Is it normal to have no friends in your 30s?
She counted them once. The people she could call if something went wrong. Not family, not the person she married. Just friends. People who would actually answer.
The number was one.
One person who had stood in that place for seventeen years. One voice she trusted enough to stop performing competence and just say the hard things out loud.
She had built a whole life. Work, home, routines that looked like belonging. But when she tried to name the people who really knew her — the version that shows up at 2am when the script falls apart — there was only this one.
And now that person was eighty-three, standing in a driveway on two crutches, waiting for someone else to arrive.
It is possible to do everything right and still end up here. To be kind, to show up, to invest in all the expected places. And then one day the invitations stop coming, the group chat goes quiet, and we look up and they are gone.
We tell ourselves loneliness is what happens to people who are difficult or withdrawn or new in town. But sometimes it is just what is left when everyone got busy at the same time.
She sat in that cluttered caravan drinking tea with the one person who still made space for her. They talked about fears carried and the gap between who we are and who we thought we would be by now. The older woman listened with her eyes closed, the way she always had. Still awake. Still there.
It was not that she wanted more from this person. It was that she wanted more people like this person. And she did not know how to find them, or whether, at this point in life, it was even possible.
What do we do when the one thread holding us to feeling known is tied to someone who will not be here much longer?
Most of us are lonelier than we admit. We have colleagues and neighbours and hundreds of names in our phones and no one we would text at midnight just to say we are scared. Life stopped creating the conditions friendship used to grow in.
The woman in the caravan kept showing up anyway. To church, to choir, to the people who needed her, even when her body had mostly quit. She made space and did not apologise for what she could not carry.
Maybe that is the shape it takes now. Not the friendships we had at twenty-two, but something smaller and more deliberate. A cup of tea in a cluttered room with someone who knows what it costs us to show up.
Is it normal to have no one? Yes. Does it mean we are broken? No. Does it mean we stop trying? That is the question we are all carrying home.
Where are we still showing up, even when it feels like no one is coming? What would it look like to make space the way she did — not for everyone, just for one? And if we found that person again, the one we could tell the truth to, would we know what to say?