Friendships at 40 look a lot different than friendships at 10, 20, and 30. At this age you may make plans, you break plans, you may self deprecate, over complicate and even put your family first before your own wants and needs and it’s just hard. I’m the kind of person who wants to sit down and have a deep conversation but I want my space too. I’m a true believer in things happening for a reason and a few weeks ago I had a humbling moment. I assumed I was a part of something I most certainly was not and became extremely emotional bringing everyone down.
For a long time I’ve overcomplicated my thinking, played devils advocate and often wondered how I could be my better self. After a few weeks of soul searching I just got to the point where I realized it’s all about acceptance. I needed to appreciate me for who I am and only add the people into my life that reciprocate that. I also needed to start loving myself. I think that when we realize that we become more vulnerable it’s usually because we aren’t confident in the human being we are. Thinking about what I just wrote makes me gasp in disbelief.
We live in a society of “self love” falseness. I think we want to love ourselves for who we are, but we are actually in love with the thought of that. What I mean is in the touch of a button we can tap into our insta stories and see someone we want to be. We keep scrolling and find a makeup trend, scroll deeper and we see a mom on a yacht vacation having a glass of sangria. What ends up happening? We want to become someone else. We want to replicate something we see. We want something that we can’t have and boom…comparison has killed our own personal joy.
I know this sounds like I’ve gone a little off topic but stay with me. If we spend two hours a day scrolling through insta stories, Facebook and Tik Tok, that’s two hours we could of spent actually doing something we loved without finding something or someone to compare ourself to. If you find yourself scrolling across what your friends, their friends or acquaintances are doing and see something you aren’t a part of, you become disappointed.
Age holds no limits in the feeling of being excluded. That is what makes friendship so different at various ages. The friends I have now are a much smaller group than I had at 17.
Because at 40 you realize you don’t need a lot of friends, you just need two good ones to call when you need a pick me up or a good cry. At 17 I needed the multiple friends I had for self actualization. Long story short few friends are better than fake friends and sometimes you have to go through some tests to find the true ones. I literally have four of those in my life right now. We don’t call each-other every day but when we do get together it’s like there was no time in between. We pick up where we left off.
Weeding out the for-life friends and the fly-by friends isn’t always easy. If anything, pulling those weeds are painful but the growth that shows when the entangled weeds are gone is far greater. Don’t be afraid to find your people by speaking your truth. Those friends won’t get offended they will listen.
Loraine Griffiths is a fifth-generation Hammontonian, graphic designer, wife and mother of three. She can be reached through email at LifeWithLoraine@gmail.com.