Are your thirties the loneliest decade?
On Friends the show, ‘pyjama friends’ the concept, and why it’s so difficult to make close friends over the age of thirty
I have felt lonely this week.
I went to see someone who I used to be extremely close to. For many years, this person knew my whole soul, inside out and back to front to the point where I could shoot her one look that conveyed paragraphs upon paragraphs of meaning. She taught me that, at a certain level, friendship really does make you telepathic. No one has ever made me laugh as hard as she has nor inspired such fierce loyalty within me.
We are no longer close mainly because she got married and had children and I have not done those things. The distance doesn’t diminish the love. In some ways, I wish it did. It would make the situation less painful.
Instead it’s excruciating to spend time with this person I used to share a library of inside jokes, nicknames, gestures and mannerisms with and suddenly find her more of an acquaintance. To go from telling her everything to swapping small talk, inconsequential chatter that skips along the surface of a life like a stone skimming water. I hate feeling this chasm between what we used to be and what we are now. And to know it’s a natural part of growing up doesn’t make it any easier.
When I left her, I felt loneliness heavy upon me. The kind of loneliness that feels like a splinter lodged deep in your heart and makes your breathing ragged. I couldn’t hold the tears back as I caught the train home, feeling so utterly bereft and alone not only in this relationship but in everything - desolation spreads quickly - in my work, my home, my love life, my social life, this big brutal city.
I found myself missing New York. Not the city itself - I have never yearned for the Empire State Building or Brooklyn Bridge Park as I thought I would when I left two years ago. I missed my friends there. A collection of pals who knew me, made me feel loved, listened to, understood and deeply cared for.
I got home, collapsed into bed and, in a moment of strange serendipity, I read a superb substack by
about the enduring appeal of the television show Friends in the wake of Matthew Perry’s tragic passing that introduced me to a concept my mind had been reaching for but not landing upon: ‘pyjama friends’.‘Pajama friends, by my made-up definition, are friends who feel so at ease with each other that they would be comfortable hanging out in their pajamas.
‘Literally and metaphorically, all of the characters [on Friends] become pajama friends. That’s the point of the whole show!
‘Friends was meant to capture the stage of life when your friends are your family, and your family is your friends.’
When I read that, I realised I was yearning for my own pyjama friends, those pals you don’t have to make any effort with because you know they already love you just the way you are.
I lived with one such friend in New York and even at the time I knew how lucky I was that I got to return to someone I loved every night, someone to whom I could say, ‘you are not going to believe what happened to me today’, someone to share my victories and miseries with. I recall hanging out with another friend while she was picking up her prescriptions in the drug store - we’d chatter and giggle and browse the aisles of candy, make up and insane foot spas together and somehow turned this grubby Walgreens in Union Square into one of my most cherished landmarks in a city that contains wonders like Central Park and the Chrysler Building.
I miss eating ice cream with friends in bed or pizza out of the box on the floor of their apartment or drinking cans of seltzer while lolling on a sofa because we were both broke as fuck. There were rarely even set plans with these friends - more often than not we would meet somewhere and our friendship would propel us through the hours. What we were actually doing didn’t matter, it was the company that mattered.
According to social scientists, there are three ingredients required to make close friends, aka pyjama friends. They are: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; spending time together in contexts that encourage people to let down their guard.
All of this explains why I gathered so many pyjama friends in New York and why, since I’ve moved back to London, I’ve made friends but none of the pyjama variety.
New York is nowhere near as sprawling as London - when I lived in Manhattan, pretty much everywhere else in Manhattan, and a lot of Brooklyn, was at most 30 minutes away. It’s a much more geographically tight place than London is - you end up bumping into people a lot because, really, there aren’t actually that many different places for people of your social group to hang in in the city. When I lived in Brooklyn, I had a handful of friends just a walk away. Now, in my new spot in south east London, I know nobody within walking distance. And with plenty of places being an hour on a tube, a bus or a train away, it’s far too easy to cop out of socialising and instead laze around on the sofa in the warm.
Being an ex-pat also forces you to let your guard down. When all your friends and family are 3,000 miles away and you are on your own in an intense, magical but also terrifying city, you have no choice but to get vulnerable. Whether that’s crying to a new friend about the guy who ghosted you or shrieking down the phone because you’ve seen a bed bug or showing up at a barbecue where you don’t know anybody because someone you met off of a Craigslist ad for a room invited you and you knew you needed to make friends so you said yes. I have learnt that being vulnerable is how you let people in and letting people in is key to forging meaningful friendships. So why am I so reluctant to be vulnerable in my hometown?
