Some adults reach retirement with very few close friends not because they failed at relationships, but because they held closeness to a higher standard than most adults are willing to apply — and the small empty calendar isn't loneliness so much as honest accounting
I want to write about something I observed at a retirement dinner in London last spring. The dinner was for an old colleague of my father's, a man I had known since I was about twelve, who was retiring after roughly forty years at the same firm. The dinner was at a quiet restaurant in the City, with about eighteen people around a long table, most of whom were former colleagues from various decades of his career, along with his wife, his two adult children, and, for some reason, me.
What I noticed, across the course of the evening, was a particular structural fact about the room that the speeches kept circling without quite naming. The man being honored had been, by every available measure, professionally respected for four decades. The eighteen people at the table represented, in some real way, the substantial bulk of the close relationships he had built across his adult life. The eighteen people were, on close examination, not close in the way the wider cultural register would understand the term. The eighteen people were former colleagues who liked him, valued him, were genuinely fond of him, and were also, on honest accounting, structurally calibrated to him in the work context rather than as substantive friends.
I watched him receive the various toasts. I watched him laugh, accept the gifts, give the appropriate small speech in return. I also watched him, in the small moments between the public performance of the evening, look around the table with a particular kind of quiet awareness that I have, in the year since, been thinking about. The awareness was not, on close examination, sad. The awareness was, more accurately, the quiet recognition of someone who had just had visibly confirmed for him what he had probably already known for some time. The close friendships he had, in some real way, expected adult life to produce had not, in his case, been produced in any abundance. The eighteen people at the table were, in some structural sense, the result of forty years of careful, decent, professionally engaged adult life. The result was real. The result was also, by his own standards, not what he had been working toward.
What I learned, talking to him after
I spoke with him briefly after the dinner, in the small awkward window where the eighteen people were collecting their coats and saying the various goodbyes. He had had two glasses of wine. He was in the mood for a slightly more substantive exchange than the evening had structurally allowed for.
What he told me, in roughly the time it took for his wife to find her handbag, was that the dinner had clarified something for him. He said that he had spent his thirties and forties watching the people around him invest in friendships that he could already see, at the time, were not going to deliver what they were ostensibly promising. He had watched colleagues maintain regular dinners with people they did not, in any substantive sense, enjoy. He had watched friends absorb considerable interpersonal cost in order to maintain relationships that had stopped being structurally rewarding several years earlier. He had watched all of this and had, somewhere in his late thirties, made a small private decision that he had not, until that evening, articulated to anyone.
The decision was that he was not going to do the same maintenance work. The decision was that he was going to invest his social energy only in the relationships that were, on his honest evaluation, producing the substantive engagement he was looking for. The decision was that he would, by structural design, end up with a smaller social network than his contemporaries, and that the smaller network would be more honestly reflective of what his actual relational life was producing.
He told me, in the small remaining window before his wife appeared, that he had not, until the dinner, fully registered what the cumulative effect of that decision had been. The decision had produced, across the next forty years, the configuration he had just spent four hours sitting inside. The configuration was eighteen former colleagues, three of whom he would describe as substantive friends, and the rest of whom were professional warmth without substantive depth. He said the configuration was, on honest accounting, exactly what his late-thirties decision had been calibrated to produce. He said he was not, in any meaningful sense, regretful about the decision. He said he was, more accurately, finally seeing what it had been adding up to.
What he said about his contemporaries
What was more interesting, on close examination, was what he said about the people he had been watching in his thirties and forties, the ones who had been doing the maintenance work he had declined to do.
He said most of them were now, in their late sixties and seventies, in roughly the same configuration he was in. The maintenance work they had been performing had not, on the available evidence, produced the substantive friendships the work had been ostensibly calibrated to produce. The maintenance work had produced, more accurately, a larger network of warm acquaintances who were now, in late life, becoming progressively less available due to the various structural features of aging. The acquaintances were dying, moving, becoming ill, becoming preoccupied with their own difficulties, becoming structurally less available to perform the kind of social engagement the maintenance had previously sustained. The acquaintances, accordingly, were no longer providing the structural cushion they had been providing in middle age.
