Friendship is a mid-life health issue
Last week I spent a weekend doing things my 15-year-old self would recognize: swimming in my friend’s parents’ pool, wandering a mall with no particular agenda. The only real update to the formula was the top-shelf Manhattans.
The company was the same, too. Carrie and I met at new kids’ day when we were 15, she fresh out of homeschooling, radiantly earnest, and, as we’d learn, something of a brawler if anyone dared insult her friends. Later we were joined by Katie, an Exeter High veteran who was somehow 40 years old at 15 and destined to teach. She overshot and became a PhD education researcher.
Nearly 30 years later, we have survived being each other’s bridesmaids. We’ve also survived harder things: bereavement, infertility, relationship endings, health scares, and a respectable catalog of bad decisions, most of which were mine. What makes these friendships so fulfilling is, at least in part, the history. Because we’ve known each other so intimately for so long, it’s easy to see each friend in full context. We can speak in shorthand and be understood without much explanation. So when their advice comes, it comes from someone who knows the whole story.
I think about this as a health issue, because it is one. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed its participants since 1938, one of the longest-running studies of adult life ever conducted. Its most quoted finding: how satisfied people were with their relationships at age 50 predicted their physical health at age 80 better than their cholesterol did.
My clients arrive with questions about protein, strength training, and blood sugar, and those matter. But midlife is exactly the decade when friendships quietly fall off the calendar, crowded out by careers and caregiving and fatigue. If relationship satisfaction at 50 is that strongly linked to health at 80, a weekend in the pool isn’t a break from taking care of yourself. It is taking care of yourself.
So text your Carries and your Katies. Better yet, book the flight. Some of what protects your health can’t be plated or prescribed. Sometimes it’s drifting past you on a pool float, Manhattan in hand.
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