Yes about the friends thing. And I do believe it has to do with age. As Bonnie Raitt sings, "Time gets kind of precious when there's less of it to waste." Only the friendships with the most juice make the cut--as cold as that may sound.
This resonated with me hard. I turned 60 last year, and I just started losing friends. One moved and never spoke to me again. My best friend of 24 years took her boyfriend's side in a dispute that was clearly his fault. Another friend considered me a fake friend because I asked for a favor, despite my constant worry that he was dying in the hospital and no one would ever know.
But I am done with that. Like you, I don't have the stomach for it anymore, and I too believe it's age that took all my fucks away.
But I'm finding that the new friends I make are gentler, kinder, more fun, more understanding, and smarter.
I hope that happens to you.
I love your writing and how you wove your story into a review. (I'm not finished watching it, but I've seen the original version.) Thanks for sharing this.
Thank you! I’m four down this year and only one by choice. But an old friend came back into my life and is worth all of those combined. Life is funny that way.
I lost two mature women friends to Rx drugs; one to the hallucinations of Ambien (a vicious 6 page letter full of astounding fictions -other people?- arrived out of the blue). The other to the profound attitude changes due to pain killers for a very bad neck (I had a major surgery three years ago and even at half doses, I could feel the meanness creep into me. Full stop!)
Even when one knows the mechanisms, it’s still so sad and painful. I wish them well, but don’t feel safe to resume anything.
It’s hard to seek out occasions to make new friends; I feel like a stalker with an agenda…
Love your free associations here and I feel nostalgic for the Village Voice and I also don't want to go back to those days and I also don't want to live these days yet I still want to live and so it's confusing...
My adult daughter is high functioning autistic, struggles to read the room and struggles to know what other people need and want, like you mention you do. She’s in her mid twenties and it really impacts her life and I’m not sure how to respond/help or if I can at all. Is this something that can be learned or taught I wonder, or is it more “it is what it is” and we all need to learn to accept it? I don’t have good hair or a cashmere scarf lol but like Richard I don’t struggle with this issue and wonder what if anything to say or do when she complains about having no close friends. No woman in her twenties wants her only friend to be her middle aged mother. Friendship is not innate I’m learning.
With youth today it's not just neurodivergent kids/young adults, it's many others too. They lack social drive, desire, and ability. Between the tech overload and the pandemic, perhaps it makes sense? And so they buddy around with family.
Yes, she’s in a special support program for college students on the spectrum at her university and did a social skills group when younger and is also a member of an amazing clubhouse for women on the spectrum here in NYC. Still no friends. She meets people and I don’t know what happens but it never lasts
A year ago I was really struggling; having to go through family artifacts and relive a very abusive childhood. But it’s done now and I am just remembering the great parts of both the persons and events.
I am so grateful for this quirk. Have I learned to finally compartmentalize?
Wow, I can feel this viscerally. I have allowed three long life gal-friends to fall away within the past four years. I got tired of these friends not having my back when I so desperately needed them. It was a lesson more about myself for always being the one to jump into the water to save them from drowning than it was for them to need saving. It took me years to develop a voice of my own, and when I found it, I simply ghosted out of their lives after the final altercations.
And like Leslie alluded, at 71, I too am done giving my "fucks away".
You want my help, you gotta ask for it. No more unsolicited advice or jumping into cold waters with all my clothes on.
Me too. It freaking hurts. Especially if the person letting-go gives no warnings, has been building up disappointments and resentments for years *without telling you*, like you're supposed to magically know they don't like _________, and basically leaps from passive aggressive to cutting old friends off. I'm seeing it in many places, not just my own painful situation with one old friend. There's a trend. There's a whole movement of Internetty self-care stuff encouraging it, too.
I really get this about one-sided friendships. I did all the driving, waiting, accommodations because they were So Important Busy. They can go on and on for years! Then one day… the truth becomes so crystal clear. That nagging feeling of being fundamentally disrespected is suddenly intolerable. Once I realized she had had sex with my husband, and was happy to believe his lies, what was left to salvage? I was just done. I never went to the hospital when she was dying. Done is done.
Perfect: "Everything in me that could have been cowering or seething had been burned out, leaving only love for how life could sometimes go and admiration for the faces swimming past me."
