Home and Deranged
Trimming the friend fat at 25: When friendship is about quality, not quantity
As I approach 25, there's an old scene from Sex and the City wedged in my brain. It's Carrie's 35th birthday party, she's uncharacteristically upset by her singledom, and just as she's about to sink into a full-blown sulk, a girl behind her blows out her own candles: "25! FUCK, I'm old."
I'm not feeling old, per se, but certainly older.
When you’re 25, you should have come to some realizations. You’re enough years out of college to realize that while lively, living in a near-commune situation with your friends, funded by your parents and supervised by no one isn’t the best real-world prep.
At 25, it's time to trim the friend fat, and while you're sloughing off the excess, to cherish those whom losing would be like losing a limb.
It was, in the most literal sense, “unreal.”
When you’re 25, you should know what you want (new car), what you need (health insurance) and what you can’t live without (paper goods). It is, after all, a landmark age. Your car insurance goes down, your Texas driver's license is finally horizontal, and, as Jessica Simpson so eloquently put it on her televised 23rd birthday, "25 is, like, almost mid-twenties."
But of all the lessons learned (and to give credit where credit is due, most of them were passed along by my mother but then ignored), none is more prescient than, "No need to suffer fools gladly."
We seem to have a compulsion, especially as women, to hold on to every friend we ever had. We have the guilty sense that we've somehow failed if we allow ourselves to drift apart.
We graduate, we move away, we move on but yet we insist that WE will be the ones who keep it together, who are as close in 50 years as we were at 22, or 18, or whenever.
No band of women before us could have had what we had, because this bond is unbreakable. This group is unshakeable. The dynamic of these personalities can never be matched, and therefore MUST be preserved. And that's where we get into trouble.
You don't have to stay friends with everybody. What's more, you shouldn't. Some people suck. And at 25, (or almost-25) you get to effectively play the "I'm too old for this" card. You're too old to swallow their bullshit with a smile; too old to suffer those damn fools gladly.
There are countless reasons for the drift. Some friends fall into relationship quicksand, some develop evangelical tendencies (whether about religion, Bikram or gluten-free living) and some go to work for the GOP.
And to put it bluntly, life is too damn short to spend with people you don't enjoy, fun-suckers and dramaticists (not to be confused with dramatists, who are often lovely).
At 25, it's time to trim the friend fat, and while you're sloughing off the excess, to cherish those whom losing would be like losing a limb. The people you go to with equal urgency in times of despair and for hair advice, or upon the discovery of a particularly absurd meme. The friends you fly in a day early to see one-on-one before you have to put away the private jokes and join the wedding party.
All we need is a few good women, and at 25 we get to refocus the energy we used to spend staying friends with everyone and devote it to being a better friend to the ones that count.
