There is a particular kind of person in their sixties with no close friends who has arrived at this season not by accident but by accumulation. The wider cultural framing tends to read this configuration in one of two unhelpful ways. The first reading is that the person has been unfortunate, that the various friendships they once had have been worn away by the wider currents of life, and that the current state is something that has, in some structural sense, happened to them. The second reading is that the person must, somewhere along the way, have done something to push their friends away, and that the current state is a kind of social failure they are now living inside.
Both readings miss, on close examination, what most of these adults have actually done. The current state is not, in most cases, the result of unfortunate accident. The current state is also not, in most cases, the result of any single dramatic mistake. The current state is, more accurately, the slow accumulated result of thousands of small decisions made decade by decade about who deserved access, who had earned the call back, who was worth the labor of being known by. The decisions were small in any single instance. The decisions, accumulated across four or five decades of adult life, have produced the small empty calendar in the living room that the person is now sitting next to.
What the decisions actually looked like
It is worth being precise about what the decisions were, because the wider register has not, on the available evidence, developed particularly good vocabulary for them.
The decisions were not, in most cases, dramatic. The decisions were the small ongoing choices about whether to return the phone call, whether to attend the dinner, whether to extend the invitation, whether to follow up on the conversation that had been promising before life intervened, whether to forgive the small slight, whether to overlook the larger pattern of small slights, whether to invest the additional small piece of attention that the friendship would, on its current trajectory, require. The choices were made in the moment. The moments were forgotten. The decisions, accumulated, were not.
Each decision was, in itself, almost entirely reasonable. The friend who called less often than was being called. The relationship that had stopped producing the quality of conversation it once had. The acquaintance who had, by some pattern of behavior, demonstrated that they were not, in any structural sense, available for the kind of substantive friendship the person was looking for. The colleague who had been warm in the workplace context but had, on closer examination, not been someone the person particularly wanted to spend their non-working hours with. The various potential friendships that, on examination, did not seem worth the labor of being maintained.
The person made the decisions. The decisions were, in most cases, accurate. The decisions also, on close examination, accumulated. The accumulated decisions are, in some real way, what produced the current state of the calendar.
What the accumulation actually consists of
The structural feature worth attending to, on close examination, is that the person was, across decades, doing a particular kind of slow quality-control work on their relational life. The work was conducted without any explicit framework. The work was conducted, more accurately, through the small intuitive judgments the person was making about who deserved access to their interior, who had earned the substantive engagement, who was worth the considerable labor of being known by them.
The labor is real. The labor of being known by another adult, in any substantive sense, requires the person to make themselves available in ways that the various surface-level forms of social engagement do not require. The labor includes the disclosure of one’s actual interior, including the parts that are not particularly impressive. The labor includes the willingness to receive the other person’s actual interior, including the parts that are difficult or uncomfortable. The labor includes the ongoing maintenance of the relationship across the various life transitions that test it. The labor includes the willingness to sit with the conflicts that arise when two adults with different interiors are trying to remain in substantive contact across decades.
Not everyone is worth this labor. The structural truth that the person has been operating on, across decades, is that the labor is finite and that allocating it to relationships that are not going to repay it is, in some real way, a structural waste. The wider self-help register has not, on the available evidence, given particularly honest language to this. The wider register tends to treat all relationships as equally worth investing in, on the assumption that warmth and connection are themselves goods regardless of who they are being directed at. The person in their sixties with the empty calendar has, by long observation, arrived at a more honest view. The view is that some relationships are worth the labor and some are not, and that the labor is, in any honest accounting, the most valuable resource the person has to allocate.
What the small empty calendar actually represents
The small empty calendar is, on close examination, not the sign of a person who has failed at relationships. The calendar is, more accurately, the sum of all the decisions the person has made across decades about who was worth the labor and who was not. The decisions were, in most cases, accurate. The accumulated effect of the decisions is that the small number of people who were worth the labor have, by various combinations of life circumstances, mortality, geographical distance, or their own structural unavailability, become reduced to a number small enough that the calendar can no longer be filled with substantive engagements.
The standard cultural framing would suggest that the person should, at this point, lower their standards and accept the various lesser-quality relationships that the wider environment is still offering. The framing assumes that some relationship is better than no relationship, and that the small empty calendar is a worse outcome than a calendar full of relationships that the person had previously, on accurate evaluation, judged not to be worth the labor.
The framing is, on close examination, not necessarily accurate. The person who has accumulated decades of accurate evaluation has, in some real way, also accumulated the standards that produced the accumulation. The standards are, by structural necessity, hard to lower without compromising the integrity of the evaluative work that produced them. The accepting of lesser-quality relationships, accordingly, would not, in most cases, produce the connection the wider framing assumes it would. The accepting would produce, more accurately, the kind of surface engagement the person had been actively declining to invest in across decades. The decline was not arbitrary. The decline was based on the empirical evidence the person had accumulated about what kinds of engagement actually produce the substantive connection they were looking for.
What is also true, in the same configuration
The honest acknowledgment is that the configuration is, by every available measure, lonely. The accuracy of the accumulated decisions does not, by itself, eliminate the loneliness. The loneliness is real. The loneliness is also, in some real way, the cost of the standards. The wider register has tended to imply that the cost is too high, that the standards should be lowered, that the loneliness is evidence of an error in the underlying evaluative work.
The implication is not, on close examination, obvious. The person who has lowered their standards in order to fill the calendar would have, on the available evidence, ended up with a calendar full of relationships they had already, on accurate evaluation, judged not to produce the substantive connection they were looking for. The filled calendar would not, accordingly, have produced less loneliness. The filled calendar would have produced, more accurately, a different kind of loneliness, the kind that involves being surrounded by relationships that are not substantively nourishing while having no time or energy left for the substantive work of identifying the relationships that would be.
The empty calendar, on close examination, at least has the structural advantage of being honest about its emptiness. The filled-with-low-quality-relationships calendar would have concealed the underlying problem rather than displaying it. The displaying is, in some real way, the first condition under which the underlying problem can be honestly addressed.
The acknowledgment this article wants to leave
The person in their sixties with the small empty calendar has not, in most cases, failed at relationships. The person has, more accurately, conducted four or five decades of slow accurate quality-control work on their relational life, and the accumulated effect of the work is a calendar that contains very few people because very few people, on the person’s careful evaluation, were worth the labor of being known by them.
The configuration is lonely. The configuration is also, in some real way, the structural expression of standards that the person has been refusing to compromise on across their entire adult life. The standards have produced the configuration. The configuration is, accordingly, not a failure of the standards but their accurate result.
What is available to the person, going forward, is not, on close examination, the lowering of the standards. The lowering would not produce the connection the wider register assumes it would. What is available is, more modestly, the slow ongoing search for the small number of additional people who might, on continued evaluation, prove to be worth the labor, alongside the deepening of the small number of existing relationships that have already, by long evidence, demonstrated themselves to be. The search is slow. The deepening is small. The combination is, in some real way, the only honest path forward from where the accumulated decisions have left the person. The wider register would prefer a faster solution. The faster solution does not exist. The slow path is what is available. The taking of it, modestly, is what the rest of the person’s adult life, lived honestly, gets to be built around.
