It’s the challenge of a lifetime to write about childhood friendship as an adult without sounding either twee or bitter. But it is true that different stages of life yield different friendship types. These generally stay in their native territories, but the flow of life has a way of ramming one stage into another, leading to friendship anachronisms. For that reason, it’s worth asking how to handle childhood friendships when they resurface later in life.
In a 2009 interview, anthropologist James C. Scott made this remark about childhood friendships:
So, it meant that … I don't know about your own historical experience in school, but people that you know from age six until 17 or 18. I feel, I've been to a couple of reunions, I know these people right down to the black little marrow of their bones … I know everything about them. I saw them every day, year after year after year. And I know them a lot more, I think, than I know people who I'm very close to as an adult in some way. And, of course, it's the same the other way around: they know me.… I find that … very comforting, actually (24:20).
While my experience has been somewhat similar to Scott’s, I might start by narrowing the range of ages he mentions from age six to seventeen or eighteen to more like age six to eleven or twelve. For me, there has always been something a little different about friendships that took shape before adolescence. After age twelve or so, a person’s defenses go up in a way that isn’t true of a very young child. Eight-year-olds are unguarded in a way that isn’t true of a teenager, which leads to a certain ease and depth in friendship that can carry over into adulthood.
While Scott qualifies it slightly (“in a way”), he notes that people he knew as a kid know him better than people who know him as an adult. On one level, of course I see his point. We change, and we don’t, and it’s comforting when people recognize our enduring traits (and vice-versa). But this cuts both ways. That same familiarity can make it hard to appreciate how a person has changed as an adult. It can be stifling. Discussion can slip into expired conversational rhythms in which we parrot things we thought when we were 16 and are not so sure about now.
Familiarity can play tricks on you. This is how Slavoj Zizek opens his foreword to The Plague of Fantasies:
When we think we really know a close friend or relative, it often happens that, all of a sudden, this person does something – utters an unexpectedly vulgar or cruel remark, makes an obscene gesture, casts a cold indifferent glance where compassion was expected – making us aware that we do not really know him: we become suddenly aware that there is a total stranger in front of us (8).
Zizek is interested in how this tendency reflects a willingness to ignore the “obscene underground” of our psychic and social realities that makes possible the socially sanctioned mundane. Leaving aside Zizek’s broader point on the psychological contortions of Marxist ideology, this is true on a personal register as well. Old friends are potent for whitewashing desires and behavior—both are own and theirs. This is nicely dramatized in Laura Restrepo’s The Divine Boys, which traces the main character’s reaction to the troubling evidence of a childhood friend’s involvement in the disappearance of a young indigenous girl (based on this case). Familiarity can lead to overconfidence as well as willful (self-)deception in our thinking about both ourselves and our friends.
The sincerity of pre-adolescent childhood is unique, fostering unique friendships, no doubt. But something similar seems to happen around age 18-25 or so when the defenses of adolescence briefly go down and people are open again. The rush of early adulthood offers a second opportunity for developing unique and special friendships. People often seem to tilt toward one or the other: one way to divide up the world might be between those with best friends from childhood and those with best friends from early adulthood.
It’s not just that the walls go up again after the excitement of early adulthood passes. More often than not, the terms of what will come next are set at that point. In a wonderful turn of phrase, William James notes in his Principles of Psychology that “In most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.” A person who meets me now would meet a more seasoned version of the person they would have met when I was twenty-five. I was, however, a very different being as an infant. The differences in a person between when they are twenty-five and when they are forty-two is quantitative; the differences in that same person between when they are forty-two and when they are two is between two qualitatively different beings.
Seen from that perspective, childhood friendships come from a time when their participants were different types of things from what they are now or will ever be again. Time only goes one way; a similar friendship can never be made again. For that reason, and not only for that reason, childhood friendships are rare and worth preserving (albeit complex and occasionally burdensome).