How Do I Rebuild My Broken Social Life?

Editor’s Note: Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles a reader’s existential worry. He wants to hear about what’s ailing, torturing, or nagging you. Submit your lifelong or in-the-moment problems to dearjames@theatlantic.com.

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Dear James,

I’m in a strange situation of seeming basically like an extrovert but feeling quite lonely. I organize things with my smallish group of close friends, but as more of them have kids, those get-togethers are so frenetic and kid-focused that we rarely have real conversations anymore. I feel like I know them, and they know me, much less than we used to—and that gap breaks my heart.

So I’ve been trying to branch out more. I organize get-togethers at work, start up conversations, invite groups to hang out—but I rarely have a lot of effort directed back toward me socially. I occasionally fall into these deep, blue moods, where I genuinely feel like if I could agree to, say, a magical pact wherein I could have one of my legs amputated in exchange for never feeling like I needed socialization again, I would eagerly agree. It’s so tiring: I can’t stop wanting to have friends, and yet, honestly, friendship has mostly been a disappointing pain for the past couple of years.

And last—despite all of this—I have a few glimmers of hope: kind new acquaintances who invite me to something, or follow up, or actively participate in trying to reschedule. And now I’m at a strange point of having been friendship-burned enough that these new opportunities actually make me feel very anxious and vulnerable. I just feel like I’m getting back on the terrible merry-go-round of hope and disappointment related to friendship. How do I develop a healthier relationship to this cycle?

Dear Reader,

I want you to hang on to your leg, both your legs, and hang on to hope. Friendship, like everything else, comes in waves. And as each fresh wave of everythingness arrives, happy and sad, entropic and creative, interested in you and purely unconcerned, rushing in and then receding, what it leaves you with is mysteriously related to how you handled the wave before. Did you meet it with a bit of symmetry and poise, a touch of private mettle, or did you just get bowled over and churned like a lump in the wave-chambers?

What I’m saying is: Hold your ground. Right now you feel alone. But a person who can handle their own solitude, who can carry their own weight, who isn’t loudly and sprawlingly involved in everybody else’s business, texting and weeping and crashing around, is fascinating. And, eventually, magnetic. This solitude is not forever.

The kids/no-kids divide is very real. Parents have to talk with other parents, in parent language, and nonparents are left twiddling their thumbs (to put it no more strongly than that). But try to forgive your friends with kids. As idiotically preoccupied as they have become, as passionately oblivious to the nonkid world as they appear to be, they need you badly. They might be feeling lonely themselves. What are friends for? For reassuring us that we exist; for finding us interesting when we’re boring; for holding on to the better parts of us even as we slide like renegade meatballs into the worse parts. Your friends with kids—some of them, anyway—will come back. Courage!

Serenely underwater,

James

Dear James,

I am 75, and when I was in college, I read Erik Erikson and thought, I will be satisfied at the end of my life. But instead, I look back with regret and see only my mistakes. I’m suffering from heartache, and though I tried to be a loving person throughout my life, I must have been selfish, as my daughter recently screamed at me just before she cut me out of her life—she doesn’t like that I drink wine and occasionally have too much. My son lives with me, but he suffers from anxiety and can’t go anywhere. I’m trapped at home (my husband died 18 months ago) and feeling very sad. Is there anything I can do?

Dear Reader,

I wrote a poem, in the hope that it might cheer you up:

When the misery comes,
up the rungs of your lungs
and clambering into your brain,
all the rue and regret,
and the fever and fret
and the feelings you cannot explain—
make yourself a nice sandwich.
Despondency, banish.
Move in the direction of health.
Put on some clean clothes.
Stick your nose in a rose.
It’s not going to smell itself.

Wishing you a string of good moments,

James

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