It’s Hard to Maintain friendships and make new ones but it’s crucial.
*This article originally appeared in November in the Wall Street Journal.
By Diane Cole
Two or three times a week, Alan J. Fink, 64, the owner and manager of a box business in Baltimore, listens as his mother wishes out loud that she had good friends to go out with. That is worrisome for his mother, who is 88—and for himself.
“I don’t want to be in her position in another 20 years,” Mr. Fink says. He frets that his circle of friends should be wider, “so that, down the pike, we’ll all be available to each other—if and when we need each other.”
A growing body of data confirms that friends are essential to our medical, psychological and social well-being as we age. Yet many people find it difficult to maintain their circles of friends as they grow older.
“It’s not that we’re deliberately neglecting our friendships,” says Ryan Hubbard, principal at Hinterland Innovation, a Melbourne, Australia, company that researches friendship and social innovations for modern enterprises. Losing friends, Mr. Hubbard says, is often more a function of our lives being complicated.
Read more: The Trick to Keeping Friends as We Get Older