The Friendships we Have Let Thin

I had a friend called Helen. I mean a specific kind of friend. The kind you see every week because you want to. The kind who knows your moods before you name them, who has seen you in most of the rooms of your life. The kind who would come if you called at two in the morning, and would expect you to come if she called.

I had three or four of those, for a long time. Now I have Helen, maybe. Maybe less than Helen, if I am honest. I see her perhaps three times a year now. We shared a flat once, years ago. I was there when her mother died. She was there when mine was first ill. Now we send a text on our birthdays. Now a Christmas card arrives with a photograph of her children that I have to study for a moment before I recognise the older one.

I did not notice this thinning while it was happening. It happened the way Hadley's closed. A postponed coffee. A meeting that did not happen that month. A decade later, I looked around, and the friendship I had thought was still there was not quite still there. It had gone quiet. I had let it go quiet.

I do not think I am unusual. Most of the men I know, of my age, have fewer real friendships than they did at thirty. A few of the women I know have held theirs better. Not all of them. Some of the women tell me the same story.

The young, I am told, have even less of this than we do. Their friendships live mostly on their phones. The loneliness numbers are the highest anyone has ever measured, and it is the young, especially young men, who are loneliest. Something is not working about how we are doing friendship now.

Friendship was one of the quiet holdings-together of the old world. Not the big relationships — marriage, family — but the ordinary ones. The people you saw at the pub. The people you played football with. The people you worked alongside for ten years and kept up with after.

These friendships did not feel like much, in their moments. You did not think about them. You just had them. They were the background of your life.

When they thin, you do not notice, because they were never supposed to be noticed. You only notice later, when something hard happens, and you look around for the people who used to be there, and find you have not called them in two years, and you are not sure you can start now.

This is a quiet loss. It is part of the larger loss the book has been describing. We have let the ordinary things thin because we were busy with the extraordinary ones. We are finding out, slowly, that the ordinary things were the ones we most needed.

The woman who runs the corner shop still remembers what I buy. Milk, a paper, sometimes a tin of the specific soup my sister likes that nobody else seems to, when she and Rosa come over. She has it ready on the counter some mornings before I have finished saying hello. I had not noticed how rare that had become until she did it again last Tuesday. I walked home thinking about it for longer than the walk took.