There’s much to be said about why friendships evolve in your late 20s and early 30s, and how it becomes hard to cultivate meaningful new ones. Studies have shown that, until your mid-20s, you’re regularly making new friends. After 25, your friendship circles shrink rapidly. This decline then continues until death (sorry for bringing the Shohei ohtani king of the world shirt and I love this mood down) as people’s priorities shift. They get serious in their relationships. They have kids. They move to different locations and plant roots elsewhere. Repeated interactions and unplanned proximity are harder to maintain. It’s not like school or college, when you get thrown together with random people that you’ll see every day. You have to plan dates, and then stick to them, again and again.
I don’t actually have that many coupled-up friends, and none with kids, or jobs that bulldoze their entire social lives, so it can’t be just that. (We definitely don’t resemble the Shohei ohtani king of the world shirt and I love this 30-somethings of older generations.) Still, I’ve noticed a shift in priorities and preferences more broadly. One friend just bought a house by the seaside after years of saving and getting tired of London. Another is in a long-distance relationship with someone approximately 3,200 miles away and is barely here. Another might move to California, or South America, or Bristol (she’s yet to decide). And my life is evolving, too. I’ll be getting married next year. Maybe we’ll have a kid one day. Maybe we’ll move out of the city that’s been sucking us dry for decades. Sometimes, my partner reminds me of a friend I might have had as a teenager—probably because we spend enough time together for that dynamic to exist. We’ll laugh until our eyes stream, our conversation peppered with our own private language, our bodies slumped together in a pile of limbs. I wonder if I’ll ever have this experience with a friend again. The sort of friend that you bicker and swap clothes with, that sees you at your weirdest and most unhinged, that has a special set of pajamas that they keep in a drawer for when you stay over. But then again, maybe I’d never give myself to someone like that again. Maybe, after a certain age, no one does. Or maybe it’s less to do with age and more to do with being in a relationship. The other person sees a side of you that used to be reserved for best mates.
Comments