Trending
Have you ever noticed that the older you get, the wider the age range of your friends becomes?
I think I was in my late twenties when this first started happening in my world.
At the time, I was working at Lowe Enterprises as an administrative assistant in leasing and asset management, although I somehow found myself flanking almost every area of real estate. Well, with the exception of legal and insurance because...blah.
But that was also the culture of the office. You did your job, and when you accomplished your mission for the day, you looked over at your colleague or your superior and asked, "Is there anything I can help you out with?"
Imagine that.
The office atmosphere was on point. Every Friday, the president of the East Coast office provided breakfast from Au Bon Pain for everyone. Then, at 4 p.m., a margarita magically appeared.
Breakfast and margaritas?
Absolutely loved it there.
But looking back, that job gave me something else I didn't realize I was getting at the time. It changed the way I thought about friendship and age.
Like most offices, we occasionally went to happy hour together. We took full advantage of Restaurant Week, that glorious marketing scheme designed to convince perfectly reasonable adults that we absolutely needed a three-course meal on a Tuesday night.
But there were three of us who became actual friends.
I was 28 and sitting right in the middle.
One of the women was 21 and working on her master's degree at George Washington University to become a forensic scientist. The other was 43 and the executive assistant to the president of the company.
Years earlier, I probably would have looked at both of them and thought, "What in the world would we have in common?"
At 18, seven years feels enormous.
Fifteen years? Forget about it.
Yet there we were.
We hung out outside of work. We shared advice. We vented. We listened to one another without always feeling the need to fix whatever the other person was dealing with. We laughed. We learned from one another.
And all these years later, I am still in communication with both of them.
The funny thing is, this trend has continued throughout my life. My friends don’t neatly fit into an age bracket anymore. Some are younger than me. Some are older. Some are around my age.
And I really hadn’t thought much about why until the other day.
I was listening to a podcast when the guest mentioned how, as they got older, they felt closer in age to their parents.
My immediate reaction was basically: What? How can that possibly be?
If your mom was 29 when she had you, she is always going to be 29 years older than you. We aren’t somehow bending the laws of time here.
But then it hit me.
The number of years doesn’t change.
The ratio does.
When you’re one and your mom is 30, your ages feel like they belong in completely different universes. You are only about 3% of her age.
When you’re 30 and she’s 59, you’re now more than half her age.
When you’re 50 and she’s 79, that gap of 29 years is still sitting there, but it doesn’t feel anything like it did when you were 10 and she was 39.
And maybe that’s part of why our relationships change, too.
As we get older, the stages of life that once separated us start overlapping.
We understand responsibility differently. Loss differently. Marriage differently. Work differently. Parenting differently. Our own parents differently.
We start realizing that the adults who seemed to have everything figured out when we were younger were really just people figuring things out while we watched.
Maybe that’s also why our friendships expand.
At some point, age stops being one of the first things we use to decide whether someone is "like us."
Connection starts mattering more.
Does this person make me laugh?
Can I trust them?
Can we have a conversation that goes somewhere?
Will they tell me when I’m being ridiculous?
Can I sit across from them over coffee--or maybe a Friday afternoon margarita--and just be myself?
Suddenly, seven years isn’t a big deal. Fifteen years isn’t necessarily a big deal. Sometimes even decades aren’t a big deal.
Maybe one of the unexpected gifts of getting older is realizing how many people we once would have considered too young or too old to be part of our world actually have quite a lot to teach us.
And maybe we have something to offer them, too.
We spend so much time talking about the things we lose as we age.
Maybe we should talk a little more about what expands.
Like our perspective and understanding.
And, if we’re lucky, our circle.
Just a little food for thought, from me to you.
Apply it at will.