One woman’s quest to find friends at 40

After marriage, kids and a career, Cari Shane Parven was still missing something: girlfriends. In this essay titled "Finding Friends at Forty" from the book "Knowing Pains," she writes about her quest for companionship.

Finding Friendship at Forty
I spent my childhood surrounded by estrogen: my mother, my dog, my teachers, and the 42 female classmates with whom I spent first through twelfth grade. There was a little testosterone, floating in the puddles of urine — my brother’s pee — that I stepped in (in the bathroom) every morning before school, and in the rings of my father’s pipe smoke wafting through our New York City apartment. Other than that, the first half of my life was all about women.

Yet two decades later, as I slid toward 40, excited to celebrate this brand new segment of my life, I found I had no female friends, good friends, to cheer me on. I was happily anticipating turning 40 because it was going to be my decade. Whereas the 20s had been about creating my family — finding my husband, marrying him, and having kids — and the 30s were about staying home to raise those kids, the 40s were going to be about me. 

But I was alone. Friendless. I stood in my house considering my life, conjuring up the images of all the women I had known, counting up the years we’d been together, then counting up the years we hadn’t been together and then wondering what had happened. Up until that moment I had not seen my lack of good friends as a problem. But as 40 approached — “half way to 80,” I would say — I found myself searching for that elusive something that I wasn’t getting from my husband and children. Instinctively, I knew what was missing — friendship. I even knew where to find it. The problem was that I didn’t have it.

So, why didn’t I have friends? I mean I’m no ogre. I love people, I love meeting people, and I actually make friends quite easily. I love the Barbara Streisand song, “People,” and I don’t find it one bit embarrassing to admit that I even have part of the lyrics, “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world” emblazoned on my high school yearbook senior page. My husband likes to say of me, “she could make a friend in a phone booth.” 

Yet there’s a line between friend and good friend or best friend, and I’d failed at “good” and “best.”  I never learned how to take friendship up a notch. I lacked follow through, and thus I lost all — if not most — of my friends. Friendship, you see, is an investment of time and self —  I hadn’t known that. It took me four decades to find that out.

As a child I went to a small school; I had the same group of girlfriends for twelve years.  There wasn’t much work involved in maintaining friendships then. It didn’t take a lot of effort to stay in touch, to see each other and hang out. My best friends and I saw each other everyday at school and, growing up in Manhattan, if I wanted to see them after school or on the weekends, all I had to do was walk a few blocks from my apartment to theirs. It was easy. 

When I went away to a small college, I made new friends. Again, it was easy. I had loads of female acquaintances, but now most of my good friends were men. Having grown up in an all-girl environment, I think I was hungry for male companionship. But male friendship doesn’t generally work out in the long run. Remember what Harry said, in When Harry Met Sally: Men and women can never really be just friends because sex always gets in the way. I actually understand what he meant. Some of my male friends had unrequited crushes on me; others I had unrequited crushes on. One by one, my male friends lost their hearts and attention to their girlfriends. I had invested so much time in my male friendships that by the time I graduated from college I hadn’t found that female pal I hoped I’d have forever. 

I hardly noticed at the time because I still had the truest friends a girl could ever want: my childhood friends. We were all back in the city, a pre-Sex and the City bunch, meeting for brunch on Sundays, and in bars and restaurants during the week. It lasted for years until we scattered like the wind starting our careers and families. With no Internet to help us keep in touch, we used snail mail and phone conversations. I wasn’t one for the telephone, and eventually found that the calls dwindled until they were few and far between. But again, I hardly noticed because I was falling head over heels for my future husband. He filled the void left by my childhood friends and so I didn’t realize that I’d let my best friends in the world slip away. I sailed through my 20s energized by the love and affection of my dream guy. 

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