You should watch Real Housewives with your friends
Let's dig into what's so great about midlife friendships.
Ashley Tisdale French’s mom group drama became the new year talk of my group chat — a group of women who were brought together by a mutual friend via our love of Bravo shows and who quickly also began discussing vacuums, skincare, kids and, yes — all the latest celebrity gossip.
We’re trying to unpack what might have happened. We’re analyzing Hilary Duff’s husband’s TikToks. We’re wondering what might inspire someone to write a public screed against some moms they don’t like.
It’s been elite-level bonding for our group, only some of whom have met IRL. But even as we breathlessly track the public mess of celebrity friendship gone awry, we bring to it some perspective. For so many of us, our friendships only get better and richer and less about mean girl drama (real or perceived) as we settle into midlife. (Hi, group text, and thanks for reading!)
That’s why I wanted to dig into the magic of midlife friendship and what lies ahead once you make it past the phase when your relationships may be largely shaped by swapping potty training tips.
I know firsthand that it can be hard in midlife to meet new people and then actually find the time to see them — but that relationships formed now can feel uniquely real. And I wanted to know what all of this meant about how friendship evolves as we age.
Cue expert No. 1
I met Debra Whitman, the chief public policy officer at AARP and the author of “The Second Fifty: Answers to the 7 Big Questions of Midlife and Beyond,” at an event in November.
We instantly bonded when we found ourselves sitting out the optional fitness challenge, choosing instead to discuss our love of contemporary fiction and our trauma from the Presidential Fitness Challenges we endured as children. I called her up this week because I knew she had data about friendship — and its absence.
Just last month, AARP published a new survey finding that 40 percent of American adults aged 45 and up report feeling lonely, five points higher than in 2010 and 2018.
The 2025 survey was also the first time AARP found a gender gap when it comes to loneliness: 42 percent of men versus 37 percent of women reported feeling lonely.
Whitman emphasized that loneliness isn’t a measure of how many people you know, but how much you self-report feeling a lack of connection to other people in a meaningful way.
And when it comes to loneliness, there are some harsh truths to swallow about midlife. Whitman said data show that we’re lonelier in this stage than we are as we get older, likely due to caregiving for both children and parents and the stress that puts on our time and our finances.
But, there’s good news.
“The data is clear: Happiness improves as we age. Loneliness decreases as we age. That is something to look forward to,” Whitman said. “I think so often we think aging is going to be just this negative time in our life, when actually, the data doesn’t support that.”
And, she said, nurturing our friendships — or even connecting with the people around you, even if they’re not “Anne of Green Gables” bosom friends, can get you through this phase. Whitman said that data shows that even taking the time to ask the person ringing up your groceries about their day can be a real moment of connection.
Not feeling lonely is literally important for your health as you age. Recent research shows that being isolated has the same impact on your physical health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
“Relationships of any kind — close relationships — really determine our health and longevity,” Whitman said.
Cue expert No. 2
I also wanted to talk to Suzanne Degges-White, PhD, professor and chair of the department of counseling and counselor education at Northern Illinois University and an expert on women’s friendship. She said midlife, even with its stresses, is a great time to find great friends.
“The beauty of friendship once you hit your 40s and your 50s is that you know yourself really really well — and you also know that your job isn’t to please anyone but yourself, basically. When we know ourselves better, we can be a much better friend to other people because we can be more authentic in our relationships.”
Moving away from the mirror
Starting in high school and often well into our 30s, she said, friendships among women often looks like “basically finding mirrors for ourselves” — befriending those who reflect our current or desired social standing and where we imagine ourselves, achievement-wise.
This changes when you hit your 40s, she said, as you gain confidence and comfort in your own skin. “We don’t have the same need to please or reflect everyone around us. That doesn’t mean that we don’t reflect others — we just do it in a different kind of way.”
In midlife, friendships are often rooted in shared values versus identical tastes or experiences. As Degges-White put it, “You don’t have to love the same music, but you have to appreciate music as an art.”
That doesn’t mean making or maintaining friends at this age is necessarily easy, she said, especially because so many of us are caregivers. But it’s important to remember that as uncomfortable as it can feel to put yourself out there, everybody else wants friends as badly as you do.
As we age, we also have the chance to get creative in how we maintain our relationships, especially given that our closest and most magical friends might not be people who live nearby.
Degges-White has encountered women in her own research who have nurturing and sustained friendships with people they see in-person only every few years. One of her favorite anecdotes is about a pair of friends who lived in different cities who scheduled a daily early morning walk, each in their own neighborhood and time zone, on the phone together.
Why you should watch Real Housewives
Tisdale French hasn’t revealed who is in the mom group she wrote about, but many have speculated that it’s a celebrity-filled one.
Crystal Mikoff, formerly of “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” added fuel to that fire. And while acting like toxic celebrities or Real Housewives might not be helpful to your relationships, Degges-White said, watching Real Housewives can be. (No, really.)
“We watch them and we see it’s performance,” she said. “We don’t have to perform with our friends, we can be ourselves and let ourselves be vulnerable.”
And yes, the Real Housewives can also help normalize our own experiences.
“It’s wonderful to watch them and say, ‘Well, OK, in my life, I had a big fight with my husband today — but it’s nothing like what this woman’s having right now with her friends.’” They help us normalize how wild and weird our lives can be as we age — and also “remind us what to avoid,” Degges-White said. “Gossip is a good thing because it tells us what not to do, because if you do do this thing, you’re going to be talked about and be a pariah.”
Degges-White said watching and discussing the week’s antics can serve as a form of what’s known as bibliotherapy, or studying a work of literature to glean lessons from others’ dramas.
“You’re taking lessons from what you’re watching.”
It also, she said, deepens your relationships when you watch shows together and discuss them as a group. “Having the Real Housewives in your life means you might want to talk about them with friends — so you’ve expanded your work of connections to people and have this way of deepening the relationships you have in real life.”
This is timed perfectly for the airing of Part 1 of the “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” reunion tonight, which will surely be all about who has and has not been a good friend to whom and what these words even mean.
Also, if you have a take about what really happened with Meredith and Britani on the plane, please write me.