Is it Loneliness or the Normal Ebb and Flow of Friendship?

For all the attention that loneliness and the best friend at work concept gets, I don’t think people really pay attention to how they’ve always made friends and why.

I’ve always been the sort of person who has a very small circle of friends. I am an only child who grew up in a remote rural area. If I had friends in walking distance, it was always only 2 or 3 people. Often my friends were the people who were in the same year of school as me. I’ve never been a sports person or a group person. I love to read and everyone always encourages me to do book clubs but I hate them. How to take the perfect introvert hobby and make it people-ly. Ugh. By the end of high school, most of my friends were a year older. My last year of high school was very lonely because all of my close friends already graduated.

My friends in university were in the same year and lived in the same residence as me.

So what do you notice?

Proximity and life stage.

I met my husband at physiotherapy when I was 23. We were the only two young people in the group. Everyone else was at least 20 years older.

At work I had lots of great coworkers and acquaintances but because I worked in Toronto and lived in Keswick, it was rare for me to develop close friendships. The commute impacted the proximity. Toronto people don’t like to commute to Keswick just to hang out. There isn’t much to do here except eat, walk and swim.

I had my first kid at 32 and my second at 34. Parenting and working full time with a 3-4 hour commute was exhausting. Your friends become the neighbours and other parents you meet at school events, soccer games and birthday parties. They are saved in your phone as “Katelynne’s mom.”

Your kids’ social life becomes more important than your own.

I wouldn’t say I had a best friend at work until 2010. She was 12 years younger than me. She was brilliant, incredibly friendly and funny. She also had studied math and history in university and her grandmother happened to live in Keswick. She’s one of the only people I ever worked with who visited my house and came camping with me. We used to analyze company strategy at lunch. We had a similar mindset. It was fun.

Or friendship started to change once she had kids. I noticed she preferred being around people who had kids the same age as hers. The difference in life stage became a bigger deal.

It made it easier to leave, which I finally did in 2019.

We don’t talk anymore.

Even though I’ve lived in my area for my whole life, it’s rare I find someone who matches my energy and future focused, status quo challenging mindset.

You have to have all three. Proximity (or a willingness to travel), life stage and mindset. Or at least I do.

So when you think about loneliness and friends at work, think about these factors. It’s not that you can’t make friends. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s that the conditions aren’t right. One of the three factors is missing. Also, take the pressure off yourself by eliminating the word “best.”