3 more days to go…
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I am another who has more female friends than male friends. One of my male friends I have known for 30 years or so and introduced him to his wife. Another male friend is someone who used to work for me and we developed a friendship then and it continued after that. I have a few school friends that I have recently reconnected with thanks to the web. Mostly though, my friends are female and have been throughout my life. A couple of them are exes and we have remained in contact and meet up as and when. I also keep in touch with a couple of women I got to know via work and meet up about every other month for a walk.
When I first retired I did so in the area I had lived in for 30 years and I often met up with less close friends by chance as we wandered around and would often go for a coffee or a drink. Since moving, those unplanned meet-ups have all but ended, unless I am visiting my old area. I do miss those unplanned catch-ups and I haven’t got to know enough people in my new area yet to make this a regular occurrence. Also, I don’t go to the pub these days and that was where a lot of my friendships were made with people who shared common interests in music etc.
Am I lonely, not really but I do feel that at times I lead a solitary life. Being single it would be nice to have a couple of friends to go to do things with, I am happy to go to galleries etc alone but I do sometimes miss having a person to chat with about the experience. Until I moved I did have a couple of friends I would do this with but like me, they were in the process of life cycle and lifestyle changes. As a result, we have drifted apart and meet-ups are much less frequent.
And @Pete_the_painter . I would like to have that as well. I love a good philosophical chat, or really, just a chat about anything. I only have one male friend whom I see when we get together as couples, as his wife is a good friend of my wife.I did have one very good friend that I connected with about 5 or 6 years back who died in the first year of covid.
Even keeping in contact through emails and texting is enough to remain part of each other’s lives and are easy ways to connect, but the guys I know don’t text or email any more than one of two words at a time as they lump any type of that communication into it being ‘social media’ and not something that should be perpetuated. Very old and closed-minded of them, I feel.
So I also spend a lot of time alone, but fortunately the wife and I get along very well and on a daily/weekly basis, do things together. She actually doesn’t have many friends either, despite the fact that we’re both quite pleasant socially … or so we believe. 
However, I did retire about 12 years ago and seem to be becoming quite used to the lack of friends situation. Thankfully, I like myself and have a fair number of interests that I enjoy. We will be moving house over the next year or two, and who knows, maybe I’ll meet some people worth knowing around the new digs.
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I hope so David. It can be very difficult when you feel you want to connect with people but they they have their own priorities and agendas and so are not necessarily very receptive. Hopefully at the new place you’ll meet some like-minded people. It may only take one really and things can snowball from there. Best of luck.
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Hi Ian, not quite 64, so I can still claim the lyrics don’t apply to me yet! But yes you right, growing old ain’t for wimps. Carpe Diem and all that. Wishing you the best with the choices you have to make, sadly there is no instruction manual.
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Stuart Turner is the man for Ford RS owners. He was the man behind Ford Motorsport and responsible for the Sierra Cosworth.
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Brilliant and thought-provoking discussion. Timely for me also. After a year of relentless health issues, largely out of the blue, I find myself at the start of an ill-health retirement process, which may of course turn into nothing more than an ill-health dismissal and a massively reduced pension. It is massively anxiety inducing but it is what it is. Things cannot continue as they were. They would simply serve to exacerbate my ill health on multiple fronts.
In terms of retirement itself I have good role models in my parents who were fortunate enough to retire in their early 50s more than 30 years ago. My mother fair accelerated into retirement, filling her hours with things to do, new and old and friends to see, whilst my father went the opposite way and sought quiet and genteel leisure (aside from his infamous entry into the over 60s Squash World Cup). They have found a nice accommodation between the 2. Similarly I think between friends, the garden, music, playing guitar and recording, comedy, cinema, films and football I’ll be just fine.
The friendship thing is interesting. As a child I was characterised as a bit of a loner although I have subsequently learnt enough about my vision to appreciate that if one struggles to make and retain eye contact and to read body language then all relationships are difficult to establish. Interestingly, I have always had 1 or more female friends and I suspect that, putting aside much common ground, I now suspect is because I’m seen as safe precisely because there is minimal eye contact and body language to be read and little chance for misinterpretation of what our relationship is.
From the 6th form onwards I developed a small group of male friends and although there’s 50 miles and more between us (a fair amount if all you have is public transport in my case) we meet at least twice a year and sometimes more. We lost touch as they married and had children but a chance encounter between myself and 1 of the group reignited us all.
