I’m In My 40s And Still Don’t Have Any Friends |
I’m In My 40s And Still Don’t Have Any Friends
"A therapist once asked me whether I wanted more friends because I genuinely wanted them or because I felt like I should want them. I didn’t know how to answer."
I should have friends by now. The kind you take trips with and tag on Instagram with the caption: “Love these girlies.” The kind you huddle with on the sofa during playdates, clinking glasses of rosé, talking openly about Botox so they can tell you, “Shut up, you’re gorgeous.”
I should have friends by now. IRL friends, not “friends” you wish happy birthday to when Facebook reminds you, not “friends” who are really just work colleagues, not “friends” who are people you used to sleep with and might have again once, if you were bored enough, drunk enough, sad enough, or all three.
I know what a friend pack looks like. I’ve been studying them since I was 12, wishing desperately to be a Brenda Walsh, a Rachel or a Carrie. How I longed for a place like Central Perk, for a round of cosmos, for intimacy, for belonging, for being witnessed, for being wanted.
It’s not like I didn’t have the opportunities. I’m in my 40s now and can see them clearly: the roads not taken, the people not loved or even liked. All those birthday parties that never happened, all that undeveloped film, all the secrets that only spill out for the ghosts in my backseat.
The more I live, the more opportunities run out. I sit in a café at my table for one, pretending to scroll while I listen to the conversations happening around me. The people at the table next to me know each other well. You can hear it in their laughter; you can see it in the ease of their bodies.
And those two over there? They’re just starting out. They’re a little more careful with their words, their bodies a little more constrained.
But they still know how to talk to each other. What I envy isn’t their closeness – it’s their ease with being seen. And this envy burns like hot coal in my throat. Why haven’t I learned how to talk to people yet? How is it that other people know how to do this seemingly simple, natural thing?
“You used to hide behind my legs at family parties,” my mom likes to say, as evidence that I’ve always been this way – either uninterested in other people or completely terrified of them. But........