On golden friendship

What does it take to make it to a 50 year reunion with your friend group intact?

I’m on vacation with my mom this week for her high school reunion. This is now my second vacation with my mom where I see glimpses of her personality before kids. Last time, I saw her around her college friends. Now I get a peek into my mom as a high schooler, the messy years. And so, I am again thinking about friendships and how my mom maintained relationships from age 14 through now. (Mom, don’t worry. I won’t tell the internet your age.) What does it take for someone to stick with you through your growing pains for 50+ years?

Observing my mom with her friends I was interested in how close friends help us tap into parts of our personalities. The woman I know becomes a mediator between friends, a silent observer as tension brews, or a conspirator when good gossip comes her way. The circle stays closed because everyone shifts and moves with the group to keep everything moving.

My mom’s close friend commented how great it was to see certain classmates be their authentic selves. She responded to those in the group with whom she sensed realness versus a performance. Performance and authenticity were the words of the week going into their reunion. Who from high school could let go and be themselves and who wanted to project or protect an image to save face?

The friend and I joked that many of them were reverting to high school dynamics with me as the chaperone. Seeing these dynamics play out with my mom’s peers, I chuckled. The antics don’t change with age. Hopefully, I gain confidence and financial stability so the antics can be on a nice cruise and not at a basement party. So, the point seems not to be that you change so much from high school that your classmates don’t recognize you but that you evolve like a Pokemon.

Another theme: the women showed up and stayed in community with each other more consistently than the men. They also, on the whole, looked better. They were in touch with their teenage selves without sweating the could haves. They can laugh about being nerds or chasing after the wrong boy because everything happened as it was supposed to. Many of the men died before reaching even the 45th reunion or couldn’t bring themselves to come. Maybe the men couldn’t learn to have the same grace for their past selves. Maybe our male loneliness epidemic is about a capacity for grace for life’s unexpected turns. This grace for the self then allows a person going to a 50-year reunion to laugh versus clenching their brown with worry.

You can have fun for a few days with folks who not be core friends anymore but experienced you at a special moment in your life. A high school tv show I used to watch, Dawson’s Creek, (Yes, I know it’s melodramatic as hell) ended their series with the narrator sharing that the most powerful gift you can give yourself and others as a young person is forgiveness. Maybe making it to a 50^th year reunion with friendships intact is about grace for your teenage self and that grace also helps you keep in touch with the friends who helped you as you were finding yourself.

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