Friends of all ages

Friends of all ages

Posted on March 6th, 2024 by Scott Warnock

The new year, 2024–we’re way into it. It’s been too late for a while to say happy new year to someone. You no longer accidentally write “2023.” We’ve plunged in, and that dive for many includes r-r-r-resolutions. Dry January. I’m gonna start hitting the gym. Book clubs.

Let’s do something maybe a little easier. How about this year commit to making a friend younger or older than you?

This Charley Locke article in Vox “You should have more friends of all ages” suggested just that, saying, “Making friends with those outside of your age range — people 10 or 20 years older or younger than you — can be challenging. But those relationships can widen your world, providing perspective and community beyond your current experiences.”

(As a pleasant surprise, I had bookmarked this article when I decided to write about this topic, and when I opened it discovered a former Drexel student I know well was featured! Go Devin!)

A person I much admired, my former neighbor (sigh) Bob Heck, was to me a model of this. He had friends of all ages, and it seemed to make him a considerably more well-rounded person. As he aged, of course, those intergenerational friendships tended to be with younger people, those he mentored but also simply seemed to enjoy sharing his numerous hobbies and pastimes with.

People can of course diversify friendships and relationships in many ways, but leaping age barriers can provide a unique lens for taking in life, for all the expected reasons: Our younger friendships can help us look at things in new, fresh ways, and with an older friend we could share their vantage of experience.

This doesn’t mean older people have to walk around with a bunch of 20-year-olds saying “fire” and “cap,” or if you’re in the “fire” and “cap” crowd to go see 80-year-olds perform in classic rock bands, but making friends outside of your age bracket can help our perspectives be more flexible and nimbler.

I often think life does tend to push us toward rigidity of belief, starting even when we’re young, and making achronological friends seems a way to slow this. A great divide in human experience seems to be viewing others without valuing the viewpoint their age brings, and we don’t do enough to experience the first-hand experiences of those outside our age range.

As my daughter is finishing up grad school and preparing for a major geographic move, she started babysitting, and she is having the incredible opportunity to be around a baby, whose developmental milestones amaze her. While of course you don’t have a friendship with a baby, her marveling at these daily developmental milestones made me think about how we don’t maintain that sense of wonder. We instead see chronological others through lenses like “Those kids today!” or “Old people are so lame”?

Okay, baby milestones are easy–and fun!–to see, but there are such markers we could find in all of our relationships. As Locke wrote in the Vox article, “Different life stages offer and require different abilities: In your 20s, you may be looking for career advice and are able to help parents connect with a distant teenager; a new parent may be looking for a support system that can become part of their extended family; a recent retiree may have plenty of time but seek more day-to-day connection.”

Developing a friendship with someone much older or younger provides you with opportunities, and I think as does any relationship built around appreciation of others, these opportunities in the end enable us to slow down.

No matter our age, we could all use more of that.

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Scott Warnock

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.