Reassessing friendships

Over the last few years I’ve reassessed every friendship I have.

With parenthood, friends’ priorities changed. With chronic health challenges, my priorities changed.

There were some friendships that used to feel wonderful that didn’t fit anymore.

There were friends I’d outgrown, and friends who’d outgrown me.

There were friends I thought I’d have for life that went up in flames unexpectedly at the first sign of conflict.

And as some friendships exited the building, it made room for others to blossom.

My thirties have felt like a merry-go-round of friendships, with many friends stepping off to focus on family life.

When you don’t have kids 🙋‍♀️, and/or tend to befriend people a few years older than you 🙋‍♀️, and/or delay having kids til later than most 🙋‍♀️(or forever), the sudden shifting of all your friendships can be disorienting.

I remember how sad I felt in my late twenties, when some of the people I used to love going out dancing with started to become mothers and fathers. We went from catching up in groups most weekends — picnics, dinners, laughing, partying, dancing, camping… to catching up infrequently, over coffee, rarely as a group anymore, and often only if I travelled to see each of them individually.

The deep, meaningful conversations about life and big ideas lapsed into surface-level catch ups where we reeled off all the goings on of the last few months,

Stringing together snippets of our lives between interruptions from a toddler throwing broccoli at a cat.

I tried my best not to begrudge these friends for the radical shifts in our friendship. I understood their situation, and felt so much empathy* for the challenges of parenthood. But at times it was hard, and I’d find myself longing for how we used to be.

*In hindsight, maybe a tad too much empathy. I listened deeply to approximately 685 too many stories about how massively hard it all is, and thoroughly scared myself away from the idea of motherhood.

Some friends were lucky enough to have a supportive partner or parents that enabled them to keep catching up occasionally without kids in tow. I always relished those catch ups and wished we could have them more often.

On many occasions this wasn’t possible, and I’d find myself battling through a blur of fragmented attention, trying to listen to my friend while our attention was pulled all over the place by tiny drunk people their kids.

I am a truly terrible multitasker.

Listening to a friend while also interacting with their toddler completely frazzles my brain and I do an awful job all round.

Now in my late 30s, I have the great fortune of having wonderful friends who I love to bits. Some with kids, some without. Some old, some new. Some borrowed, none blue.

Some near, many far. This morning I woke up mad-early to Zoom with two of my business-owning besties who live in Spain and Mexico (the timezone co-ordination between us three is wild).

Inevitably, I spend more time with child-free friends, who have a lot more capacity to catch up and to exchange texts and voice notes that sometimes venture into personal-podcast territory.

I’m still close with many friends who have young children, but our catch ups are far more sparse. We still connect deeply when we do find time to catch up, and my love for them hasn’t changed. But it feels very different to our pre-kiddo friendships.

In my early thirties, when friends were peeling away one by one to have kids, I initially took their distance too personally.

Neville (my mind) is very black and white, and back then I sometimes made the mistake of measuring friendships by frequency and consistency, rather than depth and quality.

When frequency of contact dropped off, I assumed that meant the friendship was dying. It took me years to figure it out: the depth and trust was still there, I just needed to re-calibrate my expectations around frequency.

When I became unwell for years, suddenly I understood what it was like to love and miss your friends, but not to have the capacity to nurture the friendships.

No doubt, all my friendships will shift again if Bloody Good Husband and I end up making some tiny drunk people of our own (TBC).

I was in no rush to have kids, because I was enjoying my life as it was, full of travel, catch ups and fun. I knew parenthood would change everything, and I didn’t want it to.

But without changing anything, everything changed.

Neville takes everything for granted and appreciates precisely nothing until it’s gone.

I wish my twenty-something self had relished those times when we all had tonnes of capacity to hang out. I naively assumed my social life would continue on like that forever. Didn’t see the shift coming.

Buddhists allegedly meditate in graveyards to contemplate the impermanence of life. Mad bastards.

Reminding myself that I can (and eventually will) lose everything I currently have is one of the quickest antidotes to Neville’s take-for-grantery. And the shortest cut to feeling grateful.

Though you won’t be catching me meditating in any graveyards. Yeesh.

x

Andrea

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