“I Go To Festivals With My 50-Year-Old Bestie”: 5 People On Their Age-Gap Friendships

I recently went to a wedding where I hadn’t met any of the guests before so I had to make friends for the night, fast. Although there were lots of people around my age (28), the group I spent the night dancing with were approaching 50. Age really is just a number — when you click, no one is checking the year everyone was born. 

Age-gap friendships can flourish in settings like the workplace, where you’re thrust into meeting new people that you otherwise might not cross paths with. Just last week I saw a video on TikTok of a young woman telling her older colleague that she was leaving the company, much to his heartbreak. “You can’t leave me,” he says, and suddenly I remembered the older colleagues who became work besties and in turn made going to work more bearable.  

A US survey on intergenerational friendships by AARP found that most people create these friendships at work, and nearly four in 10 adults have a close friend with a 15-year age gap. Forty-five percent of those friendships have lasted at least 10 years. It’s not just the workplace: We asked our readers about their age-gap friendships and some people met via exes or while walking their dogs. Many of those friendships then existed outside of the spaces in which they first formed.

At the end of the wedding I attended, I swapped numbers with someone from the group in their late 40s — why shouldn't we dance together again?