Ladies Who Lunch
Since retiring from teaching 10 years ago, I have had the opportunity to go to lunch regularly with various friends. During the pandemic, I didn’t go out to lunch at all for about 1 ½ years; my friends and I began going out to lunch again in the fall of 2021. My most constant lunch companion is my friend Holley; we have been going out to lunch on the third Wednesday of the month for the past five years.
“Ladies Who Lunch” do so to maintain connections. When your children are grown and you’re retired, you lose some of the natural places to make connections. When your kids are still at home, your social life often involves the people you’ve come to know because they’re the parents of your children’s friends. Sometimes these are people you get along with pretty well – kind of a “there are no strangers in foxholes.” You often have common interests and concerns because you are often at the same stage in your lives. You have young children and probably have aging parents you are concerned about. You are sometimes in roughly the same stages in your careers. Because you live in the same community, you are likely to be at generally the same socioeconomic level and can spend the same amount of money on entertainment, like eating out or going to concerts or movies or sporting events. When your children move on to other friend groups, your contact with the parents of their former friends often goes away naturally.
When you work outside of the home (as both Tim and I did for over 40 years), you develop work “friendships.” I put “friendships” in quotes, because these are relationships of convenience, for the most part. As a teacher, I valued these friendships, don’t get me wrong. The stress of teaching can really be understood only by other teachers, and being surrounded by sympathetic coworkers is invaluable. People who work in schools often think of themselves as “family” – even closer than friends – and there’s a lot of truth in that. But when you change schools or retire, it’s difficult to maintain these friendships. Constant companionship and shared experiences are the basis for such friendships, and when those experiences and companionship go away, the friendships often do as well – even if you make an effort to maintain them.
So what do you do to create and then maintain friendships? First of all, you have to decide if it’s important to you. I have found that it’s important to me. In the essay I wrote about “Old Friends” several months ago, I talked about the value of friends who are in the same stage of life as you. It takes more effort to connect with these friends, simply because you are no longer in the situations that generated friendships in other stages of your life. In some ways, I’m closer to the friends I have these days, because we have to work at maintaining our friendship. Our connection is more intentional.
This is where going to lunch comes in to play. I’ll use Holley as an example. Holley and I have known each other for over 20 years, and our connection was through the Williamsburg United Methodist Church. We both sang in the choir and belonged to some of the same groups within the church. Whenever we were together, we enjoyed each other’s company and always commented about how we wanted to get together more often. After we both retired, we continued to see each other and make the same comments. About five years ago, we decided that if we wanted to see each other we would have to make a date. We searched our calendars (we’re retired – why don’t we have time to have lunch?) and settled on a date.
We had lunch on that date and enjoyed it thoroughly. As we finished eating, we talked about how we wanted to do this again. But rather than leaving it as a casual suggestion, we got out our calendars once again and decided that, since our first lunch “date” was on the third Wednesday of the month, we would establish that as our monthly lunch date going on into the future.
I now plan around having lunch with Holley on the third Wednesday of each month. During the pandemic, we stopped going out to lunch for about a year, and then did a couple of months where we got together for lunch in our homes. We’ve been out and about for lunch once again for about the last six months. If something happens to interfere with our scheduled lunch, we don’t cancel it – we just reschedule.
We both look forward to these lunches. Mostly, we laugh. But we also talk about serious stuff – things going on in our families or in the US or in the world. We have common political beliefs, so it’s easy to use each other as a sounding board. We don’t always agree on everything, but we don’t have to. I consider Holley a member of my “posse” – the friends who I know will gather around me if I need them. Here’s where we had lunch on the third Wednesday of April this year.
I have other friendships that I value and work to maintain. Two of these friends – Ruth and Penny – live pretty far away, but we make appointments to Facetime or Zoom with each other and catch up. I want to do this more often with them – maybe even make appointments like Holley and I do. Another friend, Anne, lives right here in Williamsburg. We have several common interests, so we see each other regularly, but we also visit each other to share a glass of wine or two in the late afternoons. During these times, we strengthen the connection that makes our friendship work.
It is possible to rekindle old friendships. I haven’t stayed friends with anyone I went to high school with, for the most part. But one of these friends, Linda, organized a lunch for a bunch of people from high school and invited anyone who could come. Even though the lunch was in Annandale and I live in Williamsburg, I decided to drive up to go to lunch. We had a good time, and Linda and I decided we’d like to become re-acquainted. After wrestling with schedules and driving times a little, we are planning to link up in Richmond in the middle of June, along with another high school friend, Robin. Linda arranged for the Airbnb and we have plans to hang out for three days and get to know each other after more than 50 years of not communicating very often. It has taken two intentional acts – the original lunch that Linda organized and the continued commitment to get together after that lunch – to make the days in Richmond possible. I don’t know what will emerge from our days in Richmond, but I think we all hope that it will be the first of many such times we get together. This is not a friendship that will grow organically; it will take effort.
Loneliness is one of the biggest problems faced by older people. As the ordinary connections of family and employment fade, it takes work to maintain friends. If you have a friend you would like to see more often, you can take steps to make it happen. Go to lunch sometime.
Here are a few places in Williamsburg where I like to go out to lunch. Go to their websites to check out their menus. I will be happy to go to lunch with you.