In probing that question, researchers concluded that across the board, the strength and quality of friendships “typically decreases after people become parents” and that most of the quality degradation occurs around when the child is 3, during the years that kids’ needs are most demanding of their parents’ time and energy. In 2017, the journal Demographic Research published a study out of the Netherlands that looked at how the age at which parents had a baby impacted their personal relationships. Their sudden presence, though welcomed, coveted, hard won, and considered a blessing to their parents, throws the social order into disarray. It has fundamentally shifted my relationships.”īabies, those little assholes, really do show up in our lives like a popular girl transferring into school in the middle of the semester. It is the only thing that is permanent and time-bound. “More than marriage, more than a new job, more than moving across the country, I think there is nothing that represents more of a challenge or a threat to adult friendships than parenthood. It’s just that “it has changed everything,” she says of her friends becoming parents, in the same deadpan tone as a sitcom character breaking the fourth wall after a record scratch. It’s not that she doesn’t miss them, or want to spend time with them, or want them in her life, and vice versa. It’s not that she doesn’t love her friends or that they don’t love her. “We’re going to make our plans, and if people would like to get sitters and meet us out, great. “My whole photo reel is just pictures of me with different kids of my friends at the playground.” She and her husband decided the next time they go to New York, they’ll cough up the money for a hotel. “All we did was go to playgrounds,” she says. She would text, craving idle chitchat, and her friend would respond with a photo of her child at the playground - annoying at best, but it could also fill Sasha with a specific grief that threatened to overwhelm her.Įventually, Sasha moved back to Los Angeles, and on a recent visit to New York, she was smacked in the face by how different her friends’ lives had become. Sometimes it felt like all anybody would talk about was their children and their adorable developmental milestones, and she couldn’t relate. But the distance also grew as her day-to-day life and theirs became too much and the time they had to give each other became too little. Sometimes, admittedly, she found it difficult to stay close to her friends who were successfully starting families while she suffered through infertility. In that time, Sasha has been trying to start a family too, struggling through failed IVF cycles. Over the past three years, all but two of Sasha’s core group of high-school friends have had children, and of her core group of college friends, half of them have had children and others are in various stages of family planning.
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