I’m in my 40s, I have few friends and feel like a failure

Dear A&E,

It dawned on me recently that I seem to have fewer and fewer proper friends. That made me feel strange – not sad exactly, but regretful. I’m in my 40s and it often feels as though everyone else is still acquiring new friends and their circle is growing whereas mine has shrunk. I am very close to a few people, and then there are all the acquaintances, but I feel a bit of a failure and a little bit frightened. I can’t work out how worried I should be.

– Detached

Dear Detached,

Our 40s can feel wobbly, can’t they? Friendships, relationships, ageing parents, children becoming teenagers, careers, our place in the universe – everything feels as if it needs some fresh air pumped into it. And as for the state of the world: yikes. In this state of micro and macro anxiety, our brains tend to go into overdrive and start firing out unhelpful and unrelated thoughts, such as “Why did you sleep with that awful boy in 1999?” or “This is what I should have said in that argument in 2017, but I didn’t and this is why I will never reach my full potential.” Every day our brains process about 70,000 thoughts – some we allow to drift past like clouds. Others we allow to linger and rain on us relentlessly.

So friendship is your brain’s current tool of self-flagellation, Detached, like a kind of medieval emotional flail. And friendship is a good choice because it speaks to acute pain points, like loneliness and loveability. Friendships, like romantic relationships, drill into the core of how and where we feel we belong in the world. This is still particularly acute after lockdown, when there was a “friend edit”, whereby many people held on to the ones they couldn’t live without and let more casual friendships slip away. When lockdown lifted, some of us found we didn’t have the energy to replenish our circle of friends and now feel like we are the only ones who aren’t busy going out every night or enjoying new experiences.

First let us say there’s no expiry date on making new friends. Sure, there are people out there who are naturally gregarious and collect masses of mates continually, scooping them up in their fun bus and carrying the party on. But there are just as many quieter types who treasure the meaningful friendships that they have the energy to nurture. Spreading oneself very thin is often not the way to cultivate strong connections.

You might not need that many pals. Your fun bus might be a taxi: a smaller, less noisy, more intimate variety of fun. We energetically, drunkenly, gather friends in our 20s. University, parties, pubs and new jobs all throw up intersecting cliques that develop lives of their own as they fling out tentacles to suck more friends into their nucleus. It’s inevitable that over the course of 20 years some of this falls away. We change so much in that time: our priorities, our circumstances and often our geography. We are bashed about by life. Ultimately, those many, many people may not have been your people. Friendships do not have to be forever. That is a lot of pressure.

Nutritious friendship doesn’t necessarily mean moving in big packs – another feature of post-lockdown life is that it has dawned on a lot of people that they are more introverted than they had thought. They feel drained by the performance that large groups can demand. A smaller scale serves them better. This may be you, Detached, and we would suggest setting intentions to see the people you love regularly. Make rolling appointments – always have them in the diary. And pick up the phone. It’s a bit of a throwback to the past, but we are of a generation who remember chatting to our friends on the landline for hours, while our parents complained about the bill. In a hi-tech world we are evolving out of this – but an unexpected call can feel incredible. Connection is good for us.

Now that you find yourself in this period of introspection, take a look around and work out what exactly you mean by “friends”. Sometimes we have stealth friends with whom we have regular encounters that are very fulfilling – maybe we work with them or swim or volunteer with them. If the job or activity were to fall away, these connections could remain. They count.

And don’t dismiss the possibility for micro-connection. Every day is an opportunity to have a tiny but important interaction with someone out there. Sometimes having too many friends can feel like a job and no one gets what they need, but a small moment can mean the difference between a good day and a bad day.

The most important thing is not to worry. Friendships come and go. You can make new friends and reinvigorate old friendships whenever you choose. But it’s not a numbers game. To think like that is just another way to punish yourself – and we already do enough of that.

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Does our reader have the right to feel so detached? Please share your views in the comments below