On leaving in 1985, the revolving door, and the friendships that survive it.
There is a kind of party I have been to more times than I can count. Paper plates, a cake from the good bakery, somebody’s husband in charge of the music. The guest of honor is leaving. Back to Washington, Manchester, or on to Dubai, or home to nurse a parent through something nobody names out loud. Everyone promises to visit. Everyone means it at the time.
For a long stretch of my life, the guest of honor was me.
I left the UK in 1985 with a backpack and more confidence than sense. Greece first, for a decade. Then Germany, then America, following a husband in uniform from base to base, learning to pack a house into boxes in under a week. Then Scotland, which was almost home and somehow wasn’t. Then Spain, where I have now been for twenty years, which is longer than I have lived anywhere, including the country on my passport.
Military life teaches you a particular arithmetic of friendship. You have four years, and the clock starts the day you arrive or the day they arrive. You skip the small talk because there is no time for it, and you go from strangers to confidantes in a fortnight. Children drift between houses as if they lived in both, fed at whichever table they land on, and the casserole dishes make the rounds without ever quite finding their way home. Then the orders come through, and you stand in someone’s kitchen wrapping glasses in newspaper and promising to write. Sometimes you did. Mostly, the next posting swallowed you whole, and the friendship survived as a Christmas card, then an address you were no longer sure of.
I thought Spain would be different. Twenty years in one place: surely that is long enough to grow the kind of friendships that have roots. But the popular corners of Spain have their own revolving door, and this time I am the one standing still while it turns. You invest in people. You learn their children’s names, or their grandchildren’s, the story of their divorce, how they take their coffee. Then the money runs out, or a mother falls ill, or the dream curdles, and they are gone, and you are back at the start with somebody new.
After four decades of this, something in you goes quiet. Not bitter. Careful. You catch yourself holding back at the welcome drinks, doing quiet arithmetic on how long the new couple might last before you decide how much of yourself to hand over. Starting again used to feel like an adventure. Now it feels like homework.
There is also the matter of what passes for intimacy when history is in short supply. Real closeness takes years of weddings and funerals, and when you haven’t got that, some people reach for the fastest substitute available, which is gossip. Slagging off a third party over a glass of wine can feel like friendship. It has the same low voices, the same leaning in. It isn’t friendship. It is a pact built on the absence of somebody else, and pacts like that have a way of finding new absentees. You learn, eventually, that the person telling you about everyone is also telling everyone about you.
Then there is the comparison. Abroad, lives are on display in a way they never were at home. Everyone can see whose villa has a pool, whose children settled, whose marriage survived the move. If your life looks settled, you become a mirror, and not everyone likes what they see in it. I have watched warmth curdle across a dinner table over nothing more than a passing mention of good news.
And in the sunnier destinations, there is the holiday problem. A good number of people arrive in permanent holiday mode, and some never leave it. The rounds of drinks, the long lunches, the sense that real life has been suspended indefinitely. It is enormous fun for about eighteen months. Then the honeymoon ends, the mask slips, and you discover who you have actually been having lunch with all this time.
I think about my oldest friends in England, the ones I ring when something has actually gone wrong. Those friendships were not built faster or better than the ones I have made abroad. They were simply built on more. Shared history, not shared geography. They knew me before Greece, before the boxes and the postings, before any of it. There is no shortcut to that, and half the loneliness of a life lived out of the country is the discovery that you keep trying to manufacture one anyway, sometimes in a second language, with people who are themselves halfway out the door.
None of this makes the silence easier. The message that goes unanswered. The invitation that vanishes into the group chat. You put the kettle on and wonder, briefly, if it is you.
It is not you. Or rather, it is you, but not in the way you fear. Somewhere along the way, the appetite shifts. You stop wanting more friends and start wanting better ones. The drinkers, the gossips, the fair-weather crowd fall away, or you let them, and the falling away looks a great deal like loneliness from the outside. From the inside, it looks like pruning. The tree is smaller afterward. It is also healthier.
I would rather have one friend who turns up with soup than a dozen who turn up for prosecco. It took me forty years and five countries to work that out. I am told some people manage it faster.
This was written by our contributing writer, Amanda Judson.
Image Source: Pexels, Juliane Monari
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