Making friends with people outside our age group can feel a bit weird or awkward, but building any kind of friendship with anyone almost always starts out that way. All it takes is for someone to have the courage to approach the other, find shared interests or other things in common, and make the effort to build on that budding bond.
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For Devin Welsh, a 25-year-old college student, he made an unlikely friend in Victoria Huggins Peurifoy, who’s 71 and attends the same literary arts program called Writers Room. Despite their age gap, it was their passion for writing that helped them to connect, and now they work together on projects for the Philadelphia writing community.
Eunice Lin Nichols, who heads an organization that brings people of different generations together, urges people to develop intergenerational friendships as the life experiences of someone older can provide perspective and insight to younger people. On the other hand, younger people can help older people see the world from fresh eyes and be able to adapt to the changing times.
As with any kind of friendship, openness and communication as well as a degree of empathy are key to understanding one another despite the differences two people may have. Here are a few other ways on how we can build intergenerational friendships and cultivate them.
And it does enrich our lives. Nichols shares how she connected with a group of older African American women who helped her through her pregnancy as well as to make their neighborhood and community better. And Peurifoy too found the joy of being able to make friends with younger people as she had recently been a 70-something student until she graduated from college in June this year.
(Image credit: Hillary Peralta/Unsplash)
Source: neatorama