Friendship is important at every stage of our lives. Maybe that’s why, for centuries, it has been an important theme in popular literature, from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603) to A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) to Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove (2012).
Yet we can always use more stories about friends, especially old friends. I’m not talking about lifelong friends (such as Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend) or old people who become friends (such as Tracy Kidder’s Old Friends, which takes place in a nursing home), but to friendships between old and young people.
These kinds of friendships not only improve the quality of our lives, but they might even help us live longer.
My Old Friend
At 40, just as I was entering middle age myself, I was awarded a national fellowship to study aging. As a newly tenured English professor, my project was to research the effects of writing groups in nursing homes and senior centers on the memories, thoughts and feelings of the participants who gathered to tell their life stories.
I met many interesting people during that three-year project, including a woman named May Berkley, 80, who facilitated a writing group at the senior-citizen apartment complex where she lived. May saw a newspaper story about my research and contacted me to see if I’d like to visit her group. She thought I would gain valuable insights from its members.
And I did. But I also learned a great deal from May herself, who became my friend.
How do two people who are forty years apart become friends? The same way that friends of any age come together: through shared interests and values, time spent together, fun (May had a great sense of humor), and mutual feelings of affection, trust and respect.
Besides seeing each other at the weekly group meetings, which I attended for three months, May and I met outside the group to share our love of books and movies, as well as our ideas and experiences. It was 1995, and there was no texting, zooming or Face Timing. We always met in person, which helped cement our relationship. Occasionally we went to a play or concert, especially if there was something free on offer (May lived on a small, fixed income), but usually we met for lunch or dinner so we could talk.
We shared three main interests: feminism, education and aging. She was a big champion of women’s rights, especially in the workplace, which she had entered in midlife after her divorce. She had worked in the administrative offices of a local community college, where she was chronically under-paid, but she liked the benefits: she got to interact with highly educated people, whom she admired greatly. She believed that education was the ticket to independence and a better life for women of all ages, and she was proud to play a part in that enterprise.
May served on the elder advisory board for the Institute of Gerontology at the university where I taught. In that role, she advised faculty on research, teaching and policy and advocated for elder participants. She was motivated by a desire to counter age stereotypes, particularly regarding women’s aging. She brought the insights of feminism to these endeavors and embodied the kind of “vital aging” that Betty Friedan described so well in her book, The Fountain of Age (1993).
For all these reasons, May was a great asset to me as I embarked on my new career in gerontology. She valued what I was doing, participated fully in it, and cheered me along. Besides her influence on my professional life, she was a personal role model for how to “grow old” rather than “get old.”
The Benefits of Age-Gap Friendships
A recent AARP study has found that nearly four in ten adults nowadays have a close friend who is at least 15 years older or younger. These “age-gap” friendships often form as a result of increasingly multi-generational workplaces, and they stand the test of time. Almost half of those studied lasted at least 10 years, and 20 percent lasted more than 20 years (“The Positive Impact of Intergenerational Friendships,” 2019).
My friendship with May lasted eleven years, until her death in 2006. I spoke at her funeral about the profound influence she had on my life. And she continues to inspire me even now, as I approach the age of 70.
Friendships between young and old expand our horizons. Younger people get the benefit of elders’ knowledge, confidence, and lack of concern about what other people think. Older people get access to youth’s fluency with technology and contemporary culture and often gain a greater appreciation for their own life experiences (“The Age Defying Benefits of Having Older (and Younger) Friends,” 2014).
Society benefits from these friendships, too. Health care costs are lower for people of all ages who have social connections. According to the AARP study, those who have close intergenerational ties are more likely to hold fewer stereotypes and more positive attitudes toward aging than those who don’t.
Age-gap friendships can also make us kinder and more compassionate. As Shasta Nelson, author of The Business of Friendship, notes, “We know that everyone’s lives are different, but we remember this more easily with a friend who is in a different life stage. That oneness can lead to less comparing, less judgment, less competition.”
Living Better and Longer
Now there is compelling new research showing that our beliefs about aging affect not only our health, but our longevity.
Yale professor Rebecca Levy, author of Breaking the Age Code (2022), has spent nearly 30 years studying the effects of attitudes on aging. She has found that physical and cognitive functioning, recovery time from illness and injury, resilience to stress, and mental health are all impacted by how we think about aging and old age.
Even more astonishing, our beliefs can also affect how long we live. In a longitudinal study of residents over 50 in a small Ohio town, Levy and other researchers determined that people who hold positive beliefs about aging live an average of 7.5 years longer than those who don’t.
It’s not easy to stay positive when we live in an ageist society. As Levy notes, “age beliefs exist along a continuum, but most people in the U.S. are mainly exposed to and express negative ones.” These beliefs kick in especially when we reach middle age, as the messages become more self-relevant. Because of negative social conditioning, many older people are ageist themselves.
Levy finds that positive role models can help raise awareness and counter these negative influences.
Many of the elders she describes in her book have performed extraordinary feats, like the actor who turned 60 and decided to learn the entire text of Milton’s Paradise Lost. It took him eight years to memorize the 18th century lyric poem, which is 60,000 words long. Now 84, he still remembers all of it. Or the 99-year-old woman who took up swimming in her 60’s and has broken world records, many since she turned 90.
I think there is even more power in the lives of ordinary old people who are just like us. My friend May Berkley showed me that later life can be a wonderful time of learning, growth and new possibilities — if we embrace life and remain open to change.
There is a famous quote by French critic Charles Du Bos that, thanks to May, I find especially resonant as I grow old. I think it should be the motto for anyone who fears the future.
“The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”
Written by: Ruth Ray Karpen
Ruth Ray Karpen is a retired English professor who now works as a freelance researcher and writer. She has published many books and articles on aging and old age, life story writing, and retirement. She also volunteers for a local animal shelter. In our series on Heart and Soul, she explores how later life, including the end of life, offers unique opportunities for emotional and spiritual growth.
On behalf of Smart Strategies for Successful Living, our sincerest appreciation goes to Ruth Ray Karpen for her contribution to the heart and soul of living and aging.