The struggle of settling into your late 20s in the 2020s
It’s a meme and a cliche at this point — trying to see your friends as an adult means painstakingly scheduling a time on your work calendars just for one of you to inevitably cancel. In my case, most of my closest friends live hundreds if not thousands of miles away. So we don’t even pretend to make plans, because we can’t.
Nobody tells you how to make friends as an adult. It’s not like I actually need a higher number of them — but there’s something about being so far apart in space. The inability to swing by their house to say hi or plan a last-minute happy hour. To sit around in sweatpants and complain after a bad day. After you’ve spent years in such close proximity (in college or shortly after), it starts to feel like you’re living in completely different universes.
All of this is to say, I’ve been feeling lonely lately. Not romantically — I just got married, so that would be concerning. No, this loneliness is different. It’s what it feels like to be away from your friends.
And the tired refrain about how everyone’s been lonely during the pandemic doesn’t explain this for me. I felt less alone — or, at least, differently alone — at the height of pandemic lockdowns. Though we were all stuck in our bubbles, we were all stuck. It was an experience we all shared. Life stopped, so at least we had more time to talk. Even if talking was hard.
Now, as life returns in fits and starts, the loneliness is more distinct, noticeable. While others have parties or go to brunch on the weekends with friends they’ve met through school or work or roommates, I sit around and wonder why it’s so goddamn hard to make friends after you turn 25.
And this is all coming from an introvert. There’s the rub, really. I won’t pretend to understand the life of an extrovert, but here I go — I imagine if an extrovert wants more friends, they feel fairly comfortable putting themselves in situations in which they can make them. When an introvert wants more friends, they… well, do this, I guess. As I write this, I’m sitting at a favorite local brewery drinking a beer and writing about loneliness. Instead of, you know, talking to someone.
To be fair, I love alone time. I read, I write, I watch TV, I do yoga or just go for a walk. But alone time is easy to come by when you’re a child-free remote worker with a husband working hard to finish his graduate degree. What’s lacking in my day-to-day life is any easy way to meet new people.
A couple weeks ago, I actually did “put myself out there” by joining a remote workers social meetup (through the aptly named site, Meetup). It was perfectly enjoyable — I met a wide variety of folks and stayed for a few hours. But chatting with strangers over a few beers doesn’t cure loneliness. Only deeply caring relationships can do that.
For that reason, I am deeply thankful for the close — spatially and otherwise — friendships I do have. Last Friday, some friends who live about 30 minutes away invited us over to hang out on their porch with our dogs, drink beers (are you sensing a theme in this post?), and grill some food for dinner. In the middle of a conversation that had me laughing over and over, I found myself outside my body a bit, as if viewing the scene from above. It was a moment like in a movie, where one character looks around at their loved ones and thinks about how lucky they are. (It’s me; I’m the character.)
So, some days are lonely. But then there are these days — or, rather, nights — when my husband and my friend are in a passionate discussion about the NBA playoffs and I’m listening to an earnest conversation about the struggles of trying to get your cat outside on a leash as I take a swig of my beer with one hand and scratch my dog’s head with the other. It’s worth suffering through the bad days for just a handful of moments like this.
But, I don’t know, in the spirit of manifesting your reality or whatever, a few extra moments like this would be nice. Just for the record.
becca starkes 