FRIENDS & CHRISTMAS CARDS

I was imaging writing that my Christmas Card list would be shorter this year. Actually, it’s the same length as usual. Why then this sense that there would be fewer people on it? It is not because friends are dying off, though one or two are, nor because I feel more curmudgeonly this Christmas than usual, but I think it is to do with some facts around friendships and getting older.

Ageing gives me an appetite for paring down. I eat and drink less, I spend less money in shops…. and I also invite and visit others less often. I am happy to do without, and this seems to apply to people too. I am not giving up on close friends: far from it. But I am making less effort to make new ones and, even with those I hope to have around for the rest of my life, I notice that we meet up less often.

I could say that this is partly the aftermath of the enforced isolation that came with Covid restrictions and our eager grasping of virtual conversations and texts. But whilst glad of the technology, I don’t think this quite covers it.

One factor that makes a difference at this stage of life is that friends who have grandchildren have gravitated towards them, both as a duty and as a major pleasure, sometimes making a physical and emotional move to be closer to them. I have several friends with three children, all of whom have produced two offspring, making six to be available for - often in different parts of the country and sometimes abroad. Time in between grandparenting is spent recuperating, attending to their home or their health and, in some cases, continuing to work. There is simply less time left for seeing friends.

Other friends who are not grandparenting, gay and straight, are caring for their own frail and elderly relatives, working or volunteering, gardening, worrying about their future, attending book groups or playing golf, travelling the globe, becoming religious. I wonder if they are also feeling the pain of exclusion from the grandparenting chat: if they are, I am sorry. They don’t say.

For reasons to do with gradual decline, some friends have stopped travelling any great distance from home and others dread the ordeal of straining poorer hearing in crowded pubs and restaurants when we meet up.

Whatever the reason, it seems to be a fact that at this age we are less entwined with each other. I make no judgment about this: these friends are in my heart and, because we know each other really well and can therefore let each other go, reduced contact heralds nothing more than the morphing of one phase of life into another.

When I contrast this with friendships built up in our 20s, 30s, 40s (and some of those are still around) I remember with pleasure the shared parenting, political discussions, clothes swops, colleague outings, over-the-top parties and, above all, the taken-for-granted female closeness amongst us all. Not just the shared confidences: I met most of my friends’ parents and siblings, knew their children and their partners, understood their ambivalence about coupledom, travelled some difficult roads together. Now, those in couples have settled for the partner they are with and when we meet, it is mostly with their partner too. Very occasionally I meet grandchildren, but not in the way that in earlier life we had our children play with each other, sleep over, collect from school. It’s a different relationship with different allegiances, and the habits and norms of parenting with peers do not translate to the same kind of relationship with grandchildren. I am as guilty as my friends of creating this kind of exclusive bubble around grandparenting, as if the pride and gratitude I feel at being allowed to be a grandparent is something to hold to myself. (I am now wondering if this would be different in California or, indeed, other cultures.)

About men: I’ve just spoken to a straight male friend who says that his friendships with other men are opening up more as he gets older, retirement rendering them less competitive with each other and less afraid of intimacy. Although he sees them less often, there is more personal sharing. Perhaps there are gender differences here that I don’t know about.

To return to Christmas Cards: I hope to use my cards to reconnect with friends when distance has got in the way, and reaffirm love when it hasn’t. I will write something of what I want to say to any particular person and expect that I’ll hear from them too. I feel this friendship-distancing as a small loss as we age but, as ever, it seems that getting older is as much a process of letting go as it is of standing still, and if friends are finding themselves doing this too, then our new separateness is another way of doing it all together again.