The Friendship Fade

... and other thoughts on making and maintaining friends throughout our lives, with Shirley Ort.

Last week, I had coffee with a friend I had not seen in perhaps a decade.

L. and I discovered that our lives had shifted tectonically—and similarly—since we’d last seen each other: She has been parenting neurodivergent children, and so have I. She has been supporting her nonbinary teen, and so have I. She had been expelled from her family of origin … and I had, too.

We shared many tears and bittersweet high-fives across our table that morning. We love the lives we lead and the families we have built, but we have been living through a time when not everyone sees what we see, feels what we feel, knows what we know. And we have been living through all of it without each other’s friendship.

L. thought I was too busy to get in touch—or worse, that I had stopped caring. And I entertained a thought spiral I’ve experienced before when my friendships appeared to fade: What if I reach out and receive no response? What if I’ve waited too long? What if it’s too late?

In fact, the friendship-fade question had been on my mind many weeks earlier when I contacted one of the wisest people I know for this newsletter. I knew Shirley Ort could teach a master class in the art of friendship.

She already had.

In 2014, she moved her friend and coworker, Fred Clark, into her home so she could care for him as he faced lung cancer. Ort already had a rather significant day job: As the associate provost and director of scholarships and student aid at UNC-Chapel Hill, she was considered the foremost expert on college access in the United States. She had created the Carolina Covenant, a no-loans aid program that has helped almost 8,000 students from families with incomes at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty line to graduate debt-free.

Yet, as Clark’s condition became grave, Ort considered retiring so she could be available full-time to Clark, a campus mentor who had been the Covenant’s heart.

In one of his last acts of friendship, he implored her to stay with the work. “You’re going to need the structure of the workplace, you’re going to need your friendships, and you’re going to need the purpose of work,” he had told her.

“When you’re a woman of my age, and you have a good friend who likes to go to T.J. Maxx and is also a good cook, who will be your escort anywhere …” Ort said of Clark, who died later that year. “It was just a deep, deep friendship.”

I asked Ort, who retired in 2016 and regularly speaks with friends who range from 20-something to 90-something, to help explain the art and soul of friendship. How do we keep the friendships that matter when life gets in the way? How do we ensure we’re giving as much as we’re receiving? And why is it so difficult to make new friends as we age?

Ort, left, in Zephyrhills, Fla., with friends Fred Gore (94) and Jayne Kerr (93). (photo courtesy Shirley Ort)

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Shirley, I’d love to know your thoughts on how friendship changes over time. I’m 51, and I have found it more challenging to make new friends the older I get.

I want to ask you: Why do you think that is?

I’ve wondered if we are so settled in our vision of who we are by middle age that we only look for people who are like us. That we’re pickier. But the kinder theory is that it’s just life, and people are busy.

I do think that, usually, it’s just life. Unless you have something out of the ordinary that brings people to you through community, [new close friendships] are hard to achieve as you get older. When I travel with groups of people my age (78), we all talk about this. It is a problem. When, as adults, do we have enough continuity and time together to sort out whether we’re a good fit?

So, the time and the places to grow friendships just naturally begin to fade.

Yes, I think so. I’ve met people [on trips] I would’ve liked more contact with. And so, then you start assessing, did I say something? And the answer to myself has been: No, they have very busy lives.

You’ve probably heard that saying about friendship: It’s for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. I find it’s really true. Some people come into our lives for a season, and we want it to be a lifetime. But things change.

I’ve experienced that over the years, for sure.

A woman who’d gone through a divorce came right out and said to my friend Deborah, ‘I’m really lonely. Do you have time to have coffee with me?’ Deborah truly had no time. But she said, ‘Would you like to meet Shirley? You live in the same neighborhood.’

