Why Making Friends After Age 40 In Midlife Is So Hard

Dating has gotten harder. Young adults are struggling with loneliness. Retail interactions will be more automated in the future. Some health journalists even predict people may suffer from "touch starvation." These topics are all often described as challenges for younger or older generations. What about anyone in between?

Author Katharine Smyth wrote a piece about the challenges of finding new friends after the age of 40. As I head toward a birthday that takes me into the middle of so-called midlife, the article immediately struck a chord for me.

I'm lucky to live in a place I know, surrounded by family and friends who have known me for longer ... but I also haven't really made many new friends since turning 40. The opportunities to do that are infrequent and I'm not exactly sure how I would go about doing it anyway. As Smyth insightfully observes, "half the struggle is finding someone who wants the same thing you do, and at the exact same time." But the upside of new friends, she writes, is to meet "someone who sees me as I am right now, not as who I used to be [and] to acknowledge the growing that we all have left to do." Bottom line: we all could probably use some advice on how to make more new friends ... at any age.