What was left, in his contemporaries' late-life configurations, was the small number of relationships that had been substantively meaningful all along, plus the residue of decades of maintenance work that was no longer paying any dividend. His own configuration, by contrast, did not include the residue. He had not performed the maintenance work. He had, accordingly, not built up the wider acquaintance network whose attrition his contemporaries were now experiencing. He had also not, on close examination, been paying the cumulative cost of the maintenance across the previous forty years. The cost had been, in his case, allocated to other uses. The other uses had included, among other things, more time with his wife, more time on the small number of substantive friendships he had been investing in, more time on the various hobbies and intellectual interests that had structurally required time to develop.
He said, in the small window before his wife appeared, that he was, on balance, satisfied with the trade-off. He was not, in any honest accounting, lonely. He was, more accurately, sitting in the structural configuration his thirties-decade decision had been working toward all along.
What I have been thinking about, since
What I have been thinking about, in the year since the dinner, is the structural fact that the wider cultural register would, in most cases, read his configuration as a failure rather than as the deliberate result it actually was.
The wider register would notice the small number of close friends and would translate the number into the category of late-life loneliness. The register would not, in most cases, register the structural fact that the configuration had been produced by deliberate decision rather than by accident or attrition. The register would not register the structural fact that the trade-off he had made had real benefits that his contemporaries had foregone. The register would not register the structural fact that he was, on his own honest accounting, not particularly unhappy with the configuration he was now in.
The register would, more specifically, treat his interior experience of the configuration as suspect. The wider register tends to assume that adults with small social networks must, by structural definition, be lonely, and that any claim by such an adult that they are not lonely must be a piece of self-deception they have been performing in order to avoid acknowledging the underlying state. The assumption is, on close examination, unfounded. The assumption is, more accurately, the wider register's projection of its own framework onto interior states that the framework does not adequately describe.
What I have been thinking about is the small number of adults like him I have known across my own life. The pattern is, on close examination, consistent. The adult holds the higher standard. The adult declines, in their thirties and forties, to perform the maintenance work that would have produced the wider acquaintance network. The adult arrives in late life with a configuration that the wider register reads as failure. The adult, on close examination, is operating in the configuration with considerably more equanimity than the wider register would predict.
What the alternative configuration actually costs
I have also been thinking, on close examination, about what the alternative configuration costs. The alternative is the configuration most of his contemporaries arrived at, in which the maintenance work was performed across decades, the wider acquaintance network was built up, and the late-life configuration includes both the small number of substantive friends and the larger network of warm but structurally limited acquaintances.
The configuration is, by every visible measure, the more socially populated one. The configuration is also, on close examination, structurally expensive. The expense is distributed across the decades of maintenance, in the form of the various small social engagements that did not produce substantive return, the various dinners attended without substantive enjoyment, the various ongoing relational accountings that had to be performed to keep the wider network operational. The expense was small in any single instance. The expense was, accumulated across decades, considerable.
The configuration also, in late life, structurally erodes. The wider acquaintance network is calibrated to middle-age conditions. The network does not transfer well into the conditions of late life, when the various structural features of aging make the maintenance progressively more difficult and the acquaintances progressively less available. The contemporaries who had been investing in the network are, accordingly, watching the network attenuate across their late sixties and seventies, often without quite registering that the attenuation is the structural consequence of the network's underlying design.
The acknowledgment this article wants to leave
The adult who arrives at retirement with very few close friends is, in some real way, the adult who has been making a particular trade-off across decades, and the trade-off has now arrived. The trade-off was the higher standard for what counted as substantive friendship, paid for by the lower number of relationships the standard would, by structural necessity, allow to qualify.
The man at the retirement dinner had made the trade-off. He had, in some real way, been preparing for the configuration he was now sitting in since his late thirties. The configuration was the structural completion of the project, not its failure. The cultural register's reading of the configuration as failure was, on close examination, the register's misunderstanding of what the project had actually been.
I do not know whether the trade-off was, by any honest accounting, the right one. The right-ness depends on what one weights and how one calibrates the various costs and benefits across a long adult life. What I do know, on the evidence of the conversation in the small awkward window before his wife appeared, is that the man who had made the trade-off was, on his own assessment, not regretful about it. The not-regretfulness is the part the wider register has the most trouble believing. The not-regretfulness is also, on the available evidence of the actual interior lives of the adults who have made this trade-off, considerably more common than the wider register has been calibrated to allow for. The configuration is not, in most cases, the loneliness the register reads it as. The configuration is, more accurately, the honest arrival of a decision made decades earlier, finally being lived inside.