So, we touched base. And one day, she rang my doorbell. She had two hot chocolates. She said, ‘Hi, I’m your new friend.’ We ended up traveling to Greece and stayed in pretty close contact until about 15 years ago. Then, her life got complicated with her parents, a move, and grandchildren. I realized it was for a season; it was great. I write every birthday, and we touch base, but it’s not the friendship where you stay connected.

It’s easy to feel like you are never doing enough to maintain your friendships, though.

It takes attention. You have to be purposeful. You have to be intentional about maintaining friendships. And that won’t ensure that it will always hold, but for the ones you really care about, you have to be intentional. For me, I keep cards and note paper. I still use mail often with friends because getting mail—when the U.S. Postal Service works, and it doesn’t always—is like getting a little present.

I really like that idea. Cards and letters feel more personal now that we communicate primarily by text, social media, or email.

This reminds me of another point I’d like to make: How we communicate with friends is really important. When I was 22 and at Western Michigan University,¹ I saw this quote [from English writer and poet Jean Ingelow] inscribed in big letters on the walls of the art department. I copied it down way back then:

Man dwells apart, though not alone,
He walks among his peers unread; 
The best of thoughts which he hath known, 
For lack of listeners are not said.

That really made an impression on me. When I think about sustaining friendships, I go back to that quote. If we can remember it on social occasions, it will be easier to make things less about “me” and to see the other person. I had a dinner party a couple of weeks ago, and after people left, I thought, Everybody was so amused by my stories about travel that I didn’t ask about Dan’s mother. That’s just human. As mindful as I am, I don’t always get it right. But I’ll double back and make sure I talk to him about his mom.

I just had dinner last week with a former student — our 19th dinner together since his first year in college. As I drove away, I thought, What is it, among all the students I engage with, that has sustained this friendship over the years? And I think the answer to that is true reciprocity. He checks in on me as much as I check in on him.

Is there anything that your lifelong friendships seem to have in common?

They’re all different. I have a friend who takes longer to respond, so I’m mindful of that. I have friends who just need me to listen. And Cheryl, who’s in her 60s now and is a retired judge, stops me from making assumptions. She was a student at Seattle Pacific University when I was the dean there [in the 1970s]. At a Christian college, the ones who are getting in trouble usually have the most going for them. She was one of those. She was on a list my assistant kept of students who needed a caring adult.

Cheryl said, ‘Maybe we could jog together.’ So I bought the first pair of tennis shoes I ever owned so I could be a good mentor and jog with her—which mostly meant that I stood there gasping. One day, she looked at me and said, ‘So are we going to become friends, or am I going to be like everybody else?’

She had observed that I had a pattern of attending to people, but it was a part of my job. It was professional caring. And she read right into it. It was arresting. Fifty years later, we’re the best of friends.

Amazing. Has she always done that for you through the years? Checked your assumptions?

She’s gotten more outspoken. Cheryl’s feedback to me this last year, in particular, has been about not acting old. Not seeding. Whenever I do things or say things that Cheryl characterizes as ‘older behavior,’ she’ll stop me. Last winter, she said, ‘Do you realize how often you talk about food?’

I had to laugh. My financial adviser had just told me, ‘I want you to do as much traveling right now as you want to because when you can’t travel anymore, the only thing left is food. That’s what old people talk about, is food.’ I thought, Oh my gosh, it’s happened.

Ha! I guess friendships can be good for challenging what you think about yourself.

That’s true. But you have to find the balance between demonstrating care and respecting someone’s decisions for themselves. I have to be mindful of it because I am used to problem-solving—that’s what I did in my career. Cheryl will confront me, and I welcome it because I’m not in many positions where people might feel free to do that. We all need feedback about our own little peculiarities. I find that satisfying because that’s real, too. ♣

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NEXT FRIDAY: The Sandbox: What I’ve learned so far from Other People’s Parents and how I’m folding those lessons into my life.

1. Ort earned an M.A. in medieval history from Western Michigan University in 1978. She has a B.A. in history from Spring Arbor College and a J.D. from Seattle University School of Law.