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I scrawl on the cinema bathroom wall: ‘Anyone else find friendship in their 40s hard?’

I miss the solidarity of the women’s bathroom in nightclubs, where strangers became best friends for those brief moments that always seemed to last a lifetime

Alone time:
Niamh O'Reilly
Wed Oct 02 2024 - 06:00

“Feeling s**t. Why is life so hard?” I sighed as I read the graffiti on the door of a city centre cinema the other week, after a solo dash to the big screen. I recognised the sentiments, having been through tough times in the past. I imagined it might have been a young woman who put pen to stall and wished I could tell her that things will get brighter. But of course, someone had already beaten me to the punch.

“Things don’t stay s**t forever, so flush that s**t and move on,” read the response below.

“Life may be hard, but you are tougher,” followed.

“Keep going,” was written beside it with a heart.

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I couldn’t help but smile, reading the myriad of supportive comments that played out like a time-lapse conversation, each scrawl offering another person’s philosophical pearls of wisdom in order to help their fellow woman in need.

There was also plenty of the usual commentary in there too. Declarations of amour: “Becca loves Anto”, as well as general messages of female unity: “your gee, your rules”, and lines of other unmentionables . Whatever your views on graffitiing public property, there’s no denying that the messages written in women’s toilets can often reveal both raw vulnerability and unwavering solidarity just when you need it the most.

There’s even a name for it: “latrinalia”. Apparently, it was coined in 1966 by Alan Dundes, a folklorist at the University of California, Berkeley.

It suddenly brought me right back to my early 20s when the women’s bathroom in a nightclub or pub was the most supportive place on the planet. Be it one in the morning, or even later, it was a safe space where a stranger would come in, give you her lippy and listen to your life story. The rest of the women who popped in and out would join, lobbing in their advice and becoming your best friend for those few fleeting moments that always seemed to last a lifetime. The world was put to rights in there and female solidarity was at an all-time high.

Fast forward 20 years and the truth is for many women like me, friendship in your 40s can be much harder to come by.

It would be untrue to say I’m friendless or deeply lonely, but it would also be fair to say I’ve not kept up with those important friendships that once sustained me. Today, I’ve got plenty of people in my life, but fewer and fewer of the really close ones with whom I share a special shorthand with. The people I’ve known for years or the ones who know my idiosyncrasies, and instead of running a mile, they let their own quirks out so they can play together in a weird, yet perfect harmony of unwavering friendship.

I’ve been trying to put my finger on how I’ve gotten here. What I’ve come up with, is that part of it is my stage of life and part of it is my fault.

Even if you’re lucky enough to have a core group of friends or even just one good friend from your childhood or school days, the busyness of most women’s modern lives means it’s harder than ever to keep those friendships alive, in real life where they matter most. Many shift to the online space and although often a hive of activity between WhatsApp messages pinging, podcast-style voice-notes going back and forth and even dodgy FaceTimes going on, it doesn’t fill the need in the way an in-person friendship does.

Women in their 40s are a generation being squeezed to hydraulic press proportions. We’re putting so much effort into the other demands placed on our lives, that there’s little left for anything else. Be it motherhood, carrying the so-called “invisible” mental load of the family, such as meals, pick-ups, drop-offs, your child’s mental wellbeing and their social lives, or your work outside the home, ageing parents and maybe even getting to some kind of physical activity once or twice a week, the remaining effort left for maintaining real-life friendships can be in short supply. Throw things like distance or a move into the mix and the reasons not to meet up increase exponentially.

Midlife does bring opportunities for new friendships, however. Be it on the sideline of the GAA or at the school gates, there is much solidarity to be found. I’ve been lucky enough to find some brilliant women in this sphere, but for others, it’s not always such an easy fit. Some can find the connection tenuous and time-consuming and can be left wondering if their children weren’t playmates, would they even be friends?

I can easily blame circumstances or the time of life for my situation, but if I were to ask the toilet door of wisdom for answers, I know what I’d be told. The hard truth is, that I let friendships slide when I was in the trenches of early motherhood. I had two babies in three years, and I was simply so focused on survival and holding on to my own mental health, that I put my friendships on the back burner. Instead, I should have viewed them as a key tool in my survival kit.

Now that my children are five and seven and that bit more self-sufficient, it almost feels like I’ve emerged from some self-enforced style of hibernation, like Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley getting woken up from her cryotube. Now that I’m finally out of stasis, I find myself out of place and out of touch with my old life and as though I’m almost starting from scratch. The trouble is I’m not the same person I once was. I have an inner confidence in my own company that I didn’t have in my 20s. These days, I very much enjoy the rare treat of going places by myself. Grabbing a coffee or a meal or seeing a movie. Still, as nice as it is to enjoy being in my own thoughts without any pressure, the memory of the solidarity of the women’s bathroom chips away at me.

For those of us who feel like we’re starting over, it can be a bumpy road. At this stage in life, many friendship groups can already be well established, and it can be tough to break into cliques.

Back in the bathroom and the present, I grab one of my kids’ Sharpie pens from my handbag and take a chance.

“Anyone else find friendship in their 40s hard?” I scrawl.

I await the replies when I’m next back in that same cinema bathroom.

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