Friendship takes a different shape for adults

As you get older, it’s hard enough sustaining friendships, let alone forming new ones.

When Ruth Davidson resigned as the leader of the Scottish Conservative Party, she said the pressures of the job had made her a “poor” friend. It was easy to feel sympathy. Amid a host of competing priorities, friendships are all too easily lost.

In my 40s, I’ve experienced spasms of loneliness when

good friends have switched jobs, left London or moved abroad. Or when I’ve felt consumed by the demands of work and home, with no space for anyone else. Friendships ebb and flow. Values change.

These moments act as painful reminders to catch up with old friends. Last week I was revived by sharing wine and laughter with a man I’ve known since university.

Close friends can hold you up in times of crisis. But pangs of isolation are a spur to form new connections too. Even weak ties — casual friendships with dog walkers, say, or neighbours — are capable of boosting your mood.

In The Happiness Curve, Jonathan Rauch sees midlife as a phase. It’s a transition from striving for success and ratcheting up achievements to another part of our lives: discovering fundamental values, compassion and reflection. Friends can help you figure that out.

With the perennial time constraints in mind, however, each person needs to find out what works best for them. One friend arrives for drinks with a prepared agenda of topics to discuss before leaving for the last train home. Another has brutally axed second-tier friends from his social calendar. Kate Leaver, author of The

Friendship Cure, says the most common question she is asked is how to make friends as an adult. “So many of our earliest friendships are shaped by convenience and proximity,” she tells me. “At school, it can be as much to do with who you’re sat next to alphabetically as with how much you have in common.”

Leaver instructs braveness — talking to neighbours, finding people on social media, joining sports and book groups.

There is no template, though, and no easy way to tackle the awkwardness of asking a colleague out for a drink, or the panic of disclosing too much via a risqué joke.

When do you know if a colleague or acquaintance is something more? I was surprised to hear a co-worker describe me as a friend. A bit forward, I thought. Until I realised he knew more about the triumphs and tussles of my day to day than my best friend.

It’s an odd experience past the age of eight to ask someone if they consider themselves your friend. But I thought

I’d ask some new friends if they would describe themselves as such. To my relief, they all said yes (no pressure). We reflected that we enjoyed a freedom from the expectations inherent in older relationships. In some respects, we know each other better than old friends because we know the current versions of ourselves, rather than the dissolute or awkward twentysomethings we used to be.

I would never usually dare raise such an intimate conversational topic. But I’m rather pleased that I did.