Over and over again, those I career-coach blurt out that they are lonely. They ask advice on how they can loop into the kinds of close friendships they had had in high school and/or college.
So, I researched why it is universally difficult to establish intimate relationships as we age. As The New York Times article hammers, that kind of bonding requires three things:
Proximity - As in college, there usually must be a large pool of people you can try out developing relationships with. Yet, our world shrinks as we get older.
Repeated Unplanned encounters - Life can harden into routine and preventing too much newness. Yes, we settle in our ways. And build our systems to keep it that way.
Setting that allows you to shake off your wariness and confide - However, a history of disappointments and betrayals in relationships make us wary of being open. Instead, we get down the persona which makes us appear to be open. But we really have become closed systems. By age 40, you probably have set up a relational moat around your lives, stocked it with alligators, and kept the drawbridge down most of the time.
After the research and giving clients some tips about how to increase the odds of developing at least one close friend, I was able to connect the dots on my own traumatic encounter with former college acquaintance Kathleen Huebner. We hadn't been in touch since the 1970s, when we were both pursuing our careers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
My mistake: I was engaged in magical thinking that I could transform that little bit of a relationship from decades ago into a platform for what authentic friendship can offer. Like my clients, I was experiencing the need to bond. Work was no longer enough.
After the Polar Vortex of 2014, another increase in rent coming and sky-high auto insurance, I got it that it would be smart to uproot from the New York Metro area. After all, my two businesses were increasing virtual. Go somewhere warm and and where a decent standard of living would be lower cost. To wrap my head around that massive initiative I had to figure out how to do in an exotic, adventurous way.
So, southwestern Arizona it was.
I had ruled out Florida where my estranged sister Anne Murga-Ring had relocated. Only for about 90 seconds did I have the illusion that we could repair the broken parts of sibling relationships.
The Carolinas seemed too tame.
Mexico and Ecuador would require too much of an adjustment.
Other classmates from college, perhaps also lonely, had somehow looped me onto their Facebook pages. There I found out that Huebner resided in AZ. I assumed that I had struck gold. I would have a friend when my dog and I arrived in Tucson, AZ.
Wrong. Tragically so.
From the get-go, when I treated Huebner to lunch at her retirement community in Oro Valley, AZ, it was an interactional disaster.
I experienced the conversations as puzzling. Alienating.
My gut (psychics tell me that I am psychic) flagged me: There is something very wrong with this picture.
Within about 30 days of our first encounter during that doomed lunch I had taken this step. For Memorial Day weekend, my nemesis had sent me one of those cute e-cards. My response: Bug off, positioned and packaged as the language of civility.
Since then I have embraced that the odds are against circling back to the warm and fuzzy stuff of your youth when so many seemed to care deeply about our well-being: parents, siblings, teachers, classmates and even employers at our part-time jobs. However, I can move the dial closer to re-creating those kinds of bonds by:
Being out there more, even in COVID times
Changing my routines
Taking the leap into trust.
"At our age" the level of support we receive tends to lessen. But it can still be created and nurtured. Currently, I have several on my social network whom I can reach out to during the best and worst of times. That took blowing up my assumptions about how friendship should be. Actually, what a friendship is about keeps mutating for all generations, not only the Ok, Boomer.
The Future is already underway. Ghostwriting/Marketing Communications and coaching on those issues. Sliding scale fees. Complimentary consultation (janegenova374@gmail.com)
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