Are you also stuck in a midlife friendship drought?

When I was six, I had a friend at school called Kate. She was kind and eager to learn, with thick bangs and NHS glasses. I adored her and when her family moved from Manchester to Oxford a year later I was inconsolable.

Since then, as an only child, I have valued friendship deeply, spending my teenage years in a tight-knit group of three and college at the epicenter of a teeming mass of friends.

In fact, I’ve always put a lot of effort into friendships, but when I turned 50, in the middle of the pandemic, I noticed that my group seemed to thin out.

There weren’t that many people on my mental ‘need to get them around’ list, my best friends were preoccupied with their troubled teens, job changes and moves, and I noticed that if I wasn’t careful, my nearest and dearest would walk away the danger of simply ebbing away, on the changing tides of middle age.

This is quite typical, according to a recent YouGov survey. One in five Brits admit they have ‘distanced’ themselves from close friends since the pandemic, while four in 10 have lost touch with some friends altogether.

And we can’t afford to lose them, as 51 percent find it ‘difficult’ to make new friends.

That’s partly because midlife is no longer about settling down for the long term. For many, now is a time of dramatic personal, professional and even geographical shifts, marked by children leaving home, new career paths, health and family challenges and, in many cases, including mine, divorce and remarriage.

In 2014, at the age of 43, I broke up with my husband of 15 years. It was an intensely painful breakup, and inevitably some friends took sides. Unconfrontational as I am, I have chosen to let go of a few.

Shortly afterwards, a new job meant a return north. Living alone and my son being away at university, I often felt lonely.

Since most of my friends were in happy relationships, I didn’t want to be the divorced gooseberry, begging for a piece of their time. Plus, I was so busy at work and was commuting for almost three hours a day. new friends felt impossible.

However, according to several studies, my own situation was not that unusual. A recent Harvard study found that “as people grow older, they prefer small circles of meaningful, pre-existing friendships, rather than seeking new ones.”

The problem is that established friendships can drift away and empty nesting can be a blow to them, says Dr Felicity Baker, a clinical psychologist.

‘Without regular reasons to meet, such as sporting or school events, we may find we have less in common with other parents and fewer opportunities to connect.’

There are other reasons why we can ‘lose’ friends around this age, adds clinical psychotherapist Jacqueline Carson.

‘By now we are usually more sure of what kind of person we are, what we like, what we tolerate – or not. We apologize less for being our true selves,” she says.

Our beliefs, which are often longstanding at this point in our lives, can certainly divide us. I have found that I hardly dare to ask friends’ opinions about the conflict in the Middle East, because this would lead to a bitter discussion.

A couple has already posted their opinions, which deeply contradict mine, on social media, and once again I’m wondering if we have enough in common to maintain our friendship.

I wonder how much blame I should lay at my own door for my ever-shrinking circle; As I get older, I’m afraid I’ve become less compliant.

In my 20s and 30s, I embraced people with views very different from my own. I also didn’t even care if they were needy or exhausting as long as they were interesting.

Now I tend to seek out people who make me feel safe rather than challenged, who have the same kind of values ​​and political beliefs as I do.

I’ve also discovered that while income differences don’t matter so much when you’re in the local pub doing a shopping spree after work in your twenties, they’re much more noticeable when you live in a small house and your friends own half of Scotland .

We are now at the age where inheritances, directorships and bonuses are coming in, and it’s all about houses, nice cars and holidays.

As an author and holiday home owner (both with parents who are thankfully still alive) I and my husband Andy, 52, are not in a position to spend cash.

We rarely host dinner parties because our kitchen is a shoebox, but we are often invited to much better-appointed homes and feel guilty about not being able to give back.

There is also a practical element to it: at this age people are fully booked months in advance. Recently it took five attempts to find a date for dinner with local friends because their schedules were so full.

Others promise to come and stay, but there are the kids and the dogs and the jobs… and somehow that never happens.

There’s also the matter of grandchildren: those who have them naturally want to spend all available free time with their beloved new family members, and those who don’t (like me) are understandably left somewhat sidelined.

Not for a second do I dislike their joy, but it all adds to the sudden lack of available friends.

So what to do? Trying to revive old friendships is of course possible. I’m looking forward to a school reunion after more than 30 years, and maybe even an old friend or two coming back into my life.

But not every long-lost friendship needs to be restored, warns Jacqueline Carson.

“There’s usually a reason why old friendships have faded into the background,” she says. ‘If it is simply because you have lost touch, then it is very possible to rekindle it. But if it was after an argument, reuniting can be difficult.

“The other person may have moved on, so proceed with caution and think carefully about why you want to restart the relationship.”

The alternative, of course, is making new friends. “The best place to look is where you spend your time,” says Jaqueline Carson.

“Travel, dancing, music, yoga… if you have a shared interest, you’re more likely to connect with people who are on a similar journey.”

I really tested my friendships to the limit when I met Andy and moved to the (very) rural West Highlands to live with him in 2016.

Of course I kept in regular contact with my ‘friends at home’. But when I first got here, I only had one friend here, a fellow writer who lives ten miles away. (In Argyll that’s practically next door).

Over the years she has become a true friend. But these things take time. A new study from the University of Kansas shows that it takes about 50 hours to go beyond a “casual friend” and more than 200 hours to become close friends.

I can’t say I’ve timed our interactions, but over the years I’ve met more local friends through yoga classes, village groups and through Andy, who grew up here.

However, I’m not looking for “best friend” levels of sharing – at least, I’m in no rush for that to happen.

Everyone has busy lives and, Carson says, “you can take the time to get to know someone.”

I still miss my old friends, and I’ll never have as many as I used to. But maybe that’s not a problem, because when you’re fifty, friendship is a matter of quality over quantity.