At 71, I see so clearly the ways I should have maintained connections and so often did not. I could have maintained a life-long deep friendship with my high-school best friend's mother, whom I adored. Why did I not? Laziness? Indifference? I can not fathom it now. I reconnected with my friend on Facebook, and was able to give her a message for her mother's 95th birthday, and her mother remembered me. But we could have loved each other like relatives for 35+ years and I did not even try. I guess that getting older means we have to come to terms with a lot of this sort of thing. Thanks for addressing this issue.
well said Janet. It seems this is an issue for us at our ages, life admin has us thinking of how we come to terms with these kinds of losses and regrets, in our own actions and those of others.
I so get this about friends. I lost touch right out of high school. I moved city. I never wanted to attend reunions. Other people I met along the way in the many places I have lived haven't stuck around after I moved. I have very few people who I keep in touch with because we both make the effort. For too long I was the only one making the effort and after a while, like you I asked myself 'what for'. It turns out many of us feel shame to say we don't have many friends. I moved to where I live now 4 years ago. It was the worst timing to start again in a brand new place as we were in lock down as soon as I moved into my house. I live on the outskirts of a small village so I know my neighbour who is older than me but is able to physically do a lot more. She goes walking with other friends but I can't so I am alone at home. I've come to accept this now.
On a different note I just finished watching Ripley last night. You have encapsulated it perfectly. I enjoyed it despite being on edge a few times. It is creepy to see how he does things without remorse. He sees getting rid of a person just like getting rid of a problem. He is so arrogant, however, that he decides to stay in Venice. I let a big 'oh no, that is crazy' at the end. Thanks for your beautiful summary of this incredible series. It is so different from the movie with Jude Law. Ripley was a charmer in that one.
It's so real this friend thing, the losing of. Sometimes I challenge myself thinking....well it's a two way street, as if I am here expecting everyone to reach out to me and I do nothing. BUt it's not like that is it. Times I have reached out and there has been silence. And that has hurt. Tied up with this for me, and harder to live and be it than they say it is...............who I am and my self worth isn't sourced in what and who is missing. Yes there will be regrets and all the self doubt stuff around our necks, but in the end, in the now, I am responsible for myself and my self esteem, not them. And the best friend is the friend I am to myself. Of course we still wonder, and have those nights where self doubt hangs on our bedroom curtains heavily...........living openly with love and understanding, and able to accept our shite.......we are okay and as we all know ...we are enough. Ripley was intense.......I remembered the blood on the stairs while he seemed to have forgotten or maybe thought he would get away with it again. Cheers Santina, accepting now is so healthy and good. Namaste
Here's the fractal message I'm hearing from this piece, and from so much of what I've read from you: "you can live... the feeling of a great experiment in freedom... a spirit of... love for things onto a whole society... [to] produce a vibration that can bend minds." I'm sorry about the heavy, brown cloud; to my mind, that's the vaporized kool-aid of cultural mishegas about relating as adults and aging that us oldsters are all gently, spontaneously rinsing out of our systems.
Thanks for your generous transparency and fortitude, wryly, playfully, shining light for us as we bumble our ways through this life project.
I'm happy to give you pleasure. I do what I do for that reason only and because it gives me pleasure. It's extremely enjoyable learning to write better. xxL
You're such a good writer; thanks for this post. "Exhaling" your "sad brown thoughts." Wow.
I wonder WTAF has happened to friendship? You're not the only one who is no longer interested in apologizing, or accepting apologies, or allowing for the sad grey humanity of others in order to keep a friendship going. I sit at the other end of that seesaw, my ass bumping the hard dirt of the playground, as one of my best and oldest friends from childhood stepped off the teeter-totter early in the pandemic.
From what I see and hear, that kind of thing is common right now. Common and sad. Some of it may be age; some may be brittleness and cruelty available to all ages, whether officially sociopathic or not.
As an unopened greeting card from my oldest friend sits on the credenza, I join you in the warm pool of resonance. After years of effort on my part and not much in response, the card feels like a passive/aggressive and somewhat feeble attempt at reclaiming what was meaningful. It may seem childish but it feels right in my heart. Thank you. ♥️
What I find so interesting about the comments on today's post is that everyone writes as the one who is letting go of people they have grown tired of. I am writing about being let go of. Of course, I've also let go of people, mainly because I lost interest in them, and I don't remember them.
