I made three friends from work during a 40 year worklife (now retired). That's over the course of more than a dozen workplaces. Only one of those still continues, and it's gotten harder to maintain as she doesn't have a car and is about to relocate to her home state of Maine. This friendship dates back to 1997.

The second work friend, I made at a job in the early 1990s. We spent a lot of leisure time together. Then she moved back to Seattle from DC and that friendship petered out.

The third work friend, who once said that she thought we were sisters in a past life, that's how close we were, also faded into the past after I lost my job and she went on to the next serial best friend.

I have made a pretty good friend of a next door neighbor in my apartment building. But when I move, that friendship will peter out too. It's the nature of friendship making in one's 60s. As a lifelong single, I share little in common with married folks who now have grandkids. Their daily routines don't have space for nurturing a new friend.

I have two other very close friends, one I met playing basketball in 1997, the other with whom I attended grad school and shared an apartment with. Basketball friend and her hubby have become close to me, but they live an hour away and spend a lot of their free time with their adult kids and grandkids, spread across the country. Grad school friend lives in Connecticut, with an immunocompromised spouse, so no visiting.

All of which is to say, making deep friendships in middle age or older has always been challenging. It's even more so now.