Home Truths Sophia Waugh
I remember my sense of outrage when my parents, aged then, I suppose, in their mid-forties, casually said that they had enough friends and didn’t need to make any more. I could not understand that view of life – it shocked and, almost more, saddened me. To me, giving up on making new friends was like giving up on life. They told me it was because I was young and they had made their decision but, even then, that did not ring true, and the statement has echoed in my mind ever since.
I am now in my fifties. You could argue that I, too, have ‘made my choices’. That I do not need any new friends – and it’s true, I don’t need them. I have a lot of good friends, and more than my fair share of real, true, solid-gold friends. For someone living far from the city, I have a varied and interesting social life. But I never want to curl up my toes and say that’s enough. If you think you have enough friends, you are never going to be interested enough in other people to do more than trot through the small talk of the day. And, if you don’t move beyond that, you might as well not bother leaving your house.
I sat next to a man at dinner once who talked endlessly about money: how much he made, how much everything was worth, property values, car values … on and on it went. Apart from the sheer vulgarity of it, it was phenomenally boring, but I thought I’d give him one last chance to redeem himself. ‘Tell me,’ I asked, ‘What makes your heart sing?’ He looked deeply uncomfortable at the question, but I was not going to let him off the hook. Finally he came up with the answer. ‘I love it when I give my children money,’ he said. All right, that man was not going to be one of my new, mid-life friends, but I had at least learned a little about him.
When we are young, we mostly make our friends through shared experiences, rather than ideas. School friends, university friends, friends from various jobs, from the school gate, whatever it might be. We sift those people out and make real friends with the ones who share our ideas, but it’s the experiences which have come first. Now we are older, we get to the heart more quickly. Which is why I would argue it’s exactly not the time to give up on new friends. We don’t have to think about school pick-up times or bus routes or data analysis or whatever else it is that has thrown us together. We can zip through the ‘what do you do’ stage of conversation because we are no longer trying to prove ourselves; we are what we are.
So what are the things through which we search each other out now?
It’s the Civil War all over again. Now we’re not trying to impress each other, or prove ourselves, we can trot through the outer shell quickly. And what are still the deal-breakers? Once we’ve established a generally complementary set of interests and ideologies, what sorts the sheep from the goats?
Simple – do you laugh at P G Wodehouse and which way did you vote on 23rd June?
Gosh, it’s nice, being older.