Being let go of is entirely different . It leaves so many questions . It hurts . It replays frequently . What’s harder though is when a friend drifts away and just as you adjust she floats back and you think you were too sensitive /needy/too? and you renew the vigor of the friendship until she floats away again …
I think most of us have both let go of people and have been let go. Sometimes, rarely, people come back -- and that's now surprised me the most.
Last night my 97yo father and I watched episode 3 of Ripley, which was mostly Ripley and Dickie on the boat and Dickie's death. He'd never seen the 1999 movie, so I switched from Netflix to Paramount+ and we watched it up until when Ripley kills Dickie on the boat. The contrast was fascinating. Once Dickie is dead, in the movie it just moves to afterwards; the TV show goes on with Tom trying seemingly for hours to get rid of the boat and Dickie's body. Yesterday's article by Alissa Wilkinson in The Times (which told me where the film was streaming) says each version of Tom Ripley onscreen is a product of its times.
I loved The Village Voice as a teenager. I would have to take a bus from my suburban neighborhood in Brooklyn to get a copy to a subway station newsstand. It drew me to Greenwich Village and the voices I'd read in the paper were important to me. But by the mid-70s as an MFA student, I got a job at the Voice as a messenger in the display advertising department. I got the feeling that in editorial, for some of the old-timers, it was already starting to be over at the paper by then: still important but not like in the 50s, 60s and early 70s. In the end, people wanted the Voice on Wednesday morning for the real estate listings.
Thank you, Laurie, as always, for making me think with "Notes On Another New Life." It is something I look forward to reading.
Well, I was just a messenger and worked at the University Place office only from 1974-75. The good thing that made being a messenger rather than an editorial employee was that everyone knew not to shoot you.
And that is an important difference. It's like my life of never being head hunted for jobs your very being and skillset make you perfect for. You see your own value and slipstream alone it seems. So with the friend thing......the decision/s that let you go, the precious good friend you......they hurt. being let go, cast adrift.
Great piece, Laurie. You are far from alone. I have a wonderful set of friends, both old and new. But I also have the relationships that I've left behind, that became unhealthy or were toxic from the start. Either way, I have no desire to return. I used to love smoking. I also have no desire to smoke again. Our bodies and our spirits know instinctively what we need as we grow. Our minds are what get in the way. Cheers to your new life!
Is friendship both a blessing and a curse? I recognise true, deep friendship, the frequent, (or rare) get-togethers that leave me feeling good after the encounter.
How many friends do we need though? How many friends can we cope with? Friendship has to be reciprocal, so there's a lot of 'giving' involved in maintaining a friendship. And it can be tiring maintaining friendships, especially via social media.
I recognise the brown cloud that lingers when the responding ends and the guilt envelopes me in the letting go. Alas, I have recognised that I just cannot cope any longer with too much 'giving'.
I feel truly grateful that I still have close and satisfying relationships with my childhood friends. There only a few. We don't see each other as much but I know they are a phone-call away. I can't imagine life without them! However, as I age I understand that there must be reciprocity in relationships for them to survive and the ones that aren't reciprocal are the ones that will fade away.
I love this one so much, L, especially tying in Ridley, which I adored, and losing friends, and the Voice, and the decision not to make things right, at least for the moment, and Richard anchoring the whole thing. This is tight writing with expansive scope. Brava, kid, brava. XXD
Yes about the friends thing. And I do believe it has to do with age. As Bonnie Raitt sings, "Time gets kind of precious when there's less of it to waste." Only the friendships with the most juice make the cut--as cold as that may sound.
Does not sound cold at all.it is real ! So true no time left to waste 🙏
This resonated with me hard. I turned 60 last year, and I just started losing friends. One moved and never spoke to me again. My best friend of 24 years took her boyfriend's side in a dispute that was clearly his fault. Another friend considered me a fake friend because I asked for a favor, despite my constant worry that he was dying in the hospital and no one would ever know.
But I am done with that. Like you, I don't have the stomach for it anymore, and I too believe it's age that took all my fucks away.
But I'm finding that the new friends I make are gentler, kinder, more fun, more understanding, and smarter.
I hope that happens to you.
I love your writing and how you wove your story into a review. (I'm not finished watching it, but I've seen the original version.) Thanks for sharing this.
