The relief most older adults can’t quite explain to their families

There is a particular conversation that older adults sometimes find themselves having with their adult children, around the dinner table or in the kitchen after the visiting children have arrived, that the wider cultural register has not, on the available evidence, given particularly good language to. The conversation starts with the adult child expressing concern that the parent does not, by the visible measures the adult child has been using, have very many close friends anymore. The parent is in their sixties or seventies. The calendar is, by the adult child’s reading, empty in a way that the adult child finds worrying. The adult child wants to know whether the parent is, in some structural sense, lonely.

The parent is, on close examination, not particularly lonely. The parent is also, on close examination, almost entirely unable to explain to the adult child why they are not, because the explanation requires the parent to articulate something that the wider cultural register has not given them words for. The explanation is that the friendships the adult child is concerned about the absence of were, in most cases, friendships the parent had been quietly resenting for years. The absence of them is, accordingly, considerably closer to relief than to grief. The parent knows this. The parent cannot, in most cases, say it out loud, because saying it out loud violates several of the standard cultural assumptions about what older adults are supposed to feel about their diminished social networks.

What the resentment had actually consisted of

It is worth being precise about what the resentment had consisted of, because the wider register has not, on the available evidence, developed particularly good vocabulary for the specific phenomenon.

The resentment was not, in most cases, dramatic. The resentment was, more accurately, the slow accumulation across decades of small structural asymmetries that the parent had been absorbing without quite registering as costs. The friend who only called when they needed something. The friend whose conversation had always been organized around their own concerns, with the parent’s interior treated as a kind of backdrop the friend monologued in front of. The friend who had, by long pattern, never quite remembered the parent’s actual preferences and had been imposing their own preferences on the friendship for decades. The friend who required, in every interaction, a kind of emotional labor that the parent had been performing without quite registering that the performing was work.

None of these friendships had been bad friendships in any external sense. The friendships had been, by every visible measure, the kind of long-standing relationships that the wider cultural register would have characterized as valuable. The friendships also, on close examination, had been structurally calibrated to the parent providing more than they received, and the calibration had been operating quietly for so long that the parent had, in most cases, stopped noticing the cost they had been paying.

The retirement of these friendships in late life was not, accordingly, the loss the adult child reads it as. The retirement was, more accurately, the structural cessation of work the parent had been performing without compensation for decades. The cessation produced, in the parent, a particular kind of internal relief that the wider register has no vocabulary for, because the wider register has been organized around the assumption that the maintenance of long-standing friendships is, by structural definition, a good thing.

Why the adult child cannot easily hear this

The honest acknowledgment is that the adult child, when the parent attempts to articulate even a partial version of this, is in most cases unable to easily receive it. The reasons are worth examining.

The first reason is that the adult child has been operating on the standard cultural framing of friendship, in which long-standing friendships are presumed to be valuable by virtue of being long-standing. The framing does not include, in any structurally accessible way, the possibility that some long-standing friendships might have been operating at considerable hidden cost to one of the parties for most of their duration. The adult child, accordingly, has no available framework for hearing what the parent is trying to say. The parent says the friendship was not particularly nourishing. The adult child translates this into the parent being lonely and in denial about it. The translation is wrong. The translation is, however, what the adult child’s available vocabulary structurally produces.

The second reason is that the adult child has, in many cases, their own ongoing friendships that they are currently invested in maintaining. The parent’s articulation that some long-standing friendships were not actually worth maintaining produces, in the adult child, the small uncomfortable possibility that their own ongoing friendships might be similarly assessable. The adult child does not, in most cases, want to do this assessment. The adult child, accordingly, has motivated reasons to push back against the parent’s articulation and to insist that the parent must, on the available cultural framework, be wrong about what the parent has been experiencing.

The third reason is that the adult child wants, in some real way, to be able to think well of the parent’s social life. The thinking-well-of-it is partly genuine concern for the parent’s well-being. The thinking-well-of-it is also, on close examination, partly about the adult child’s own positioning. The adult child does not want to have to worry about the parent in late life. The adult child wants to be able to come and visit and find the parent surrounded by the visible markers of a well-attended social life, because the markers are what the adult child has been calibrated to read as evidence that the parent is doing okay. The absence of the markers produces, in the adult child, a small ongoing worry that they would prefer not to be carrying.

