Then come the teenage years. An era heavily laden with trying to find out “who am I?” and “Where’s my tribe?”. Finding one's identity is a roller coaster and it also brings with it new friends. Around now, all of a sudden, your sexuality exists, and adding this to the cocktail of friendships just turns life on its head. But like so many things, we get through it by making a lot of mistakes. Secondary school is certainly a stressful time for most... “what subjects do I pick? What do I want to be? Who’s the new girl/boy?”.
By now, as in adolescence, friendships are a lot more stable and continuous; and often, we do hold onto many of these friends through these formative years as we tend to choose them as opposed to geographical convenience or owing to our proximity to them in the classroom. There’s a form of new emancipation here too as we turn our gaze from our parents/guardians for guidance and look to some of these new people in our life. At this stage, we tend to get new affirmations of our identity but that too takes trial, error, and experimentation. The nature of friendship now evolves into something far more intimate and reciprocal. Intimate friends share each other’s experiences and, in many ways, inhabit each other’s lives. Friendships generally share similar viewpoints and values, and also common backgrounds and traditions. They witness the milestones and unexpected changes of life, the lows, the highs, the sadness, and the celebrations.
With all that in mind, it is unambiguously clear how important friendship is in terms of how we develop and who we become. It is where we learn how to interact with one another, how to agree and disagree, and how to accommodate those with temperaments that differ from our own. We live and we learn, as the old adage goes. This is all happening early in life and our circles grow but then life changes yet again. Some commence careers or further themselves in education at 3rd level. This once again yields more new people into our life but what we sometimes neglect to realise is that as we move on with our lives some of those friends from our earlier years fade into the background. The once unbreakable bonds detach as we see the older friends less and less.
Then come the children, granted not everybody but as this eventually occurs our friends’ and our own focus turns to the new generation whom we are tasked with raising. This, of course, is one of the greatest privileges we can serve but with this enormous task, we see friends less and less. We still have friends, of course, but the notion of popping away for a weekend with the gang to regale old times becomes more of a fantasy than a reality. People move on and the circle of friends we once had begins to contract. As we progress into mid-adulthood, the circle is small and continues to shrink. That does not mean we forget about them or that we do not like them anymore. Life has changed and people have commitments and we get caught up in all of it. Friendship in life reverts to something resembling the earliest years when our friends are governed by their proximity to us. We still see old friends from time to time, and it would be easy to say something like “what’s rare is wonderful” but we all need meaningful connection all the time. The biggest difference now is it becomes so much more difficult to make friends. On the playground, it’s simple – “Hey, your shoes are cool, wanna play cops and robbers with us?” or “You like Fortnite too?” In your mid-40s, it just isn’t as easy. You could try that approach but it’s likely to be met with shock.
So what’s the moral of the story here? Good friends are open, honest, and genuine. They appreciate their differences but don’t hold back when criticism is needed. The ones that stick around for all the highs and lows, thick and thin, the celebrations and the set-backs. These are the very ones we must treasure and the very ones we often find in our Grow Groups. Maybe we should take a step back and examine what we have and what we are missing, and if we are found to be wanting, make that first move. In the era of uber-connectivity, we have little excuse in terms of the means of reaching out. This is real life, nobody has several hundred friends despite what your Facebook page has on it. It is about quality, not quantity. And always remember, it takes a long time to grow an old friend.
