The Friendship Blueprint for Our Thirties and Beyond

How do we reweave social fabric when life has unraveled the threads?

Photo by Ben Duchac on Unsplash.

Friendships are a fickle thing to maintain.

Like plants, they take a particular type of care. They require a specific blend of time, space, energy, love, and intentional effort to see them flourish. But oddly enough, people are both uniquely gifted to provide friendship and simultaneously terrible at it. Case-in-point…all the moments you cherish the most and the greatest wounds you’ve ever known all stem from other people.

And as we get older, maintaining those friendships gets harder…as we are all finding out.

In our twenties, friendships feel like they come easy. In college or early adulthood, proximity and shared circumstance do a lot of the heavy lifting — dorm rooms, shared projects, group hangouts, and late-night chats create a relational glue that’s hard to replicate. Post-college, you’re often in a new city, building community through coworkers or hobby groups, still finding friends at weddings or birthday parties or friend-of-a-friend barbecues. There’s a rhythm and flow to it that just…works.

But in your thirties and beyond, the math changes.