I'm sorry you had to go through that with your friends. It seems to be a sign of the times. And it can be very painful.
Thank you! I’m four down this year and only one by choice. But an old friend came back into my life and is worth all of those combined. Life is funny that way.
Yes, I know exactly what you mean!
I lost two mature women friends to Rx drugs; one to the hallucinations of Ambien (a vicious 6 page letter full of astounding fictions -other people?- arrived out of the blue). The other to the profound attitude changes due to pain killers for a very bad neck (I had a major surgery three years ago and even at half doses, I could feel the meanness creep into me. Full stop!)
Even when one knows the mechanisms, it’s still so sad and painful. I wish them well, but don’t feel safe to resume anything.
It’s hard to seek out occasions to make new friends; I feel like a stalker with an agenda…
Stalk on. Wishing you well. --Laurie
Ha ha thanks! I’m picturing a stalk of broccoli peeking around a corner with a hopeful smile and treats.
Love your free associations here and I feel nostalgic for the Village Voice and I also don't want to go back to those days and I also don't want to live these days yet I still want to live and so it's confusing...
You've made that quite clear. xxL
My adult daughter is high functioning autistic, struggles to read the room and struggles to know what other people need and want, like you mention you do. She’s in her mid twenties and it really impacts her life and I’m not sure how to respond/help or if I can at all. Is this something that can be learned or taught I wonder, or is it more “it is what it is” and we all need to learn to accept it? I don’t have good hair or a cashmere scarf lol but like Richard I don’t struggle with this issue and wonder what if anything to say or do when she complains about having no close friends. No woman in her twenties wants her only friend to be her middle aged mother. Friendship is not innate I’m learning.
With youth today it's not just neurodivergent kids/young adults, it's many others too. They lack social drive, desire, and ability. Between the tech overload and the pandemic, perhaps it makes sense? And so they buddy around with family.
Does she have an autistic community to connect with? To help end the social isolation?
Yes, she’s in a special support program for college students on the spectrum at her university and did a social skills group when younger and is also a member of an amazing clubhouse for women on the spectrum here in NYC. Still no friends. She meets people and I don’t know what happens but it never lasts
That sounds very hard.
The gloom and heartbreak of losing and letting go friends - I relate hard and deep and I hope you will write more about that. I need to understand.
I don't remember the people I have left, only the ones who have left me. xxL
The brain cleans house.
A year ago I was really struggling; having to go through family artifacts and relive a very abusive childhood. But it’s done now and I am just remembering the great parts of both the persons and events.
I am so grateful for this quirk. Have I learned to finally compartmentalize?
Does anyone just ‘age out’ of PTSD?
❤️
Wow, I can feel this viscerally. I have allowed three long life gal-friends to fall away within the past four years. I got tired of these friends not having my back when I so desperately needed them. It was a lesson more about myself for always being the one to jump into the water to save them from drowning than it was for them to need saving. It took me years to develop a voice of my own, and when I found it, I simply ghosted out of their lives after the final altercations.
And like Leslie alluded, at 71, I too am done giving my "fucks away".
You want my help, you gotta ask for it. No more unsolicited advice or jumping into cold waters with all my clothes on.
I am the one let go of, not the other way around. xxL
Me too. It freaking hurts. Especially if the person letting-go gives no warnings, has been building up disappointments and resentments for years *without telling you*, like you're supposed to magically know they don't like _________, and basically leaps from passive aggressive to cutting old friends off. I'm seeing it in many places, not just my own painful situation with one old friend. There's a trend. There's a whole movement of Internetty self-care stuff encouraging it, too.
You are right about the internet! Interracial friendships were in for particular contempt about 4 years ago. Discouraging
I really get this about one-sided friendships. I did all the driving, waiting, accommodations because they were So Important Busy. They can go on and on for years! Then one day… the truth becomes so crystal clear. That nagging feeling of being fundamentally disrespected is suddenly intolerable. Once I realized she had had sex with my husband, and was happy to believe his lies, what was left to salvage? I was just done. I never went to the hospital when she was dying. Done is done.
Perfect: "Everything in me that could have been cowering or seething had been burned out, leaving only love for how life could sometimes go and admiration for the faces swimming past me."
