “girlfriend,” and a high school friend stayed with us for a weekend. In September, I went away for a long weekend with a friend I first met in elementary school and last travelled with in 1985. In October, I enjoyed a long lunch with a buddy with whom I share memories of middle school, camp, and a whole lot of baseball fields. After our lunch, I met up with four college friends for a weekend.
After one of these get-togethers, a friend posted a picture of us on Instagram with the caption “Old friends are the best friends.”
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these relationships and have considered writing about them, but is there anything novel to say about friendships? Also, not being a real writer and valuing my friends more than my readership, I can’t be terribly specific about any of these relationships. Still, I can stop thinking about how important these relationships are to me and the sheer pleasure they bring me.
For me, an old friend is someone you’ve been with long enough and through so many stages of life that you are sure they’ll be your friend forever. The duration of the relationship means that you’ve had to embrace one of my favorite Jonathan Franzen quotations: “To have friends, you have to realize that nobody is perfect.” This is especially true since if you’ve been friends since middle school, high school, or college, you’ve been friends when neither of you was the best version of yourself. When I see these old friends, there are always stories of something you said or did that can only be acknowledged with a shake of the head.
A striking feature of these friendships is that you knew each other before all the accretions of age were added. These old friends are unimpressed by titles, publications, accomplishments, and earnings. They are also unfazed by divorces, job losses, and ill-considered life choices of people’s kids. Friends know who you are beneath the adornments of age.
This does not mean these friends know us better. We really do change with time.1 But this knowledge is what differentiates the old friend from the person you see at a high school reunion for the first time in 40 years; the old friend knows your core, but also knows who you’ve become, and thus knows you better than anyone else. Elbert Hubbard said, “A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
I have a bit of a pathological need to stay connected to friends. As my own untrained therapist, I attribute this to being an only child and feeling the need to replace siblings with friends. Jess C. Scott famously said that “friends are the family you choose.” There were times when I wondered if there was any point in maintaining these friendships. So much of our time together was spent rehashing old stories. This was fun, but could it really sustain relationships? Happily, these old friendships have evolved wonderfully. Our college crowd now meets yearly to add new adventures. Our conversations are less about times past and more about discussing our current issues. We joke that the weekends have gone from going to listen to music at bars to group therapy sessions for middle-aged men.
During my internship, I was hanging out with a new friend (who I now consider an old friend) who commented that we were each other’s first adult friend. He noted that all previous friends were founded on happenstance — they began because you were classmates, or bunkmates, or roommates, or teammates. I am not sure I buy this differentiation anymore; many of my current friends are the people I work with in the clinic or the ceramics studio. Still, I like what it shows about people. Put a bunch of people together, and most are going to find a soulmate or two who you’ll love for decades. This makes you understand why arranged marriages work.
In the end, I am just thankful that these old friends remain in my life — a group of men and women scattered across the country, with different jobs, families, and interests. Among them are people I can call with specific needs or call, nearly at random, when I just need some pleasant company. Whether we talked a week earlier or it’s been a month or six, the conversation is always easy. As we are all about the same age, we recognize each other’s present challenges. Every conversation exists in a judgment-free zone, where no one is seeking secondary gain.
Oh, and they usually make me laugh, they make me feel good, and I love them.
Photo Credit: Pete F
I once interviewed an internship candidate. I asked him, “If you could choose one person in the history of mankind to interview, who would it be?” He responded, “Me when I was 16.” I practically laughed out loud at this terrible answer. First, the candidate was 21. Second, of all the people who have ever lived, he was most interested in himself 5 years earlier. I have to admit, though, the older I get, the more curious I am about talking to the 18-year-old me. I am pretty sure I’d be disappointed.
"As we are all about the same age, we recognize each other’s present challenges."
I want to put in a pitch for friendships with people of different ages, as well. Two of my longest friendships have been with women 27 and 37 years older than me (the latter is now 97 years old). Looking back, I realize that they were mentors to me, and I didn't know it at the time. They showed me the emotional and intellectual growth I still had to look forward to, and modeled aspects of the person I wanted to become; they put my "present challenges" in perspective, because they'd lived through it all and survived. Now that I'm older, I recognize that I must have contributed something to their lives, too, in addition to the ordinary joy of our friendship: with one, for instance, I was the young tennis partner who kept her game sharp. I'm also close friends with a woman who was originally my son's friend in high school, but grew to be my friend when she became a writer and moved to my city. She keeps me sharp in our industry and with popular culture, and maybe I'm inadvertently sharing with her some of the gifts that my older friends bestowed on me.
I hope to be included in the list, old friend!