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One woman’s quest to find friends at 40

After marriage, kids and a career, Cari Shane Parven was still missing something: girlfriends. In this essay from the book "Knowing Pains," she writes about how she ended up 40 and friendless.
/ Source: TODAY books

After marriage, kids and a career, Cari Shane Parven was still missing something: girlfriends. In this essay titled "Finding Friends at Forty" from the book "Knowing Pains," she writes about her quest for companionship.

Finding Friendship at Forty
I spent my childhood surrounded by estrogen: my mother, my dog, my teachers, and the 42 female classmates with whom I spent first through twelfth grade. There was a little testosterone, floating in the puddles of urine — my brother’s pee — that I stepped in (in the bathroom) every morning before school, and in the rings of my father’s pipe smoke wafting through our New York City apartment. Other than that, the first half of my life was all about women.

Yet two decades later, as I slid toward 40, excited to celebrate this brand new segment of my life, I found I had no female friends, good friends, to cheer me on. I was happily anticipating turning 40 because it was going to be my decade. Whereas the 20s had been about creating my family — finding my husband, marrying him, and having kids — and the 30s were about staying home to raise those kids, the 40s were going to be about me. 

But I was alone. Friendless. I stood in my house considering my life, conjuring up the images of all the women I had known, counting up the years we’d been together, then counting up the years we hadn’t been togetherand then wondering what had happened. Up until that moment I had not seen my lack of good friends as a problem. But as 40 approached — “half way to 80,” I would say — I found myself searching for that elusive something that I wasn’t getting from my husband and children. Instinctively, I knew what was missing — friendship. I even knew where to find it. The problem was that I didn’t have it.

So, why didn’t I have friends? I mean I’m no ogre. I love people, I love meeting people, and I actually make friends quite easily. I love the Barbara Streisand song, “People,” and I don’t find it one bit embarrassing to admit that I even have part of the lyrics, “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world” emblazoned on my high school yearbook senior page. My husband likes to say of me, “she could make a friend in a phone booth.” 

Yet there’s a line between friend and good friend or best friend, and I’d failed at “good” and “best.”  I never learned how to takefriendship up a notch. I lacked follow through, and thus I lost all — if not most — of my friends. Friendship, you see, is an investment of time and self —  I hadn’t known that. It took me four decades to find that out.

As a child I went to a small school; I had the same group of girlfriends for twelve years.  There wasn’t much work involved in maintaining friendships then. It didn’t take a lot of effort to stay in touch, to see each other and hang out. My best friends and I saw each other everyday at school and, growing up in Manhattan, if I wanted to see them after school or on the weekends, all I had to do was walk a few blocks from my apartment to theirs. It was easy. 

When I went away to a small college, I made new friends. Again, it was easy. I had loads of female acquaintances, but now most of my good friends were men. Having grown up in an all-girl environment, I think I was hungry for male companionship. But male friendship doesn’t generally work out in the long run. Remember what Harry said, in When Harry Met Sally: Men and women can never really be just friends because sex always gets in the way. I actually understand what he meant. Some of my male friends had unrequited crushes on me; others I had unrequited crushes on. One by one, my male friends lost their hearts and attention to their girlfriends. I had invested so much time in my male friendships that by the time I graduated from college I hadn’t found that female pal I hoped I’d have forever. 

I hardly noticed at the time because I still had the truest friends a girl could ever want: my childhood friends. We were all back in the city, a pre-Sex and the City bunch, meeting for brunch on Sundays, and in bars and restaurants during the week. It lasted for years until we scattered like the wind starting our careers and families. With no Internet to help us keep in touch, we used snail mail and phone conversations. I wasn’t one for the telephone, and eventually found that the calls dwindled until they were few and far between. But again, I hardly noticed because I was falling head over heels for my future husband. He filled the void left by my childhood friends and so I didn’t realize that I’d let my best friends in the world slip away. I sailed through my 20s energized by the love and affection of my dream guy. 

