Friendship at midlife is hard

Thinking about my empty nest relationships and an opportunity to spend a weekend together talking about friendship.

I Facetimed my daughter at quitting time on Friday and when she didn’t answer, I sat at my desk laughing at something I’d just done. So I was happy when she Facetimed me back a minute later to have someone to confess to about what a maniac I’ve become.

“What’s up,” she said, her face close up to the camera, so I got just as close and said, “I have got to stop obsessing about the Thai place. I just called them again.”

“Oh god, now what?” she asked.

I tried to stop laughing to tell her that I had just called the local Thai place to see if they were open for dinner that night, even though I’d gotten takeout from there the weekend before and it feels like I am always calling to see if they’re open.

“It was the guy with THE VOICE,” I told her. “Remember that voice?”

Since I moved here 18 months ago, it has become my mission to order from this Thai restaurant about a mile away that never seems to be open. Whenever one of the kids is coming home for the weekend, we say, “Let’s get Thai takeout,” and when we call, the phone just rings and rings. This has happened at least 10 times.

Last summer, we actually ate at the restaurant in person. It was me, my sister, and two of the kids and my daughter was admiring the guy running around taking orders and seating people. He was kind of a strapping tattooed man who I assumed was Thai with the deepest voice you’ve ever heard. It almost sounds make-believe, like someone pretending to sound like Darth Vader. We were like, “Whoa, that’s kinda sexy.”

The food was terrific and since then, I have thought about the pad thai and been unable to order it. The place always seems to be closed. Friday nights. Saturday nights. Winter. Summer. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for when the place is open. We always end up ordering something subpar on Seamless. Usually pizza.

Last week, my youngest was coming home from college for the weekend and he asked if we could get Thai. He also asked if I wanted to go hiking and walk around Barnes and Noble, and I was like, “Are you catfishing me?”

I mean, I know that’s not exactly what catfishing means. But my son was kind of dangling all the things I love to do and he has been known to then renege on these types of offers. All of a sudden, he’s sorry he said he’d do the thing you want to do but actually, he’s going to a friend’s to play poker. Like, he acts like the best boyfriend and then disappears.

I tried to explain my “catfishing” rationale to my daughter, and she was like, “That is absolutely not what that means.”

Anyway, in preparation for his arrival home on Friday night, I started calling the restaurant and quickly realized it was akin to trying to call Telecharge to get Bruce Springsteen tickets back in the day. I had to keep pressing redial on the iPhone. Finally, THE VOICE answered and then seemingly put me down on the counter as he answered other lines and told people (presumably) standing in front of him that the wait was over 30 minutes. I listened for five minutes until it became clear THE VOICE had forgotten about me, so I hung up and called back and was giddy when he began to take my order, only after telling me it would be an hour until I could pick up. “No problem,” I told him, elated just to have gotten through. Like getting tickets for the Born in the USA tour in the very last row at Giant’s Stadium.

We swung by and picked up our order and came home and piled our plates with Pad Thai and Drunken Noodles and started binging something on Netflix and I was thrilled that my meal lived up to my imaginary hype.

So much so that when a friend asked where I wanted to go to dinner this Friday night, I was like “How about Thai?” That’s when I called and got THE VOICE who confirmed they were open FOR THE SECOND FRIDAY IN A ROW and called my daughter to confess this obsession

At the restaurant, my friend and I ended up having to sit on a bench in the tiny vestibule for maybe 30 minutes while all the other people crowded in there with us were seated. But neither of us cared and happily chatted while we waited for THE VOICE to seat us.

She and I have known each other since she was an unmarried young woman in her 20s and I was in my early 30s with three little kids and trying to also be a freelance news reporter. Not a natural combination. All these many years later, we are now both in our 50s and while still at slightly different stages, each with a lot more life tucked under her belt.

Lately, we’ve talked a lot about friendship, something we’ve both been struggling with, maybe for both the same and different reasons. For me, in my third year as an empty nester, I am becoming more aware of just how bad I’ve been about nurturing relationships. And that it’s not a recent phenomenon.

And this is really what I wanted to say.

I’ve fallen down a lot of Substack holes about friendship recently, and one question has jumped out at me: if you had an emergency in the middle of the night, are there five people — to whom you are not related — that you could call?

For me: no.

I don’t think I realized any of this was happening until my therapist began pointing it out to me. She’s been trying to draw my attention to the things that would make my life more full. “Don’t hide your light under a bushel,” she tells me, and I can really feel that ache for those types of relationships in my life. I can feel how much I crave those connections.

Yet I do nothing about it.

When that friend asked me if I wanted to do an early dinner on Friday, my very first instinct was to say no and stay home and read my romantasy faerie book and eat dinner watching something on TV.

