In my twenties, I had a specific vision of what that decade would look like: an amorphous vision of a gaggle of friends who would assemble, no questions asked, to comfort you when something goes wrong.
The gang would be in constant communication via a dedicated WhatsApp group; break-ups would be eased with thoughtful and unexpected deliveries and the group would be always sitting around you – a secular Last Supper – helping you process.
But I never found this united group of likeable misfits, all bonded together, who I could spend working hours in coffee shops with.
There was no gang on hand for high jinks. I wasn’t part of any group where we could rely on each other to always rally around when the going got tough. Other than the woman who is now my wife, I didn’t feel as if I had close enough bonds with anyone to reach out when I was anxious or pissed off, let alone a whole parade of people I could talk to.
In fact, I spent much of my twenties feeling lonely – despite not being alone. I had a loving partner; family support; friends I would try and spend time with. But where, I wondered, was my gang?
My mental image of what my friendships should have looked like was obviously one pulled from pop culture: the stuff of sitcoms and movies where plotlines were limited to a core group of friends – between four and six – for practicality. Think Friends, obviously; also Sex And The City and Gossip Girl. And deep down, I knew that my longing for this kind of bond – one shared between several people – was a longing for something that didn’t really exist.
But at the same time, I couldn’t shake this sense that I was missing out. When I looked around me at people I knew, and would even consider to be my friends, it seemed that the groups were bigger in real life. I was on the periphery of people who had formed close bonds years ago and whose group only grew as time went on. It looked so easy for others to find and yet I couldn’t crack it. Instead, I circled on the outer edges, watching and longing. I couldn’t help but feel that being on the inside would cure what ailed me.
Because there’s another, accompanying message to the image of a big friendship group: that being with those friends through thick and thin is what your teens and twenties are for. They are how you get through the lows that you inevitably run into as you grow into adulthood, and they are the source of the exhilarating highs.
Working crappy jobs, dating awful people, living six people deep in flats designed to house two, often stumbling in together at 3am after an accidental night out: these were the experiences that were meant to define your twenties and help you carve out a semblance of who you are. And you couldn’t possibly get through them without the support of your friends.
I assumed that I was the problem. Perhaps my loneliness – an embarrassing, claggy emotion – was emanating out of me and pushed people away. Perhaps I was even more tactless and annoying than I berated myself as. I concluded that I was simply an unpleasant hang for most people, so I should simply let sleeping dogs lie. Focus on what I did have, rather than what I thought I lacked.
But as I got older, I came to a new understanding of why this big friend group was so out of reach for me.
I was the problem, just not in the way that I thought.
Because my supposed loneliness felt so encompassing, I was refusing to engage with what my subconscious was telling me – which is that I have always enjoyed being on my own. I would much rather do things to my timetable. I struggled to fill time with plans because a part of me, deep down, didn’t want to. I didn’t have the energy to keep up with relentless group chats, or the capacity to be around lots of people a lot of the time. And I would become scratchy, unpleasant and tactless once I reached my limit on social interaction.
These fundamental aspects of who I am make dreams of a big group of friends incompatible from both sides: I couldn’t keep up, and if I was honest with myself I often didn’t want to. So I would slip out of the rotation.
The tricky thing is not being a solitary person, I’ve realised. It’s that wherever you fall on the introvert/extrovert spectrum doesn’t save you from loneliness. It’s true you can be lonely in a crowd, but enjoying solitude doesn’t mean you don’t get lonely either.
Of course there are other factors that mean a cohesive, unified group of friends is impossible to maintain: life is expensive, working hours are long, and the housing market means even the closest of friends will be flung to different ends of cities or even countries.
Social media, too, has a lot to answer for – it reinforced the vision that this was something accessible to everyone but me, when the fact was I was the norm, not the anomaly.
Loneliness among young people is a growing problem and has been so since before the pandemic further isolated us. According to the Mental Health Foundation, nearly nine in 10 (88 percent) Britons aged from 18 to 24 said they experience loneliness to some degree with a quarter (24 percent) suffering often and seven per cent saying they are lonely all of the time.
For me complete solitude is too much – I enjoy about 80 per cent of it before I begin to feel that unbearable ache for connection.
Now I connect with my friends in a way that works with me, not against me. I embrace the individual friendships I’ve forged and no longer wish my friends were all bundled up in one convenient group. I now know I can manage at most three social plans every fortnight, and feel completely at peace with that. Any more and I become drained and need to spend a whole weekend curled on the sofa, knitting in hand, emptying my brain.
The idea of a group of people with whom you do everything is still an alluring one, but it is one I have let go of. It is not the answer to loneliness, or the thing that makes your twenties worth struggling through. The balm that soothes those experiences are far more personal and complicated to be easily sorted by a TV trope.
I now know I was not the problem: I was simply looking for answers in the wrong places. Learning to embrace myself was a long lesson, but has made me feel more happy and at ease with myself now than I ever did 10 years ago.
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