My 30th birthday came and went without much fanfare. I was in the throes of motherhood with a one-year-old and a newborn. Other than an elaborate dinner with my husband, celebration was out of the question. I was busy and not yet aware that besides lacking sleep, I was lacking friendship. After all, I had my husband. 

“Who’s your best friend?” my children would ask me when they learned to talk.

“Daddy,” I’d say proudly, truly proud to call my husband my best friend. I loved the way it sounded. To my ears, it made me seem better than those women who didn’t consider their husband their best friends. I believed I needed no more than my husband to fill me up emotionally. I believed that he was my true “BFF” and that he understood me as no female ever had. 

“No!” they’d scream. “Daddy is your husband, who’s your best friend?”

My children asked me this question over and over through the years, ad nauseam as children do. Then, over time, the answer, the realization, crept into my consciousness: I didn’t have one. I didn’t have a true best friend. I had abandoned woman-kind. 

I had let my friends down. I had, in actuality, been a bad friend. I used my dislike of the phone as an excuse for my limited capacity to follow up and follow through. I was a friend who remembered birthdays but forgot to send a card or make a call. I was a friend who failed to send condolence notes because I wasn’t sure what to write, when the words really didn’t matter. I was a friend who failed to bring dinner to a friend who really needed a homemade meal. 

The realization was hard to take. It actually took years to digest and felt a lot like acid reflux — painful and a recurring reminder of what I’d lost. But as with any kind of pain, you either live with the discomfort or do something to feel better. So, the night before my 40th birthday, I made a resolution. I committed myself to finding friends and figuring out how to build them, keep them, and invest in them.

I went straight to my childhood friends to plead my case and discovered babies who had been born when I hadn’t even known of pregnancies; parents who had died when I hadn’t even known of illnesses; degrees that had been earned, jobs that had been lost, and moves that had been made. I got on the phone and got an earful. I got on the phone and promised to be there, in sickness and in health, in good times and bad, as long as we both shall live, and I meant it.

In the three years since my resolution I have fostered four fabulous friendships. Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s actually a lifetime for me — one from every decade of my life. I have many acquaintances, as I always did, but I have four friends (one from my childhood, one from my college years, one from early parenting and one from the present day) upon whom I can rely.  And I’m learning how to let my friends rely on me. Because they are so wonderful, because they are such good friends, they are willing to stand by me while I learn even if it means yelling at me because I have forgotten to call them back — again. I still hate the phone but I’ve learned to multi-task by bringing my cell on walks with the dog. I’ve also realized that even if I don’t feel like talking at the exact moment a friend has called, she might be the one who needs me. I’ve learned to text, which is a fast, easy way to stay in touch and of course, I’m madly in love with e-mail — a brilliant form of communication.

What I have found is that these friends, these four amazing women, fill an indescribable void that can’t be filled by my family. It’s a void children can’t fill because they are natural takers.  It’s a void a husband can’t fill because no matter how in touch he is with his “feminine side,” the fact is that men just don’t think, listen or talk like women. So, as I slide through the fourth decade of my life I see how I’ve come full circle, back to the comfort of my early estrogen nest. It’s a wonderful, comfortable place held together with love and companionship, understanding and commiseration. It lacks judgment and is overflowing with support. It’s a security net woven of women, by women and for women. 

Cari Shane Parven (42) is a former television reporter, based in Potomac, Maryland. Her perfect day would include a morning swim, a day of skiing (preferably in Montana) and an evening on her laptop writing about human behavior. Her dream as a child was to be like Jane Goodall sitting in the forest among the chimps or Margaret Mead observing the natives in Samoa. As a mother of three and wife to one, she can do neither. So instead, she blends into the culture around her and writes about what she sees. Her observations can be found in her two blogs, "Inside the Beltwayand Under the Radar"and "Keepin' It Real."  

Excerpted from “Knowing Pains: Women on Love, Sex and Work in Our 40s,” edited by Molly Tracy Rosen. Text copyright (c) 2009 by Margaret Tracy Rosen, reprinted with permission from WingSpan Press. For more from the book, click here.