I note what others say about the differences between their male and female friendships but I think it’s dangerous to make generalisations. My male friends will certainly talk football but we’ve zero interest in stuff like cars and will often talk music and other cultural stuff and as the years have passed we’ve seen other sides of each other and shared losing parents; losing a chid; increasing health issues and so on. It’s infrequent but essential. Gutted that the next time out I’ll be in Berlin and at a gig but we’ll catch up soon enough. I lost my closest friend before he hit 50. Found dead in a house we thought he’d left many years earlier. Long story but it was an eye opening lesson in what happens when you compertmentalise your life and allow others to do that to you. I won’t feel guilty about his death. It was his choice but all of us realised we’d missed so many clues for years. My next closest friends are in Cardiff, Crawley and Newcastle so we use Leeds as a compromise and try to do that once a year outside of visiting each other.
On a day to day basis then I’ve no-one local to go to the pub with and largely I wouldn’t anyway. Nowadays if I want a conversation then it’s coffee and cake. I’m not a group person anyway. Largely because my eyes and ears struggle to follow stuff unless it’s one to one but also because groups do tend to take comedic turns when sometimes some of the group want a serious and supportive conversation.
As regards female friends I binned my closest aged 25. Still have pangs of regret about that but overall it was the right decision for many reasons. In recent years I have cultivated 3 friends with very different backgrounds. 1 has the same eye conditions as me. 1 I met at a union conference and we’ve stayed in touch on and off since. 1 is the age of my step-daughter. Worked with her for 6 months and we sinmply got on. Very easy to misinterpret that kind of thing but that’s not who I am or will ever be. If/when I finish work I will likely stay in touch with 1 or 2 people but that’s all it will be. Staying in touch more than friendship. Texting. That kind of thing.
I hesitate to do the “my wife is my best friend” thing. We work fantastically well together although she goes through long periods where she doesn’t see this at all. Over the years it’s become clear we have very different approaches to friendships. Hers are essentially work colleagues for as long as they’re there and after that there’s just family. She doesn’t understand female friends at all and assumes that all are “after something”. Hilarious but also a tad depressing to me that after all these years she doesn’t see my anxiety at the mere thought of such stuff. She could not contemplate the idea of female friends. She thinks all my male friends are “odd” in some way. Maybe they are but I’ve known some since I was 12; some since I was 16 and some since I was 18 or later. Vive la difference.
I can’t explain the need for female friends. They don’t, for me, serve a different function to male friends. My friends are simply people I get on with for a wide variety of reasons. Put them in a room together and they likely wouldn’t see any common ground at all bar me. It doesn’t matter. They all get on with me.
Nevertheless, as many others here have mentioned, I also have no-one nearby day to day and that leaves me wondering whether I too am in some ways lonely. I’m not convinced I am. I have learnt enough about myself over the years to appreciate just how much I love my friends, geographically distant as most of them are, but I also know how much I enjoy the quiet company of family and my own company. The balance for each of us is different I guess. I have a little FOMO with regards exactly the sorts of people who do get together as a group and drink etc. but then the reality of that is also quite stark. It’s just as often people doing that because they’ve never learned how to live with themselves and so I guess, for me, things are not perfect but they are okay.
All that said, I have also found common ground with complete strangers with only the common ground of health to start withand that has been life changing in all the best ways. It strikes me that whilst it’s not a substitute for a daily trip to the pub there are several of us here who should take our life in our hands; find a geographic compromise and maybe meet up with zero discussion of hifi. It’s clear here many of us feel the same anxieties.
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I have found the keeping female friends, difficult if not impossible over the years, once partnered or married to an individual one. I kind of get that but miss the intellectual and cultural differences of female friends , no more, that I have met over the years. I would find it difficult if my wife were to re friend someone from her past, but if she had a friendship at the time we met, then I don’t think I would have been uncomfortable with her keeping that friendship going. Sadly the reverse was never possible.
Other friends, I now have none in regular contact. I have two that I occasionally hear from or contact to see how they are. On the other hand they are the only two, either of which would turn up at my door if I was in trouble, or me at theirs.
In terms of loneliness, I have been in the past when unexpectedly single, and particularly while recovering after a nasty rta. No doubt I will be again if anything untoward happened to my wife. With her there is no loneliness as such but post Covid I do miss my lone trips away with car track clubs where the predominantly males could gather in the evenings, share stories and thoughts and generally talk rollocks over a drink or three. I don’t think its an age thing for me. I’ve always enjoyed a party but visitors are always welcome, as long as they don’t want to stay too long. 
The internet has probably helped in that respect, particularly post covid. Car and hifi forums allow me to share thoughts and create a connection however virtual with people who have similar views on some of the things I enjoy.
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David you’ve got more important things to worry about I’ve just read that Canadas maple syrup stocks are the lowest they’ve ever been. That’s a national disaster.
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Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Pete!
Good God … this is terrible, it’s difficult to type with my hands shaking so much. If the shortage goes on too long, there’ll be a Civil war as our national economy callapses.
