Friends Take Years, and Time Feels Short

At home, you did not notice how long your friendships took, because you were living them.

By Neil Solomon · 3 min read

Picture a couple named Dana and Paul. They moved to a Gulf city eight months ago. People at the building are friendly. Dana has been invited for coffee twice. But neither she nor Paul has anyone they could call at ten at night.

I read two stories about this, from two countries, and they show two sides of the same wish.

Oman. A woman writes that the people she met were warm, kind and welcoming. And still, real friends were harder to find than she expected. I read this as a gap between welcome and closeness. A welcome can happen in one afternoon. Closeness grows from seeing someone again and again over a long time, and from having something to share besides being new. I think many of us expect the first to turn into the second faster than it does.

The United Arab Emirates. The other story is about the feeling that time is short, so you rush. If you are 62, a friendship that takes five years feels like a big part of what is left. So people push. They say yes to everything, they join every group, and they try to make closeness happen on a schedule. The writer sees an aching in that, and I do too. It is a loneliness that makes sense. It is also hard on the person feeling it, because friendship does not respond well to pressure.

Here is how they sit together.

I want to be fair to the places. Nobody in these stories did anything wrong. Friendship takes repeated time together, and moving takes away the history that does half the work at home.

Dana and Paul talk after another coffee.

"They were so kind," Dana says. "I just wish I knew if they liked us."

"Maybe it is early," Paul says.

"It has been eight months."

"Back home it took us six years with the Hendersons."

She smiles. "I forgot that."

That is the point I would like to leave with you. At home, you did not notice how long your friendships took, because you were living them. Here you notice, because you are counting.

One way to ease the hurry is to pick one or two things you do every week, at the same time, in the same place. A class, a walk, a table at the same cafe. Friendship tends to grow from the same faces seen often.