Remember your college friends and roommates? You either lived together or else close enough to casually and spontaneously hang out at one of your places almost any time you wanted. You knew the ins and outs of each other’s lives, the minutiae. You knew most of each other’s classes, and more importantly, times that you both didn’t have class. You ate together, you studied (maybe) together, you partied together, you talked about crushes and hookups together. You existed in that liminal bubble between adolescence and adulthood together. You took up so much space in each other’s lives, in a good way.
I met one of my college roommates and beautiful dear friend Susie for brunch this past weekend when she came through town. We don’t live near each other (she’s in Chicago, I’m in NYC) and haven’t for nearly 25 years. We’ve been friends since the second week of my freshman year, almost 30 (how is that possible) years ago. We caught up on various life things and I got to hear more about her teenage son, while my tween son, who joined us for brunch, attempted to charm her with his precociousness. And then we all had to leave and go our separate ways, back to our middle-aged lives. It was too short, not enough time, not nearly enough time.
Back in college, we had nothing but time. Susie and I lived together for two years in college. We (by “we,” I mean not just Susie, but all of those college friends) spent hours just shooting the shit, I don’t even know what we talked about. We cackled after prank-calling people we knew (this was the mid-’90s, in the time of the landline). We gossiped about boys, we got wasted together the way that only college girls can, we nursed each other through broken hearts. We gave each other shit after various Walks of Shame. We talked about that one guy who pissed the bed when we stayed over one drunken night. We got McDonald’s when we were hungover and watched Empire Records over and over and over. Every day was Rex Manning Day. We were just there, together and with the rest of our friends. In college, your friends are your community. They are one and the same.
Susie is a year older than me, and by the time I moved to Chicago after graduation, she’d already been living there for a year, establishing her post-college life. We’d lost that college rhythm, which simply doesn’t – can’t – exist outside the college bubble. Two years later, I moved to New York, where I’ve been since. As is so often, our lives in our 20s and 30s diverged. This happened with all my college friends, and law school friends too.
laid out this Friendship Dip perfectly. As we move into our 20s and especially 30s, our lives take us in different directions. We move away from each other, we have varying career ambitions and demands, maybe we get married or maybe we don’t, maybe we get divorced, maybe we have kids, maybe we don’t have kids, maybe we have kids way before or way after everyone else does, maybe we get sick, maybe we have wildly different income levels, maybe our values change. We’re each following where life takes us, and it’s not always (or often) together. By the time we reach our 40s, we’re in it. Our friends and our community aren’t necessarily one and the same anymore. Some of our oldest, closest friends don’t live near us, and our community is often more of circumstance (parenting, workplace) than choice. Time is an elusive resource in a well that is always running dry.I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Petersen’s Friendship Dip tracks with the happiness nadir at 47.I’m nearly 48, and girl, I am feeling the Dip. Our society is increasingly organized to make it harder and harder to build and maintain friendship and community. I don’t live near my high school BFF or any of my college friends. My law school friends are scattered, and despite being roughly the same age, we’re all in various different “big” stages of life. I’ve been a divorced mom for 10+ years, and still don’t feel like I’ve fully found my parenting community. (The challenges of finding community as a divorced working mom of an only child is worth a separate essay, for sure.) Perhaps most salient is that we’re all so damn busy and stretched thin that finding time to just hang out feels harder than getting tickets to see Beyonce.
Most of the time, I’m too busy and pulled in a thousand directions to notice this. But seeing Susie this time reminded me of how much I miss that feeling of living with your friends and community. By “living,” I don’t necessarily mean cohabitating (although gosh was that a freaking blast!), but rather living. Existing. Being. Doing. Living.
But all hope is not lost! Over the holidays, I visited my parents in Florida, where they live full-time now. I got to meet my mom’s gal pals, a group of three other delicious ladies who she’s become close with over the last few years. They all live in the same gated community and can walk or bike to each other’s houses. They’re retired and free of the distractions of parenting and career striving. They hang out and chat about their or their loved ones’ various health issues (I learned of all kinds of things to warily anticipate in a couple decades) or a new restaurant that just opened or their ikebana or French classes. (I mean, maybe they’re hungover and talking about who hooked up the night before like Susie and I did in college, which, go for it, ladies.) They’ve come full circle – friends and community the same again. They’ve Friendship-Dipped back up.
These days, Susie and I see each other maybe a couple times a year, when one of us is in Chicago or New York for some reason. It’s usually for a rushed meal, hurrying to cover all the various topics we want to know about the other’s life, never having enough time, hugging tightly goodbye with a quick “Love you, see you soon I hope!” and then slipping back into our lives.
Maybe in 25 years, Susie and other friends and I will be living near each other in a sunny community where we have time to know the ins and outs of each other’s lives again, and every day can be Rex Manning Day again.
Maybe you’ll get to have this Golden Girls life with your college friends or your yet-to-meet retirement friends. Until then, “love you, see you soon I hope!”
What’s got my attention this week
You don’t fucking say. No amount of meditation apps can make up for a toxic work environment with unclear or unrealistic expectations and ill-prepared managers.
I had no idea there were atheist chaplains, but I kinda love that.
The latest in not instilling confidence that the 2024 election is going to go well…
WAL woman of the week
A woman out there in the world, being A Lot
A one-woman show about blow jobs could only be done by a woman who is A Lot. I saw Jacqueline Novak’s “Get on Your Knees” live a few years ago and loooooooved it. You should definitely watch her Netflix special.
Out of the mouths of babes
“It is incompleteness that haunts us.” Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire.
I love how this newsletter part captures the evolution of friendships from college to midlife. It's so relatable how life takes us in different directions as we get older. The struggle to find time to connect with friends is real, but there's hope for a Golden Girls future. 🌟 Excellent work, fantastic writing! 🌼
Wow, Nikki, I relate to ALL OF THIS. Same same same with my college besties. We're scattered about the country (WA, FL, NJ) and it's obviously hard to see each other but we try. Last year I got to see both of them thanks to work trips in their areas (thank you, day job!) I also relate to most of my friends have teens and I have my tween (who could love to join the ladies for brunch. That's totally his jam!) My dream is to live the life your mother has! Awesome read!