“What about the 15th? Do you have time then?” I write. The WhatsApp ‘typing’ notification flashes on the screen of my phone. “Agh no I’m sorry!”, they message back. “We’re taking the kids to Kerry that week and we have to paint the whole downstairs when we get home.”
There’s another brief typing interlude and then they ask – “What about the second Saturday in August?” I groan audibly at the misfortune of timing. “I’m not around that day”, I say, glancing through the calendar in my phone to see a work commitment I can’t move and feeling disappointed. “I’m really sorry.”
I seem to spend a lot of time exchanging apologies with friends these days. This bizarre dance of calendars appears to be the language of modern friendship, at least for people over 35. You don’t necessarily live in the same communities, cities, counties or even countries. You try to find snatches of time to look directly into one another’s eyeballs in an attempt to retain a bond that was originally forged in the two of you doing actual things together, such as watching films or going to gigs or lying in the park on summer weekends talking about college assignments or useless boys who don’t text back.
Now you see one another far less than you’d ideally like. I’m talking about the friends you love here rather than the slightly awkward acquaintances from another lifetime who you don’t quite know how to kill it dead with. I’m referring to the friends you mourn a former closeness with and truly want in your life. The ones who would have helped you bury a body, or brought you Skittles and flat 7-Up when you were in the hospital, or supported your brief if ill-considered attempt to write a godawful screenplay. The friends who came before spouses or houses or babies or ageing parents or thermal socks.
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In this bizarre, digitised era, so much of human connection is conducted through technological proxies that we are often duped into thinking we’re keeping meaningful relationships topped up through utterly superficial contact, and then wonder why we’re lonely. The modern adult friendship seems to consist largely of seeing people one to three times a year for a meetup which takes four thousand messages back and forth to pin down. If no one cancels, when you finally do see one another, it’s been so long that the whole thing can feel a bit alienating.
Physical changes indicate the uncomfortable breadth of time passed since you last sat down together. Someone has lost or gained 30lb, or suddenly has more grey hair than not-grey, or has cut in a fringe that renders them suddenly unrecognisable, or they’ve retrained as an accountant.
The meeting turns into an exchange of facts. Information uploaded and downloaded. Here’s where I’ve been. Here’s how work is going.
How’s your mother getting on? And that boss who was giving you trouble?
How long have you had the fringe? It suits you!
Meetings feel as though you’re running breathlessly after one another, trying not to lose touch but hauntingly aware that you’re failing quite spectacularly. The relationship becomes something that makes you feel sad and disconnected and inadequate rather than the restorative, connected sense of meaningfulness that friendship should bring.
Add emigration into the mix and see if that makes it simpler to maintain these crucial connections to long-term friends (it doesn’t). When I visited home last October for the first time since moving to Australia, I stayed for 10 days or so with my old housemates from college. They’ve long since married one another and made their home in Dublin while I went gallivanting to London and now Australia.
It’s the sort of old friendship where you can invite yourself to stay for a rudely long time and it isn’t weird (or only a little), but when I arrived at their door I could see by my oldest friend that we shared a mutually unexpressed worry. We had lived together before, but not in a long time.
It had been years since we’d spent a protracted amount of time together. Here she now was, granting me access to her home – the place where we ideally go to avoid awkward conversations with people we don’t like as much as we thought we did. There it was in the big eyes I’d always admired for their expressiveness and enviably long lashes, trepidation – ‘will it feel the way it used to? Do we still have the friendship we used to have?’
Neither of us shared that worry with the other until the end of the trip. Throughout the visit, we finally had time to spend together. Not just exchanging life information, but eating chocolate on the sofa while watching shockingly bad reality TV. Going out for dinner and not sharing one dessert – because desserts should be strictly one per person and we understand that. Walking around Dublin and getting reacquainted with the city and with the grown-up versions of ourselves. There in my friends’ home, I found myself getting to know them all over again.
All of the features I’d loved about them – the curiosity and gentleness, the silly sense of humour and the tendency to wander into deep conversation – was still there. We were all much changed, but still it felt like it used to. It just took more than a rushed catch-up in a cafe to reconnect in the way that a 19-year friendship deserved.
We can’t all drop everything and run into the sunset together with our friends, but despite the distance of time and emigration, I was deeply reassured by that visit. By the realisation that if you are finally able to spend time with your friends (after however much messaging and calendar consultation and if the demands of caring roles and workplaces allow), the anxieties will often sort themselves out.
The relationship might be there, just as it ever was, if we can find a way to spend some time together.
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