Making new friends after 50 !

My dog walk ponder this morning came about after a number of conversations with brilliant bright, sparky, beautiful souled, creative, wise and intelligent women, midlife women who are lonely. They do busy jobs, have busy family responsibilities, are very occupied with the busy, busy, but fundamentally deep down when it comes to social relationships and having a collective of people that understand them and get where they're coming from, they are lonely.

This conversation has happened often enough and with enough people to make me wonder out loud, if this is a thing.

How do you make friends as a midlife woman? Where do you make friends? Once those natural more routine opportunities to make friends have gone? And what I mean by that is school, college, university, first jobs, having babies etc.

Then where do you go to meet like minded people? How do you make friends when you are past 50 ?

One of the most recent experiences I've got of making a new friend was when I went on a course a course full of like-minded souls, many with similar values. A room full of new potential friends. One of the bright, sparky, beautiful souled and funny ones caught my attention and I wondered how I might get to know her more. In one of our first conversations though, she told me that she wasn’t there to make friends, wasn’t interested in having any more friends, didn’t need them. We did go on to become close friends but it took a while and I still wind her up now about our initial conversation !

Are we are we full up? Is there a perception that we've got enough friends? Do we just not have the time and energy to invest in any more?

I have said and done it myself. Met interesting people, kept my distance, thinking that I just don’t have the time, energy and bandwidth to make new friends. It’s just too exhausting to figure it all out.

Another recent ish new friend, was someone I met on a course, online, and contacted a few weeks later to find out if her Mum who had been ill during the course, was ok. A simple gesture, something that took no more than a few minutes, but led to a conversation, and then another, and another, until a few years on, we still have never met in real life but she is one of my favourite people, we have a real soul deep relationship, one we can talk, ask and ponder almost anything, without fear, favour or agenda.

Some people talk about the fact that making new friends is hard because they find other women competitive, jealous and spiteful and that this can make it feel difficult. Maybe it's just the energy. The energy required to sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of meeting people and then having the energy to turn random acquaintances into friends, into people to confide into people to share thoughts with people to build possibilities with. It takes time and energy and investment to make those friendships.

Maybe the other thing that goes on is that perception of what is a friendship? Is it ok to have friends for moments, reasons or seasons or is it only worth investing in friendships for a lifetime?

So you might meet a women on a course or in work that really sparks off you and you both enjoy the company but it's a connection that is fit for the purpose that you're both involved in but maybe has no other purpose than that. It might be that there are other friends that you just meet at the gym or yoga and have a quick chat with. They're never going to be anything more than that kind of friends. Then you have your ride or die friends. The friends that would help you move, and help you bury the body. No questions asked. The friend you could call at three o'clock in the morning to cry down the phone with and the friends that you've had all your life even if in some cases, if you met them today, they wouldn't necessarily be friends. But you've got that shared history. Being at school together, meeting at University, having babies at the same time, starting your first jobs together and all that shared life stuff.

So my parting question is this to you midlife sparky, bright, intelligent, thoughtful women.

Where you go to meet and make new friends after 50?