I saw an old friend recently – the kind you’ve known for so long that you clear a whole day for them, as you might a family member. We laughed and laughed like we were teenagers again, and drank martinis before lunch, and it felt almost like it always did when we were young, except we could afford better than cheap cider, and he owns a house and I’m someone’s mother.
Another old friend – one I’ve known even longer, since I was six – described me and the other girls who made up our little group as “fake siblings”. That is how lifelong friendships feel. There’s an easiness and acceptance that comes with longstanding intimacy. You know each other’s secrets, you’ve been inside each other’s parents’ houses, shared beds and cigarettes, witnessed heartbreak and foolishness, tears and whiteys, before the more serious stuff piles up: weddings, births, illnesses, life crises, deaths. You talk about the serious stuff, of course (there has always been some serious stuff, but teenage friendships often provide a refuge from it), but when you need it that old friendship is a portal, transporting many of us to a time of lightness and freedom that is otherwise hard to access.
I don’t know where I’d be without these friendships, which is why it makes me sad to read that young people today aren’t making them, or at least not in the same way. According to a new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research titled The Loneliest Generation, the number of young people with no close friends has risen fivefold since 2014, with 11- to 24-year-olds becoming dramatically more isolated. One in 20 16- to 21-year-olds say that they have no close friends at all.
The report cites digital childhoods and austerity measures such as youth club closures as factors in eroding the foundations of a good adolescence. My own friendships owed much to the digital realm (specifically MSN Messenger), but they were still largely and crucially face to face, and that seems to be one of the things that has changed. We did not have internet childhoods, and so the skill – and I do believe it’s a skill – of making friends was crucial, and acquired young. The things that bonded us – circumstances, subcultures, music and, most of all, humour – took place mostly offline. We spent hours sitting in parks or around campfires, just talking and joking. We went to gigs and club nights and festivals. We rode our bikes or begged lifts or walked five miles home. It’s strange seeing these ways of relating to one another being idealised by younger people, spoken of wistfully in social media posts and comments as though something has been lost. I suppose we idealise the countercultures of our parents’ eras. People simply conversing without a phone present shouldn’t be seen as radical, but it’s being framed that way.
We are right to be worried about this mass loneliness among young people. To spend adolescence without friends can leave a lifelong trace. Even the friendships that didn’t last affect us, even – perhaps especially – those that were not so straightforward. Therapists are fond of the phrase “rupture and repair” because it’s accurate – falling in and out and in again with friendship groups can be educative. It can teach you to be kinder to one another, to tolerate difference, and to learn what behaviour you are and aren’t willing to put up with. These are important life lessons but they are increasingly overstated – the online language of friendship, which emphasises what a friend “gives” you or “adds” to your life seems intense and transactional to those of us raised in less psychobabbly times.
These sorts of bonds take time and energy to establish. Many, many hours of sitting and fooling around. The art of friendship is as much the art of doing nothing. Of mooching. Hanging out. Watch an old sitcom such as Seinfeld and friends are always running errands together. When did you last go to the dry-cleaner’s with somebody?
Much has been written about the decline in third spaces and its impact on social relationships. Places to hang out, outside home or work, are essential to the art of real-world friendship. So is time to talk, to wander and to linger together. When it comes to the crisis in friendship, a social media ban for under-16s is a good thing: it makes relating to one another in person more of a priority, and leaves more time for those activities that bond us together.
It’s only as you get older that you realise how precious those adolescent years are. People don’t talk about fun enough – how important it is to wellbeing and survival. So much about technology makes our lives smoother and quicker, but I am not sure it makes it more fun. Not like gathering four or five or six people around a campfire and drinking cider before all jumping naked into a river, or exploring an abandoned house (not something I would ever endorse, but something we used to do). Memories of adolescence and the people we spent it with have been found to be more vivid. They call it the “reminiscence bump”. It is a crucial time for development and, as I’ve found myself, those memories carry us through our lives. In my dreams, I still explore abandoned houses with those kids, my fake siblings.
What will be the long-term wellbeing impact if those years are filled instead with the flickerings of other lives on a screen, gobbled up and then swiped past, forgotten? We must preserve the art of friendship before it’s lost for ever.
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