Forty-year friendships, making new ones in midlife, and choosing who gets your time

I’m curious: If you’re a Gen X kid, are you still close friends with the people you grew up with?

Because I am.

There was a bigger group when I was in high school. Eleven, twelve, however many guys, plus other friends in my orbit of those sprawling high-school groups. (You are probably one of them, reading this right now.)

But inside it, there was a core group.

That core group has shifted and melded and drifted apart and come back together over the years. There have been different eras in those friendships. People got closer. People got farther away. Life happened.

But fundamentally? Those are still the people I’m going to go to. Those are the people I want in my life.

We don’t live in the same places anymore. We stay in touch mostly through texts, occasionally phone calls or FaceTime. Sometimes we probably go too long without talking.

But we stick together.

At least one of these guys and I are coming up on forty years of friendship pretty soon, if we haven’t crossed it already. Forty years, man.

That is fucking awesome.

And I’ve been thinking about it because I’m watching my son, who is fifteen and going into his freshman year of high school, start making some of these connections himself.

That is something I have always wanted for him.

It was important to me that our family be close, obviously. I want him to love us and trust us, and hopefully, if we’ve done our job well, he does.

But I also wanted him to have other people he could love and trust. Maybe forever.

Is that happening right now? I don’t know. It kind of looks like it.

Obviously things have changed. Technology has changed. The way teenagers socialize has changed. Whatev. But underneath all of that, I wonder how different it really is?

There are four, five, six phone numbers in my phone right now (no longer memorized like in 1992) that I could call and say:

I need you here. Now.

And there’s a pretty good chance at least one or two of those guys would start figuring out how to get here. Maybe more. Depending on what was happening, maybe all of them.

And that is a tremendous comfort.

It’s also a tremendous joy.

There are people from that group I miss horribly, too. I really, really fucking miss them.

But friendship doesn’t survive automatically. You have to work at it.

And I’ve made new friends, too.

Our family moved a few years ago, and I now have people in my life whom I’ve known for only about four years. Are we as close as the guys I grew up with? No.

How could we be? You can’t manufacture forty years.

But can I call them? Yeah.

In fact, we have some stuff coming up on the calendar right now where we need help, and these are the people we called.

Because I love them.

Because I trust them.

They are very different people from my high-school friends, but they share some of the same qualities. Like: They show up.

And I’m discovering something very cool as I get older:

You can still make friends.

Not acquaintances. Not networking contacts. Not “people you know.”

Friends. People you are genuinely happy to give your time to.

And that phrase—give your time to—feels more important to me now than it ever has before. Because every minute counts.

I’m on the younger end of Gen X, which means plenty of people in my generation are older than I am, but at some point you start doing the math.

There aren’t infinite Saturdays. There aren’t infinite afternoons sitting around talking bullshit and laughing. There aren’t infinite phone calls.

So I have become pretty particular about how those minutes get spent.

If I’m spending them with you, I mean it.

I have a group of newer friends I get together with almost every Saturday. Sometimes it’s three hours. Sometimes four. Sometimes five.

And I realized recently: That’s intentional.

That was the word I was looking for. Intentional.

I am intentionally spending part of my finite life with these people.

And they are intentionally spending part of theirs with me.

That may be one of the great defining qualities of friendship as we get older.

It’s not necessarily about proximity, or how often you text, or if you went to the same high school.

Intentionality.

We are choosing each other.

If you can find people you can be intentional with—and who are intentional about you—I think that is what really sets a friendship into concrete.

So I’m curious: Are you still friends with the people you grew up with?

Do you have somebody in your phone you’ve known for thirty or forty years who would still answer if you called and said, I need you?

Have those friendships changed as you’ve gotten older?

And maybe just as importantly:

Have you managed to make new ones?

Because if you have, I’d really love to hear about it.