Midlife is wild.
If you’re a parent, this is typically when you’re dealing with the transition from kid mum to teen mum or staring down the barrel of empty nesting. You may be supporting aging parents and their health changes. Even your own.
Added to that are the changing dynamics in your relationship due to the brain rewiring we’re undergoing (thanks to estrogen decline) and maybe just a realisation you don’t want to keep doing life the same way.
This is when many marriages change. And sadly, friendships too.
Recently I was speaking to a friend who was lamenting the friends whom she’d thought would be there during her hardest time in the past year, and was also surprised by new friends who really showed up for her.
Over the last 5 years, I’ve focused heavily on learning about midlife relationships. And the expectations and boundaries I had or hadn’t set have been blown apart.
Therapy has certainly helped me navigate much of this. But also living through it, and giving others as much grace as I was giving myself. One of the greatest concepts I came across about friendship survival was this;
Proximity. Interests. Life stage.
At school, in the mothers’ group, in an office you actually went to, friendship happened without effort. You saw the same people enough times that closeness snuck up on you.
Midlife takes most of that away.
The school gate closes. The mothers’ group graduates. A lot of us aren’t in an office anymore, or we’re working part-time by design, because bandwidth is the one resource none of us can borrow more of.
No natural collision point means no accidental friendships. If you want proximity in your 40s and 50s, you have to build it on purpose. Nobody’s building it for you.
Shared interests get you in the room. They don’t necessarily keep you in each other’s lives.
You can find someone who runs, has teenagers, and is white-knuckling their way through perimenopause exactly like you and still not click, because the interest overlaps but the way you each move through the world doesn’t.
Interests open the door. What happens after you walk through it is a different thing entirely, and it’s the bit most of us weren’t taught to look for.
Life stage is the one that blindsides people.
In your twenties and thirties, there were built-in checkpoints: engagements, first babies, the same exhausting toddler years, so you always had a cohort a few steps ahead or behind you doing the same thing.
Perimenopause doesn’t come with a group chat.
Nobody throws you a shower for it. You might be white-knuckling hormonal chaos while your closest friend is coasting through hers symptom-free, or watching a parent decline while yours are still doing Pilates twice a week. Same age, wildly different stage.
That mismatch is quiet, and it’s one of the main reasons friendships that felt unbreakable in your thirties go quiet in your forties. Nobody did anything wrong.
The stages just stopped lining up.
When all three line up- proximity, shared interests, matching stage- friendship is easy. It’s basically automatic.
The problem is midlife rarely hands you all three at once anymore.
So the friendships that survive are the ones where you and the other person decided to keep choosing each other even when one of the three dropped away.
Running a community of midlife women taught me something I didn’t expect. Almost everyone is surviving. Not thriving, not failing either, just surviving and trying their best with whatever they’ve got left at the end of the day.
Not everyone is open about that. A lot of women carry it quietly, so what looks like someone not showing up is often someone who simply doesn’t have the capacity to.
That’s the bit I had to learn the hard way. Things get neglected. Messages go unanswered for weeks. Not because people don’t care, but because they’re out of bandwidth, same as you probably are on your worst days.
Unless you’ve got proximity, shared interests or lifestage, reaching out has real obstacles built into it. It’s not always as simple as picking up the phone.
As a neurospicy person, rejection sensitivity doesn’t make any of this easier. My brain wants to read silence as a verdict. She doesn’t care. I’ve done something wrong. It takes work to override that and remember the more likely story: she’s tired, she’s stretched, she’s carrying something I can’t see.
So I’ve learned to give people the grace I hope they give me. Life at this stage can be genuinely beautiful. It can also be genuinely hard. Most of us are doing both at once, which is probably why friendship here looks so different to how it did at twenty-five.
I’ve spent the last couple of years rebuilding from the ground up, one pillar at a time. If you’re at the beginning of that process, Choose Yourself is where I’d tell you to start.