I noticed this recently when I was telling a friend how I wanted to ‘build a home’. I explained to her that my old place in Brooklyn felt full of love and that’s what I hoped to have in my new place. I added that I wanted to have my neighbours over for dinner but I didn’t feel the place was furnished enough - I have two decrepit dining chairs at the moment which the flat’s previous owner left for me (thank God).
She said: ‘I think that’s how you build a home, by inviting people over and forming memories. And it kind of doesn’t work if you wait until everything’s perfect. Plus, they live here, they can bring up a spare chair.’
As soon as she said it, I knew she was right. I’m still trying to work out why I had no problem revealing to friends in New York the full extent of my imperfect life - I proudly showed them around my poky apartment in the East Village which looked out onto a brick wall, had no space for a dining table and would, in time, become infested with bed bugs - and yet I resist revealing my half-furnished flat in East Dulwich as though I’m ashamed of not yet having it pict
ure-perfect and Instagram-ready even though I know that picture-perfect and Instagram-ready does not encourage the forming of true friendships. It is dawning on me that while it is true that I miss my friends in New York, I also miss who I was in New York. And I’ve not been able to bring that person back to London.
Add to all these obstacles, the fact that by the time you reach your mid-thirties more and more people have moved away in search of more space and priorities like marriages and children push friendship to the bottom of the list, it’s hard not to feel a little hopeless that by not tying the knot or popping out a sprog you have doomed yourself to a lonely life.
I called my one pyjama friend in London from the depth of my sad funk this week and I asked: ‘Do you think this is it? Do you think the twenties and early thirties are your sociable times and from now on you kind of have no choice but to embrace your own company?’
‘No,’ she sweetly and wisely counselled. ‘I believe things come back around. And I also believe you never know who you are going to meet. Think about how we met. I think you can meet someone at any time who will impact your life in a wonderful way and that’s what I hold on to.’
That’s the energy I’m going to hold on to this week. I’ll invite my neighbours for dinner even though the chairs aren’t great and the table is wonky. I’ll wait and hope that someday the people I love but have grown distant from will return as lives ebb and flow. I’ll remind myself that, though rarer at this stage of my life, pyjama friends are still out there and it’s on me to let my mess show a little more and open myself up to the possibility.
Further reading
I really recommend reading Catherine Price’s piece Why Friends Is Making Me (And Perhaps You?) So Freaking Nostalgic - I loved it and I expect you will too.
Ghosts by Dolly Alderton (an annoyingly fantastic writer) is a sad, moving but just so true novel which tackles the difficulty of feeling suddenly distant from a dear friend who has got married and had children and the pain that estrangement causes. It is all-round a fantastic book and I’m v much looking forward to her latest - Good Material - which I’ll devour as soon as I can get my mitts on it.
I’m only halfway through this piece by Allison P. Davis for The Cut on this topic Adorable Little Detonators: Our friendship survived bad dates, illness, marriage, fights. Why can’t it survive your baby? but I’m already nodding my head in agreement and wondering at just how brilliant, brave and honest Davis is as a writer. Also, if you haven’t read her profile interview with Meghan Markle yet, it is MASTERFUL.
Helen Lewis’s piece Matthew Perry, the best Friend I never knew isn’t about this topic but it is hands-down the most moving tribute to Matthew Perry that I’ve read (honestly, the more I read on Substack, the more I think the best journalism is on this app which, I suppose, is encouraging but also quite depressing actually). The fact that Lewis wrote this just hours after Perry’s death was announced and yet so well articulated what his work meant, what he meant, the weirdness of grieving for a fictional character - all of it, just Grade A writing, give it a read.
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Thank you for this. I’m an American living in Camberwell (pajama friends distance, I’m just saying). I’ve been here for 9 years and have been through a real cycle. I felt this same ache when I arrived for about two years. I moved not knowing a soul and had to work hard to find friends. I did and for the next five or so years those friendships deepened extraordinarily. Now, many of those friends have moved -- Columbia, for the sun; San Diego, for a job; NYC, for a husband’s work assignment; etc etc.
I still have friends here, a lot via my wife, and my weekends are full, but I feel like they are ground floor friendship not pajama ones yet.
This resonates and I know this ache. Just after I turned thirty a little over a decade ago I made a couple of decisions - one immediate, one growing (or not) - and though I didn’t know it at the time, I now realise that many individuals I considered close friends were merely friends by the peculiar, stifling (suffocating?) circumstance. I grieve not for the people but the feeling that I was living a life that wasn’t my own and that, perhaps this intimacy was ersatz. And when I see them I feel a sense of a self that was painfully trying to fit in to someone else’s expectation of my life. I find myself writing letters in my head to some of those people to say thank you. And to say goodbye. Sometimes it hurts too much to linger in the shadows of that which once seemed so great but perhaps was just an illusion .