Curing Midlife Loneliness

Under the high thatched roof of Amaru’s main room, open at the edges to a cool sea-scented breeze, the long rustic table of Central American hardwood—flowing grains of toffee and dark chocolate—is set for twenty. Silverware wrapped in paper napkins, bottles of water in recycled wine bottles, short vases with fat flowers of red and yellow, tall water glasses, and high-backed Hacienda-style chairs. It’s only the second night at Amaru, but the nightly dinner ritual is already a welcomed part of my day.

Rob and Fred lean on the small bar at the pool end of the great room. Elle and Tim, the riping surfer couple, are playing cards on a low table between couches with yoga instructor Willow and Amaru manager Sabrina. Carlos from Columbia and Lucy from Mass linger at a high-top table near the hammocks with their surf coach San Diego Sam, while young Jessica and Maria from Florida mingle with Charles from North Carolina and blonde-haired surf guide Anabel. Everyone casually eyes the long dinner table, waiting.

And then the moment arrives. Gerritt, proprietor of Amaru, along with a bevy of smiling ladies from the kitchen, carries plates of hot food to the table. Now, the assembled throng drifts to the table to see where they should sit. It’s not hard to know, because a name is written on each of the plates. Step to the table, scan plates, and sit behind the one with your name. Although the names on the plates do serve to address dietary distinctions, they also create a subtle yet comfortable forced socialization.

In the eight evenings I spent at Amaru, I never found out whether the plates were placed in some pre-formulated design or were randomly plunked down, but every night my plate lands in a different spot, next to a different person.

Dinner is served at seven, and it’s rare to see an empty seat. Staff dines with guests in a comfortable mix. Tonight I’m between Sabrina from Switzerland and Jessica from Florida. My surfing amigos, Fred and Rob, are across from me, between surf-camp owner Elle and Maria from Florida. There’s an ease to conversations here, which flow in a pattern as predictable as the tides: how was your surf, where are you from, and on into different details of each person’s journey.

Around the mid-century mark of many of our lives, friendships begin to fade. It’s not that we don’t want to keep up with our people; it just happens. Someone is traveling. Someone else is helping an elderly parent. This guy can’t do Tuesdays; that one can’t do Thursdays and won’t eat after eight. By the time you find a date, dinner is six weeks away. And scheduling and rescheduling is draining. You hope each group has someone with the organizing skills and patience to pull it off.

Friendship used to be organized for us, a byproduct of proximity. Your locker is beside someone at school, you work in the same office, or your kids play on the same sports teams. For me, I had a built-in friend group of the parents of the kids I coached in ice hockey. We’d see each other three or four nights a week, and then in the lobbies and restaurants and rinks at tournaments on weekends. There was never a mystery around what to talk about. Every conversation started with hockey, and most ended there too. Politics were rarely mentioned, and socio-economic differences were limited to noticing the level of SUV, pickup, or sedan they parked at the arena. You’d often go a full season without even knowing what the other parent did for a living.

When my kids aged out of youth sports and went off to college, that chapter of my life ended. And so did almost all of those friendships. Why? For the most part, we all enjoyed each other’s company. We had kids the same age and faced many of the same challenges, but when you remove the shared weekly activity, there’s nothing to replace it.

Sociologists have a term for these loose social connections: weak ties. Relationships with close friends and family are known as strong ties. For decades, these same folks have bemoaned the loss of weak ties. They say the internet is to blame. Remote work and the yawning divides of our media consumption. Whatever. Don’t you have something more alarming to get alarmed about?

Seemed like a bunch of handwringing over nothing. But when I lost almost all the weak ties in my life at the same time, I was unmoored nearly overnight. Add weak ties to the massive list of things that young me was wrong about. Reconsidering those seemingly superficial relationships, I realized they were the connective tissue to people outside my immediate circle, exposing me to different information, opportunities, communities, and perspectives. Without other viewpoints, it would be easy to think that I had learned all there was to learn in this life. With no one to challenge my contentions, it became glaringly obvious why old people become crotchety know-it-alls.

But there was more to it than that. Then one day, I read an article in an online publication called Ageist that suggested most midlife loneliness might just be a scheduling problem. If so, Gerritt has fixed it at Amaru with a simple shared meal every day. No one needs to plan the next meeting. It’s already determined when and where you will see each other again. You know what you’ll talk about, surf, and you know it will end early so that you can get up at 4:30 am to do it all over again. And as I look over the table at my 78-year-old friend, Rob, I can see that, to the people around him, he is not a lawyer or an executive. He’s not a rich guy or a poor guy, a dad or a granddad; he’s just a surfer ... and he belongs. And maybe, for a moment, I do too.