I am young. They are old. Yet our friendship means the world to me

Imagine someone living alone, vaguely attached to their community, with their extended family. Maybe that person wouldn't say they're lonely – maybe they know how to smother it, making happy talk in the grocery store queue – but the feeling is there, a moon pulling the tides of its days.

One ​​day, a neighbor shows up at their door. The two are separated by decades and have shared banter in passing, but nothing more. This time, the older neighbor is holding a steaming bowl of soup. The first thought of the occupier is fear. I'm sorry. Nevertheless, the soup is good. Literally and figuratively, a heart warms.

Who did you envision for these roles? Who did you cast? It's hard now to see me as the solitary inhabitant of this house, having moved alone to Traverse City, Michigan, for a temporary teaching position when I was 27. I wore my loneliness like a rash, a secret under my sleeve as I walked the halls of my school. The presence of my remote boyfriend, friends, and family seemed spectral to me, like happy ghosts that popped up every so often from my iPhone. My loneliness grew every time I heard groups of people my age returning from downtown bars.

If I thought I was too young to be alone , I was wrong. A 2018 report from Cigna Health Insurance found that millennials and Gen Z Americans feel lonelier than older generations; people who live alone too. Statistically, I was maybe an average lonely neighbor.

Doreen was about my mother's age, inclined to do chores in a sequin camouflage coat. When she appeared on my front step with chili made from an elk her husband had killed, I was mostly a vegetarian. Still, touched by the offer of the sagging paper bowl swaddled in plastic wrap, I ate it all. I hated to imagine her timing how my light went out early on the weekend, but I soon learned to stop imagining her motives for care and meet her as a friend. What started as culinary crafts – apple crisp from me, minestrone from her – turned into chatty updates. Sometimes I intended to go for a run but found myself on the sidewalk for 15 minutes, my eyes watering with laughter as she acted out the Chippendales show she had seen with her girlfriends at a nearby casino.

At the end of the school year, I gave Doreen the leftover cans and bottles from my fridge, and she pulled me in for one last hug . Is it worth saying that we are no longer in touch, that our connection was limited by the proximity of our homes? The fact that our friendship didn't transcend the street doesn't make it a failure. Now, when I think back to this year, I feel immense gratitude to those like Doreen who reached out to me, inviting me to go kayaking, go to a jazz show, come in for pizza or brunch, to join their writing group. All but one of the good friends I made that year were at least a few decades older than me, but because we liked doing or talking about the same things, the age gap seemed essentially out of place. When speaking with millennial peers about my experience, I was surprised to see my emotional trajectory echoing. Not only were many of my friends who had moved to new places also ashamed of being a "lone twenty-something," but they were surprised that in the absence of an "integrated" group of old-timer friends school, their social life flourished. vertically across generations. In other words: the people who came to us, the young newcomers, were often older.

This agrees with Catherine Elliott O'Dare's findings professor of social work and social policy at Trinity College Dublin, who discovered that intergenerational friendship can help root young people in new communities. O'Dare advocates for a conceptual mindset shift, arguing for "the meaninglessness of age homophily" and challenging cultural expectations that age is a good basis for friendship. /p>

"As one of my participants said, 'We don't wear our birthday cards around our necks,' O'Dare told me. His research shows that the "the engine oil of these bonds is not pity or benevolence, but the same things that fuel friendships between peers: reciprocity, humor, shared interests. "If you find a like-minded person - and this is a real gift in life - ag...