In the end, of course I’m glad I went. The restaurant was so loud that my throat felt strained from trying to shout across the table throughout dinner. Two couples were sitting at a table pushed very close to ours and one of the men also had a distinctive VOICE, but more like a braying donkey than our sexy tattooed man.

As we were paying, I joked that I talked so much that I wouldn’t have to talk at all the next day and as I was going to bed last night, realized that — aside from my dog — I’d talked to no one else all day. Instead, I stayed home the entire day and read a book (from beginning to end) and went for two long dog walks.

One step forward, two steps back?

So, I am thinking a lot about friendship, especially at this stage of my life when I finally have the bandwidth, as we say in Corporate America, for relationships with people I did not give birth to. And I am really starting to get that that means I have to reach out to other people. I don’t do that because A: I am inherently lazy and B: I have no time management skills and forget to do these things in advance.

For so long, I could avoid that lonely feeling by crawling under the blanket of my four children. They kept me busy for many years. And then they became my social life in many ways, especially when everyone came home during the pandemic. And then I got sober and just couldn’t deal with dinners out and all those glasses of wine that I couldn’t drink. And then I started my actual career in marketing and that took all of my energy. My sole focus was figuring out how to navigate that new world, like getting dropped in the middle of China without a cell phone.

I ate Pad Thai leftovers while watching TV last night and that was fine but I have to stop doing that. I have to get out of my comfort zone and connect with other people.

Ack, why is life so hard? Why can’t Thai restaurants be open whenever you need them and friends don’t just line up outside my door asking me to come out to play?

According to the internet, awareness is the first step toward change, followed by acceptance. Good. Fine. I’m there. My therapist always says that we usually don’t change until things become so painful that we can’t stand it anymore. When there seems to be no other alternative.

I am going to find my five people.

My current best friend who’s also super bossy.

sunday shares:

I’m a saucy gal. Guys, I need a something on everything I eat. A sauce of some sort. Or maybe it’s just condiments in general? I don’t know. But I made lettuce cups when my son was home and whipped up a peanut sauce, which I have been slathering on everything since then because I have so much left over. Not sure how long it keeps in the frig but I am someone who recently ate toasted moldy bread with cottage cheese on top (I didn’t realize it had gotten moldy until I looked at the bag of remaining slices and saw the bottom was completely covered in fuzz), so I’m a terrible person to ask.

A (platonic) love story. I know you want to know what book I read in one sitting. It’s funny and sad

Catherine Newman

novel, We All Want Impossible Things. She’s a writer I have long admired and weirdly, I just found her on Substack. And then in my Substack friendship hole yesterday morning, her book — about a 42-year friendship between two women — was referenced and I was like, “Oh, I have that on my nightstand.” I started reading around lunchtime and finished in my darkened TV room before heating up my pad thai for dinner. I will read anything she writes.

Now what? Since the start of the year, I have read all five books in the ACOTAR series, which the internet says is just under 3,000 pages. UGH and the last book! Nesta and Cassian forever. I have fully embraced that this is where I am in my reading life. But now what? There is an absolute hole in my day-to-day without all those characters going to war or getting spicy with each other. I downloaded the first Crescent City (Sarah J. Maas’s newest series), but after a few thousand pages completely immersed in one world, it’s hard to go back to the very beginning of a whole new world. I’ll keep you posted.

Thoughts on friendship. Do you know the writer

Anne Helen Petersen

and her Culture Study newsletter on Substack? This is the one time in my life I have found the opportunity to say iykyk about Petersen, who is internet famous for her writing and popular Substack. This post she recently wrote on platonic vs. romantic relationships, and reimagining life with friendship at its core, weirdly hit on everything my friend and I talked about eating Thai food the other night.

Oh, and here is the post on friendship that referenced the five friends and how this writer went about finding her people. I’m grateful to Shannon Watts’s

Playing with Fire

for the inspiration.

Join me this spring for an intimate beach retreat weekend in Stone Harbor, NJ.

Let’s be friends. All of this talk about friendships and connecting makes me wonder whether any of you are feeling the same way. In fact, let’s take it one step further and spend the weekend together talking about it. This spring, I am hosting an intimate beach retreat for a few of us to slip away to a gorgeous home in Stone Harbor, NJ for a weekend of yoga, beach walks, delicious food and lots of conversation about friendships at midlife. Interested? You can send me an email or let me know in the comments below. I’ll send out an official email with all the details, including price and what to expect, and how you can sign up to be part of my beta Midlifer getaway group. It’s April 19-21 so check your calendars. This will be fun.

See you next Sunday. xoAmy