People assume the lonely part of getting old is the solitude. The empty afternoons, the silent house, the diary that keeps thinning out. But for a great many older people, the solitude turns out to be the bearable part. The genuinely lonely part lands earlier and hits harder, and it’s a realization rather than a circumstance. It’s the slow discovery that most of the connections you kept going for decades were held together by proximity, routine, and obligation, and not, as you’d assumed the entire time, by anything like love.
What was actually holding it up
Most of the relationships that fill an ordinary life are propped up by one of three things, none of which is affection. There’s proximity, where you’re simply near someone, the colleague at the next desk, the neighbour over the fence, and nearness does the work of friendship without either of you ever having to choose it. There’s routine, where you see a person on a schedule the world imposes, the standing meeting, the school gate, the Friday five-a-side, and the schedule keeps the bond breathing without anyone bothering to tend it. And there’s obligation, where you ought to, the relative you’d never have picked, the couple you’ve always had round, the duty that books the dinner whether you fancy it or not.
What makes this so clever and so cruel is that these three mimic real closeness so perfectly you can’t spot the difference while the support is in place. A proximity friendship feels exactly like a chosen one. You laugh together, you confide, you’d have sworn on your life it was the real article. The structure stays completely invisible the whole time it’s bearing the load.
Ageing is the test that pulls the scaffolding down
Getting old, more than anything else it does to a person, is the systematic removal of all three supports, often within a few short years of each other. Retirement strips away the proximity and routine of work in a single Friday afternoon, and four decades of daily camaraderie suddenly discover they had nothing underneath them. Downsizing and moving take the proximity of place. Widowhood is the cruellest, because the couple was the unit that held an entire social world together, and when one half of it goes, the dinners that ran like clockwork for thirty years simply stop.
One by one the props get pulled, and you finally see which relationships were standing up on their own all along and which were only ever leaning on the structure around them. It’s a brutal exam, and almost nobody is told it’s coming.
My great-uncle Frank, and the company that vanished
My great-uncle Frank worked the same job for the better part of forty years and had, by any measure you’d have used at the time, a thoroughly full social life. Workmates he saw every single day. A circle of couples he and my great-aunt hosted on a rotation so dependable you could have set a calendar by it. To me as a boy, Frank looked like the most connected man alive.
Then he retired, and the men he’d shared four decades of daily life with, the ones he’d have called close friends without a flicker of doubt, did not call. There was no malice in it. The proximity was just gone, and the friendship went with it, because the friendship had been the proximity the whole time. A few years on, my great-aunt died, and the couples they’d fed and watered for thirty years sent their cards and then, by degrees, nothing, because the hosting had been her doing and the obligation had been to the two of them, and the two of them no longer existed.
What remained, once all of it had been stripped away, was two people. One old friend who phoned every week for no particular reason, and a former neighbour who’d moved to the far end of the country years before and still drove down twice a year. Two, out of what had looked for half a century like dozens. Frank said a thing to me near the end that I’ve never managed to shake. He said he’d had an enormous amount of company in his life and not very many friends, and the awful bit was that he’d never once known the difference until the day the company stopped turning up.
It isn’t betrayal, which is what makes it ache
The easy move is to get angry at the people who fell away, to brand them fair-weather. That misreads the whole thing. A proximity friendship is not a fake friendship. It’s a real and decent thing in its season, genuinely warm, well worth having. It simply isn’t a portable one. Take away the context that made it and there’s nothing left over to carry it, and that is nobody’s failure of character. Frank’s colleagues weren’t faking it for forty years. They liked him. They liked Frank-at-work, and once there was no more work, there was no more them.
That’s precisely what makes the realization so lonely. There’s no villain to round on, no betrayal to nurse. Only the plain, late discovery of which of your bonds were ever really yours, arriving at the one point in life when it’s far too hard to go back and build different ones.
The same test is coming for all of us
The useful part of this, if there’s a useful part, is that the exam isn’t unique to the old. Every one of us is carrying scaffolded connections and load-bearing ones right now, jumbled together and impossible to tell apart while the scaffolding stands. The only real difference is that at thirty-eight I still have the time to find out which is which, and to act on it, in a way Frank simply no longer did.
Finding out for yourself means taking the scaffolding away on purpose, now and then, before life gets round to doing it for you. Ask, of any connection: would this survive if the proximity went? If we didn’t work together, didn’t live nearby, didn’t have the standing arrangement holding us in place, would either of us actually cross the gap to keep it going? For most people the honest answer is no, and that’s perfectly fine, they’re good company and you should enjoy them as exactly that. But the handful who get a yes are the ones worth pouring the real time into while the choosing is still yours to do.
Frank’s two people had one thing in common, I worked out later. Each of them, at some point, had kept the friendship alive when absolutely nothing was forcing them to. The weekly caller across years of no reason at all. The neighbour who carried on driving down long after the neighbouring was over. They’d passed the test years before it was ever set, by crossing a distance the routine wasn’t closing for them. That, as far as I can tell, is the only dependable sign of a connection that will make it into old age. Not how warm it feels today, with the scaffolding still up, but whether anyone troubles to cross the gap once there’s no reason left to but the wanting.