I don’t know whether to stock up on maple syrup or ammunition …
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Thank you, I hope you’re right. It would be nice change to have happen.
Good friends are hard to find. I didn’t make it easy for myself to make friends when I moved to Nuremberg in 1991, as I wasn’t yet completely fluent in German, but the guitar brought me into into contact with plenty of casual acquaintances. When I moved to Munich in 2015 I made a point of seeking contact with Anglophones and went along to a few beer garden events, but didn’t really warm to the people there. There was even a guy from my home country who I thought might be interesting to befriend until I realized he was a bore.
My wife and I have a few married couple friends with which to eat in and out, but my closest friends go right back to school and uni days. Now they live in Lyon, Dublin, Cork, London, Glasgow, Cadiz, Brisbane, all over the place.
The bond formed with friends when growing up together is hard to break, all you have to do is stay in touch. I share a Whatsapp group with all my old classmates and get on better now with most of them than I ever did at school. It was a boarding school in Ireland (at that time with girls in the last two years) and the things we went through together there have bonded us for life. Talking about those times with the others I didn’t realize that at least one of them cried themselves to sleep at night.
In later years my wife and I had friends borne out of common situations, like single parenting, but when we were no longer single parents but patchwork, the foundation of the friendships crumbled and we just aren’t close any more and have actually lost close friends completely over silly misunderstandings.
The biggest problem with friends, as I watched with my parents, is that you or they pass on at some point and the group gets smaller. That’s when loneliness can really set in if you aren’t lucky enough to have met your natural partner to share your life with. I don’t really feel the need to go out with the lads; I find my wife’s company more fulfilling. Having said that, my two boys (13 and 15) want to spend more lads time together with me, so me, them and a friend have booked a week’s charter boat with skipper in the Adriatic in May. That should satisfy the need for boys’ romps for a while! 
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Catching up on this thread today after a while has been most thought provoking. It’s 3 1/2 years since retirement was thrust upon me and a good time to reflect on what has been good and what less so. I think I am pretty much over the mourning period now though the anger still erupts from time to time. With other half still working pat time there is less time for shared activities so the food bank fills in some time. Like HH I also miss friends and with relatively few close geographically and in numbers keeping in touch is important though I recognise I have generally made the running so need to gauge how much is reciprocated. New friends have come from elevating virtual acquaintances to f2f through wine lunches and dinners both locally in the north west (usually Manchester) and in London. It’s not a very cheap hobby though but with more wine than I can drink on my own taking a bottle or two to a good lunch works for me. The vicarious enjoyment of others vinous choices on the forum is also very good fun.
I have noticed time has speeded up as well as I slow down. Consequently the need to make the most of what is available is a priority and with kids in Finland and South Africa and 4 grandkids getting bigger every day there is always an excuse to travel.
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Glad I’m not the only one who has noticed this, the older I get the less hours there seems to be in each day, either that or there are less minutes in each hour its one or the other.
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If married then it would seem very odd, to most people, to be socialising with another female on one’s own. Going to the pub or for a meal together, going for walks, discussing things etc, etc. That kind of intimacy would be seen by most people as inappropriate. Maybe it shouldn’t be, but the fact is that there are social norms and this is outside of that for the majority of people.
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Same here. To the point where I am forced to query how my wife and I managed to ever fit everything in when we were at work full-time. I thought it was just us - that we planned our time poorly!
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For me, this highlights a particularly important point, Willliam. My wife and I spend a fair amount of time together and enjoy each other’s company, but we have our own interests and hobbies of course. But we had three daughters, so my entire family life has been me and four girls which though it has been plenty of fun along the way, there is always been a male camaraderie component missing.
I have mentioned this situation to my wife, maybe four or five times throughout our life together but I don’t think she really gets the full significance and my daughters certainly don’t. So I think that I’ve just gotten very used to zero male companionship on a day-to-day week-to-week basis, except when we get together as couples.
Other than this, there seem to be many similarities in the various events for each of us that causes or brings us to the situations where we end up having a hard time finding solid male companionship in our later years.
And @Quickben mentioned in his post that one has to judge reciprocation to decide if there really is an interest on the other side. People that one gets together with can appear to have a very enjoyable time and I wonder sometimes if it’s just laziness, or perhaps they’re insecure, or possibly they really don’t enjoy your company as much as it seemed. Either way after the 3rd or so, one way only prompt, I drop it.
But then, people can just be quite odd at times, so who knows? But if we had three sons instead of three daughters, I’m sure things would be quite different. I do get along very well with my daughters though and I appreciate that very much.
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Of course when you really get old finding the energy to back up the motivation will be the problem.
When you are managing five hours of sleep on a good night there will be time a’plenty. Believe me.
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