At 71, I see so clearly the ways I should have maintained connections and so often did not. I could have maintained a life-long deep friendship with my high-school best friend's mother, whom I adored. Why did I not? Laziness? Indifference? I can not fathom it now. I reconnected with my friend on Facebook, and was able to give her a message for her mother's 95th birthday, and her mother remembered me. But we could have loved each other like relatives for 35+ years and I did not even try. I guess that getting older means we have to come to terms with a lot of this sort of thing. Thanks for addressing this issue.
well said Janet. It seems this is an issue for us at our ages, life admin has us thinking of how we come to terms with these kinds of losses and regrets, in our own actions and those of others.
"Standing near him, it’s like having an external hard drive." Great line!
You know exactly what I mean. xxL
I call my spouse my assistive living device.
I loved that line too!
I so get this about friends. I lost touch right out of high school. I moved city. I never wanted to attend reunions. Other people I met along the way in the many places I have lived haven't stuck around after I moved. I have very few people who I keep in touch with because we both make the effort. For too long I was the only one making the effort and after a while, like you I asked myself 'what for'. It turns out many of us feel shame to say we don't have many friends. I moved to where I live now 4 years ago. It was the worst timing to start again in a brand new place as we were in lock down as soon as I moved into my house. I live on the outskirts of a small village so I know my neighbour who is older than me but is able to physically do a lot more. She goes walking with other friends but I can't so I am alone at home. I've come to accept this now.
On a different note I just finished watching Ripley last night. You have encapsulated it perfectly. I enjoyed it despite being on edge a few times. It is creepy to see how he does things without remorse. He sees getting rid of a person just like getting rid of a problem. He is so arrogant, however, that he decides to stay in Venice. I let a big 'oh no, that is crazy' at the end. Thanks for your beautiful summary of this incredible series. It is so different from the movie with Jude Law. Ripley was a charmer in that one.
It's so real this friend thing, the losing of. Sometimes I challenge myself thinking....well it's a two way street, as if I am here expecting everyone to reach out to me and I do nothing. BUt it's not like that is it. Times I have reached out and there has been silence. And that has hurt. Tied up with this for me, and harder to live and be it than they say it is...............who I am and my self worth isn't sourced in what and who is missing. Yes there will be regrets and all the self doubt stuff around our necks, but in the end, in the now, I am responsible for myself and my self esteem, not them. And the best friend is the friend I am to myself. Of course we still wonder, and have those nights where self doubt hangs on our bedroom curtains heavily...........living openly with love and understanding, and able to accept our shite.......we are okay and as we all know ...we are enough. Ripley was intense.......I remembered the blood on the stairs while he seemed to have forgotten or maybe thought he would get away with it again. Cheers Santina, accepting now is so healthy and good. Namaste
Here's the fractal message I'm hearing from this piece, and from so much of what I've read from you: "you can live... the feeling of a great experiment in freedom... a spirit of... love for things onto a whole society... [to] produce a vibration that can bend minds." I'm sorry about the heavy, brown cloud; to my mind, that's the vaporized kool-aid of cultural mishegas about relating as adults and aging that us oldsters are all gently, spontaneously rinsing out of our systems.
Thanks for your generous transparency and fortitude, wryly, playfully, shining light for us as we bumble our ways through this life project.
I'm happy to give you pleasure. I do what I do for that reason only and because it gives me pleasure. It's extremely enjoyable learning to write better. xxL
You're such a good writer; thanks for this post. "Exhaling" your "sad brown thoughts." Wow.
I wonder WTAF has happened to friendship? You're not the only one who is no longer interested in apologizing, or accepting apologies, or allowing for the sad grey humanity of others in order to keep a friendship going. I sit at the other end of that seesaw, my ass bumping the hard dirt of the playground, as one of my best and oldest friends from childhood stepped off the teeter-totter early in the pandemic.
From what I see and hear, that kind of thing is common right now. Common and sad. Some of it may be age; some may be brittleness and cruelty available to all ages, whether officially sociopathic or not.
As an unopened greeting card from my oldest friend sits on the credenza, I join you in the warm pool of resonance. After years of effort on my part and not much in response, the card feels like a passive/aggressive and somewhat feeble attempt at reclaiming what was meaningful. It may seem childish but it feels right in my heart. Thank you. ♥️
What I find so interesting about the comments on today's post is that everyone writes as the one who is letting go of people they have grown tired of. I am writing about being let go of. Of course, I've also let go of people, mainly because I lost interest in them, and I don't remember them.
