one is silver
and it complements gold beautifully
For years, a close group of my friends has had a tradition we call “friends’ dinner.” Everyone is invited to bring spouses, kids, and sometimes a potluck dish. Among the families, we’d rotate homes and hosts. It felt sweet and warm and nourishing on multiple levels. These have been my people for decades now, and they’ve seen me through everything. I hope to still be laughing at each other’s dinner tables when we’re old, or whooping it up in the same retirement community.
Craig and I separated in 2020, and we paused those friends’ dinners during the worst of the pandemic. Once we picked the tradition back up, even with the huge degree of closeness I felt with my besties, I stopped knowing how to show up at these gatherings. Nobody made it weird but me — I made it weird in my own mind. When a friends’ dinner invite text went out, I’d immediately stress over who to bring. Craig is still my family and one of my dearest friends, and he’s been friends with these people for as long as I have. But sometimes bringing him felt like we were cosplaying a married couple, and it brought up fresh grief. Bringing Diana, who was a new partner at that time, felt natural to me but strange in how it’d shake group norms. My kid was mostly busy teenagering, so, in my early divorcée years, I’d often to go alone. I even stopped hosting, and I friggin’ love hosting stuff like this. I was still awkwardly forming and trying on new parts of myself, so even when going alone, I couldn’t find a way to show up in this group where all parts of me felt met, seen, and understood by these beloved others.
It’s a lonely feeling to stand among your closest people and feel like there’s a part of you they can’t really get because you don’t really get it yet, either. My being in a hetero-presenting marriage and raising a child with Craig for nearly two decades meant that most of the people I connected with in the first half of my life were in similar boats of heteronormative, domestic life. The friends’ dinner crew are married (most in heteronormative marriages) and deep in their beautiful, domestic lives. I’d go to the dinners alone and hug their children, feeling like an alien. These dearest friends never stopped loving me, but there were pieces of my midlife emergence they couldn’t relate to during that intense time.
Yesterday, while folding laundry, I found myself humming a song I learned in elementary school. I was never a summer camp kid or a Girl Scout (I’m indoorsy AF), but in PE class, we’d chant while jumping rope: “Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.” These lyrics were meant to teach that new friends are fine, but old friends are the true fortune. Then, in my forties when my midlife emergence hit hardcore, my view on everything expanded, including on friendship.
One of my newer friendships began because of a shared career path of therapists-turned-coaches. We skipped small talk and got into the depths quickly. She happens to be queer, too. As someone who likes to be so fully understood (ahem… enneagram 4), what surprised me about making new friends in midlife is that it is absolutely comforting and freeing that they have no archive about me. They’ve never met the married, folded-up version of me, so when I show up now, there’s no former version to compare me to.
The people who’ve known us the longest know our histories, which is the part that is the gold. A new, silvery friend meets us in the present tense only. As Andrea Gibson wrote, “There is so much love in consistently asking, ‘Who are you now?’ There is so much love in letting our loved ones be continually new to us.” In a longstanding friendship, that sort of flexibility requires such generosity, patience, and total suspension of expectations. Yes, that’s possible in old friendships, and what I’ve learned is that when undergoing a transition as life-altering as coming out later in life, I needed a few people to meet the newer, emerging me first. I’m also grateful that the people who know my history love me enough that they’re catching up.
This post is me thinking “out loud” through my fingertips, as a perhaps clunky effort to express this itch or ache I’ve carried over this past decade. It’s been difficult to capture in words. If you’ve been through a major life transition, maybe you can relate to the idea that our golden friendships are the stable, deep, rooted loves of our lives. The silver ones aren’t replacements — they’re witnesses who offer a boundless sky and free range for the experimentation and play of our unfolding. Over time, alchemy happens and gold is made. But during transitions, the mixed metals of silver and gold are a treasure. (Crap, are you singing this now, too?)
If this landed in a tender place inside you and you can relate to feeling both loved and lonely in some of your longstanding relationships, I’m here to say that a circle of kindred strangers can be an absolute blessing and a soothing balm while going through a big change. I’ve been guiding circles like this for five years now, turning strangers into new friends, in the Midlife Emergence® group. It’s a ten week experience where eight to twelve women and nonbinary folks in the middle of their own becoming meet each other and connect where they might feel most alone in their midlife journeys. Applications are open now through August 20th. We begin in mid-September. You can read about it here, and if you have a question about whether it's your circle, reach out to me.
listening to: so many podcasts about comedy and comedic writing! I think Handsome opened the door, and now I realize I’m listening mostly to comics. (I’m also watching Hacks and reading Adult Braces - what’s happening?!) My current pod rotation is Good Hang with Amy Poehler, Working It Out with Mike Birbiglia, It’s Open with Ilana Glazer, Las Culturistas with Matt and Bowen, Two Dykes and a Mic with Rachel Scanlon and McKenzie Goodwin, etc…
watching: Heartstopper Forever — the 4th season of one of our favorite TV shows came out as a movie instead of a season. I hate to say it, but while it was sweet to revisit these characters, we found the movie to be repetitive and unsatisfying.
trying: a new yoga studio in my neighborhood… I haven’t done yoga in community in eons, but I’m needing the extra accountability and community a group naturally offers. (You, too? 😉)
avoiding: onions. I’m not allergic, but lately when I eat them, they seem to permeate every cell of my body and even my nighttime dreams. Why am I like this? 🧅
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