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I’d Forgotten This Part Of Friendship
And it took my newest mate to remind me
Making friends later in life (I’m only 44 — it’s just scared me to use that phrase!) can be hard.
People are in their lanes, and worse than that, thanks to social media (and a bit of in built self-defeatism) we make unhelpful assumptions:
- No-one wants to talk to me
- Everyone has loads of friends, they’re all sorted
- I’m the only one feeling a bit lonely, everyone else has perfect lives
- People would rather be left alone
- I’ll look sad and desperate if I go and start talking to people out of nowhere
Just to be clear, all 5 of those statements are categorically untrue.
And the great thing about carrying on making new friends throughout your life is that you will get new things out of those relationships.
Because that new person is only meeting you now, they don’t have assumptions, they don’t know “what you’re like” and they don’t presume how you will react to certain situations.
It happened to me this weekend.
My newest mate, who I’d met through our kids going to the same school (and a bit of Dad friend match-making by our…