Being let go of is entirely different . It leaves so many questions . It hurts . It replays frequently . What’s harder though is when a friend drifts away and just as you adjust she floats back and you think you were too sensitive /needy/too? and you renew the vigor of the friendship until she floats away again …
Yes.
I think most of us have both let go of people and have been let go. Sometimes, rarely, people come back -- and that's now surprised me the most.
Last night my 97yo father and I watched episode 3 of Ripley, which was mostly Ripley and Dickie on the boat and Dickie's death. He'd never seen the 1999 movie, so I switched from Netflix to Paramount+ and we watched it up until when Ripley kills Dickie on the boat. The contrast was fascinating. Once Dickie is dead, in the movie it just moves to afterwards; the TV show goes on with Tom trying seemingly for hours to get rid of the boat and Dickie's body. Yesterday's article by Alissa Wilkinson in The Times (which told me where the film was streaming) says each version of Tom Ripley onscreen is a product of its times.
I loved The Village Voice as a teenager. I would have to take a bus from my suburban neighborhood in Brooklyn to get a copy to a subway station newsstand. It drew me to Greenwich Village and the voices I'd read in the paper were important to me. But by the mid-70s as an MFA student, I got a job at the Voice as a messenger in the display advertising department. I got the feeling that in editorial, for some of the old-timers, it was already starting to be over at the paper by then: still important but not like in the 50s, 60s and early 70s. In the end, people wanted the Voice on Wednesday morning for the real estate listings.
Thank you, Laurie, as always, for making me think with "Notes On Another New Life." It is something I look forward to reading.
The old farts who thought paper was over were men. And good riddance.
Well, I was just a messenger and worked at the University Place office only from 1974-75. The good thing that made being a messenger rather than an editorial employee was that everyone knew not to shoot you.
And that is an important difference. It's like my life of never being head hunted for jobs your very being and skillset make you perfect for. You see your own value and slipstream alone it seems. So with the friend thing......the decision/s that let you go, the precious good friend you......they hurt. being let go, cast adrift.
Sometimes people have already let go of us in their head and are just going through the motions until we do the dirty deed. And vice versa.
Is it harder to say “we need to talk about this relationship” as friends than lovers?
In some cultures, like 80s LA, everything felt so transactional, use and bd used was normalized. Couldn’t wait to get out.
Great piece, Laurie. You are far from alone. I have a wonderful set of friends, both old and new. But I also have the relationships that I've left behind, that became unhealthy or were toxic from the start. Either way, I have no desire to return. I used to love smoking. I also have no desire to smoke again. Our bodies and our spirits know instinctively what we need as we grow. Our minds are what get in the way. Cheers to your new life!
Is friendship both a blessing and a curse? I recognise true, deep friendship, the frequent, (or rare) get-togethers that leave me feeling good after the encounter.
How many friends do we need though? How many friends can we cope with? Friendship has to be reciprocal, so there's a lot of 'giving' involved in maintaining a friendship. And it can be tiring maintaining friendships, especially via social media.
I recognise the brown cloud that lingers when the responding ends and the guilt envelopes me in the letting go. Alas, I have recognised that I just cannot cope any longer with too much 'giving'.
I feel truly grateful that I still have close and satisfying relationships with my childhood friends. There only a few. We don't see each other as much but I know they are a phone-call away. I can't imagine life without them! However, as I age I understand that there must be reciprocity in relationships for them to survive and the ones that aren't reciprocal are the ones that will fade away.
The parallels to marriage are many. Each side gives 100%
Yes, not always at the exact same time but in the end it is equal.
I love this one so much, L, especially tying in Ridley, which I adored, and losing friends, and the Voice, and the decision not to make things right, at least for the moment, and Richard anchoring the whole thing. This is tight writing with expansive scope. Brava, kid, brava. XXD
Thanks, love. Did I send you a link to the Saturday Zoom? You understand perfectly what I'm aiming for. xxL
Yes, you did. I haven’t responded as I may have to work, but I’ll try to make it. I want to!
You don't need to respond. You are always welcome. xxL