Friendless After 60

Every Saturday, my next-door neighbor goes out for coffee with a group of high school friends. They’ve been doing it for years. Now in their 60s, they have stayed close despite time, distance, and years spent living abroad. Their bonds even endured a war that tore marriages and families apart. If you detect a hint of envy here, it’s because I do envy them.

How does one acquire friends that stick? You know the type—the ones who stand by your side regardless of time or distance. I seem to have developed a knack for losing friends rather than making them. Or perhaps I just never learned how to keep them around.

Early on in elementary school I was inseparable from two classmates, Dean and Igor. We went to school together, both figuratively and literally, walking the route side-by-side every day. Igor lived along my path; some mornings I’d arrive to find the two of them already waiting to fall into step with me. If I was early, I’d ring Igor’s bell, and together we’d walk around the next building to pick up Dean.

During recess, we spent every spare minute laughing at inane inside jokes or engrossed in the deeply philosophical discussions only ten-year-olds are capable of. After the final bell, we rushed home, parted briefly to dump our school bags, and ran right back outside to goof around the neighborhood.

Due to a hole in my memory, I can’t recall much of what we actually talked about or the games we played. But I do remember countless hours pushing our bicycles while walking side-by-side—because you can’t easily hold a conversation while riding—and just talking. People called us the Three Musketeers, a tired cliché for any trio of close friends, but we loved it.

Our friendship lasted until the very last day of elementary school. We vowed to keep it up after summer break, despite enrolling in different high schools. We still lived in the same neighborhood, after all, so getting together wouldn’t be a problem. Except, by the end of the summer, Dean’s family had moved away and Igor’s classes were scheduled on the opposite shift from mine. I never saw them again.

Around that time, I started practicing judo. I had actually wanted to do kung fu—I idolized Bruce Lee and had seen all his movies. Since there was no kung fu club in town, my dad decided that judo was a close enough substitute. "They wear kimonos, too," was his logic. Conveniently, there was a bar right next to the judo club where he could quench his insatiable thirst while waiting to drive me home. You might think that wasn’t much of a reason to enroll in a sport, but I stuck with it for the next fifteen years. Dad, on the other hand, lasted only a year before taking his drinking away from judo, my mother, and me.

There were five of us on the judo team, all spanning different weight categories. When people saw us walking down the street, they joked that we looked like the Dalton brothers from the Lucky Luke comics, especially when we lined up from shortest to tallest. We shared the sweat and pain of training, played endless practical and impractical jokes on each other, traveled far and wide for tournaments, and witnessed each other’s best and worst moments. Naturally, we hung out every spare second and even vacationed together during the summers. Eventually, all five of us enrolled at the same university. You’d think a decade and a half of shared history would form a bond strong enough to last a lifetime. Isn’t that how it happens in books and movies?

At university I discovered a knack for photography. By our final year, while my buddies were jockeying for lifelong roles within judo clubs and sports associations, I was contributing photos to a sports magazine. That eventually led to a full-time photojournalism gig at a newspaper. I traveled extensively for assignments. When I was back in town, I’d meet up with the gang for a drink.

At first, I’d just slide into my usual seat, take some good-natured ribbing about "Mr. Journalist" being "too big" for their mundane problems, and the night would dissolve into our usual banter and laughs. Even so, the gap between us was widening—imperceptibly at first, then faster, until it became insurmountable. Every time we met, it took me a fraction longer to react to the inside jokes. They had to put in more effort to draw me into the conversation until, at last, they stopped trying. The banter continued over and around me. I became an observer, an outsider watching old friends have fun. I had lost the common thread that bound us, and in turn, I lost them.

I don’t want you to think for a moment that I blame them for this drift. If anyone is to blame, it’s me for not trying harder.

As a footnote: we tried to reconnect thirty years later, after I retired and moved back home. It was a disaster! By then, we were complete strangers. For a few minutes, we reminisced about the people we used to know and exchanged brief updates on our current lives. Then the conversation dried up. We sipped our drinks in uncomfortable silence and parted with the quick, insincere promise to keep in touch. Instead, we did the opposite, vanishing from each other’s lives one last time.

Croats have a saying: "Daleko od očiju, daleko od srca"—far from the eyes, far from the heart. It is usually meant to describe the futility of long-distance relationships, and it proved prophetic for my friendships.

After a few years of working in Croatia, my career took me across the ocean to Canada, far from the new friends I had made in the newsroom since my judo days. True to the proverb, despite emails and phone calls, being far from sight meant being far from mind. By the end of my first year abroad I hardly heard from anyone back home. This time it wasn’t for lack of trying. Simply put, my emails went unanswered and my phone calls unreturned. Eventually, I focused on building a new life in a new country and making new friends.

Fast-forward almost thirty years and here we are: my wife and I, back in Croatia, enjoying our retirement by the sea. Once again, we left a network of friends behind, this time across the ocean. Since our big move, many of them have come to visit us here. Once. We showed them around our town; we drove them across the region and the country. They all loved it. But we secretly fear that most of them simply used our hospitality as an opportunity to visit a small, exotic country that everyone is talking about. It feels as though they came to see the sights, not necessarily to spend time with us. Because once they checked Croatia off their bucket list they show no intention of returning.

Of course, we loved having them and we genuinely enjoyed showing off the hidden gems around our new home. But deep down, we wished someone would have said, "Don’t worry about driving me around. I just want to sit on the porch and spend a few days with you, because I miss you guys." So far, no one has.

That leaves me with the difficult task of making new friends yet again. Frankly, forging new friendships doesn’t get easier with age; on the contrary, I’ve become guarded and hesitant to open up to strangers. I am weary of opportunists who cozy up to a person just to take advantage.

Then, there is the cultural separator that sits between me and my surroundings like a semicolon in a sentence: while I was busy becoming Canadian, Croatia moved on its own course. Now I am here, speaking like a Croat, but thinking and behaving like a Canadian. My "Croatianness" is obsolete and my "Canadianness" is out of place. It is a frame of mind that people here can neither comprehend nor sympathize with. I am a living paradox. Who would want to befriend that?

Allow me to close with a few parting words of "wisdom" from a guy who didn't follow his own advice and lived to regret it: cherish your friends, keep them close, and stay in touch. Call them—not when you need something, but for no reason other than to ask how they are doing. Meet them as often as possible, and they may stick around for good.