For many years I followed a no-new-friends ethos, one that became cemented in popular culture with the 2013 release of the track “No New Friends” by DJ Khaled, featuring Drake, Rick Ross and Lil Wayne.
The logic holds that only established friendships are true and trusted, because they have endured, and since they have endured, there is no space or utility for new friends.
But under even the mildest scrutiny, this reasoning crumbles. All friends were new at some point. What a no-new-friends policy truly points to is a rising risk aversion as we age that can, in the end, be socially crippling.
I’ve come to better appreciate that there are stages and levels of friendships, that they exist as a dynamic constellation — some people spinning into it and others out, some closer to you and others farther away — all holding their own value in your life and you in theirs.
This idea of an ever-evolving web of connections I once thought of as chaotic, but now I’m exhilarated by the churn and renewal.
I don’t believe this requires the suspension of discernment or an embrace of recklessness. Instead, it requires that we regard our emotional boundaries as more picket fence than stone wall.
We must continuously allow people into our lives, with caution and care, of course, but in nonetheless.
We must also learn to let them out. We must allow dimming friendships to sunset, and do so without acrimony, treasuring the fact that they existed in our lives at all and remembering with fondness the times shared.
Tearing down walls
Two things helped me to clarify my idea of friendship, both related to aging.
One was my mother’s relaxing relationship to friendship as she has aged. Now in her 80s, she has become friends with people whom she once kept at a distance. Their minor disagreements and petty animosities have melted away. They are the survivors, those whom life has chosen and wisdom rewarded. They know what matters in the end: human connection.
The other was moving to Atlanta just before I turned 50. In my decades in New York, I had settled into what felt like a natural pattern: treating the friends I first met in the city as my only true friends and severely restricting new friendships, even as some old friends drifted away.
When I moved, that pattern was disrupted. I was thrown into newness, an unfamiliar social ecosystem in which most people were new to me. Suddenly, the idea of being open to new friendships felt both prudent and normal.
When we are young, we are encouraged to make fast friends, to be open and unguarded. But somewhere along the way we lose that openness, having been burned by betrayal, wanting to limit pain and disappointment.
However, I now think of our openness to new friendships existing as an inverted bell curve: very open when we are young, less open when we become adults and more open again as we grow older.
For as long as the world feels vast and ever expanding, there is no pressing need to replenish or refresh our pool of friends. But as we move into our latter years and friends begin to fall away — they relocate, they die, they transition into phases of their own lives that leave little room for us — our resistance to new friends starts to feel silly and shallow.
That is where I now find myself.
And this is particularly important to me since the surgeon general last year declared loneliness an epidemic in this country with particularly deleterious effects: “The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity.”
Furthermore, a 2020 study, noting that “having friends in old age is linked to higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction,” found that for those 65 and older, “encounters with friends” throughout the day were more pleasant and “were associated with fewer discussions about stressful experiences,” compared with encounters with romantic partners or family members.
Friendship and love
Of course, opening oneself up to new friends at any age is not without risk, but it’s risk worth taking. There is no love without risk, and no true courage without it, either.
One measure of love is to allow another to bypass our defenses, to get close enough to hurt us, to receive them with tenderness and trust, to expose to them the soft, vulnerable place under our wings.
That is where the danger lurks, but accepting the possibility of injury as a consequence of endearment is what marks us as being fully alive.
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No heart that has truly loved survives the journey unscarred.
I first read Kahlil Gibran’s “On Love” when I was a college student interning at The New York Times, and his words have stuck with me ever since, particularly his admonition that pain is a part of love, that “even as love crowns you so shall he / crucify you,” and therefore part of the desire in loving is “To know the pain of too much tenderness. / To be wounded by your own understanding of love; / And to bleed willingly and joyfully.”
Friendship is its own kind of love, what the ancient Greeks called “philia,” and must be regarded and managed as such.
So now, if the question is whether I want to make new friends in my 50s, the answer comes without hesitation: Yes, please!
Charles Blow is a New York Times columnist.