What the parent actually wants the adult child to understand

The parent, in most cases, is not asking the adult child to celebrate the retirement of the friendships. The parent is, more modestly, asking the adult child to stop treating the retirement as the problem the adult child has been treating it as.

The parent has, by long accumulated evidence, arrived at a more accurate evaluation of who in their wider network was actually worth the labor of being known by them, and who was not. The accurate evaluation has produced, by the structural necessity of acting on accurate evaluations, the retirement of the relationships that were not worth the labor. The retirement is not, in the parent’s interior, a loss. The retirement is, more accurately, a structural correction that the parent has been waiting decades to be willing to perform.

What the parent is asking the adult child to do, in some real way, is to extend the same epistemic courtesy to the parent’s accurate evaluation that the adult child would, in principle, extend to any other adult who had spent four or five decades carefully observing a particular feature of their own life. The parent has been observing the friendships for considerably longer than the adult child has been alive. The parent’s evaluation of the friendships is, accordingly, considerably more informed than the adult child’s evaluation could possibly be. The adult child, by the structural logic of the cultural framing they are operating on, has been treating the parent’s evaluation as suspect, while treating their own less-informed evaluation as the accurate one.

This is, on close examination, what the parent is trying to gently undo when they explain to the adult child that the empty calendar does not feel like loss. The parent is, more specifically, asking the adult child to update their picture of what the parent has actually been experiencing across the previous several decades, and to allow the parent to be the more reliable source on the parent’s own interior than the adult child’s externally derived assumptions have been treating them as.

What the relief actually feels like, from inside

The relief, on close examination, is structurally specific. The relief is not, in most cases, dramatic. The relief is the small ongoing absence of the various small costs the friendships had been imposing without quite being noticed.

The relief is the absence of the small dread that had preceded certain phone calls. The relief is the absence of the small fatigue that had followed certain dinners. The relief is the absence of the small ongoing internal accounting the parent had been keeping, without quite registering that they were keeping it, of whose turn it was to initiate contact, of who owed what to whom, of which of the various small social debts and credits had been accumulating across decades of the friendship’s continued operation.

The relief is, more accurately, the structural simplification of the parent’s social environment that the retirement of the unrewarding friendships has produced. The remaining relationships, the small number of them, are the ones that have, by long evidence, been worth the labor. The labor is, in those cases, structurally reciprocated. The reciprocation is what makes the labor sustainable. The structural simplification has, accordingly, not produced a lonelier life. The simplification has produced, in some real way, a less burdened life, with the substantive engagement now concentrated in the small number of places where the engagement was actually being returned.

This is not, on close examination, the picture the wider cultural register has been calibrated to produce of late-life social configuration. The wider register has been producing a picture in which more friends is structurally better than fewer friends, regardless of the quality of the friendships. The picture is, on the available evidence of the actual interior lives of older adults who have retired their unrewarding friendships, simply not accurate.

The acknowledgment this article wants to leave

The hardest part of reaching one’s sixties with very few close friends is not, in most cases, the silence itself. The hardest part is having to explain to the rest of one’s family why the silence does not feel like loss, when the family has been operating on a cultural framework in which silence and loss are presumed to be the same thing.

The friendships the older adult has stopped maintaining were, in most cases, friendships the older adult had been quietly resenting for decades, while continuing to maintain them out of habit, social expectation, and the accumulated weight of shared history that had never quite translated into mutual nourishment. The retirement of these friendships is, accordingly, closer to relief than to grief. The relief is real. The relief is also, by the available cultural vocabulary, almost impossible for the older adult to articulate to a family member who is operating on a different framework.

What is available, more modestly, is the slow attempt to communicate, across multiple conversations, that the parent’s evaluation of their own social life is more informed than the family’s externally derived assumptions have been treating it as, and that the empty calendar is the structural product of accurate evaluation rather than the symptom of decline the family has been reading it as. The communicating is hard. The communicating is, in some real way, one of the more underappreciated pieces of intergenerational work that late-life adults are currently being asked to perform. The wider register would benefit, on the available evidence, from extending more epistemic courtesy to the older adults who have, after several decades of careful observation, arrived at conclusions about their own social lives that the wider register’s standard framings have not yet caught up to.