Clinical Psychologist Reveals 5 Reasons High-Achieving Women Have A Hard Time Keeping Close Friends
Turns out, achievement can often come with a social cost.
Good Faces | Unsplash Many high-achieving women in my practice struggle with making and keeping up with friendships. There are many reasons that friendship can be hard, but there are specific challenges that high-achieving women face, particularly when they also have young kids.
Here are five reasons high-achieving women have a hard time keeping close friends:
1. Time
If you are working a high-powered job and taking care of kids, there are not many hours in the day that aren’t allocated to one of these two pursuits. Most high-achieving women are also interested in maintaining their health, which means that going to the gym, going to therapy, or other health-related activities also have to figure into the equation.
And don’t forget date night with your husband. By the time all of these are accounted for, it is rare for two women with packed schedules to be able to schedule a phone call, never mind a couple of hours for dinner.
2. Fatigue
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As women move into their 30s, 40s, and beyond, their energy level usually diminishes significantly. Childbearing, nursing, and tending to the physical needs of young kids make women physiologically age a lot faster than their male counterparts.
More women than men struggle with depression as well, and a major symptom of depression is fatigue. If it hits 7 pm and you’re pretty much exhausted, that means that your opportunities for socializing are fairly limited, especially if you’ve been working until 6 and need to save your energy to catch up on emails later on as well.
3. Lack of opportunities to connect with other similar women
More and more women are in top-level jobs now and outearn their husbands, but the majority of moms of young kids are still not in this situation. If you are a high-achieving woman who needs more friends, the opportunities are fewer and further between to meet people in the same position as yourself.
For all of the reasons in this post, the women who are similar to you are very busy and tapped out, and have fewer possible times to schedule get-togethers. This is obviously not to say that women who stay at home or work part-time don’t have a lot of deeper-level commonalities with high-achieving women, and of course, friendships can flourish no matter what anyone does for work. But, practically speaking, birds of a feather flock together, and when the birds are all too busy to create a flock, that’s a problem.
4. Priorities
Many high-achieving women say they want more friends, but the reality is that they want to spend all the moments they are not working with their kids (and their partner if they are happily partnered).
Some women feel that this is not something they can readily admit, but the truth is that high-achieving women are usually hyperconscious of time management, both in the short and long term, and they cannot wrap their heads around spending hours per week with friends if that takes away from their finite amount of time with their kids.
This is especially relevant when kids are elementary school-aged, as women are then extremely sensitive to the idea that, soon, these kids will turn into adolescents who don’t want to spend as much time with their parents.
5. Stress
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When you feel burned out, it is hard to have the kind of long conversations that bring people closer together. You find yourself trying to fit a whole conversation into a short text exchange because that will be more efficient.
It starts to feel like a burden to communicate with other people if you feel they will want anything from you, even just empathy, that you don’t have the emotional bandwidth to give.
If this post resonated with you, it is important to think about the reasons that friendships feel difficult for you right now. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Do I really want more friends, or when I say that, do I mean something else? (E.g., nostalgia for your youth, time away from your partner?)
- Would deepening a connection and spending more time (even phone time) with an existing friend be possible, even if making new friends seems impossible?
- Are there ways to block out time in my calendar to hang out with my family and my friends together, which may be what they prefer as well?
- Do I know any friends of friends in a similar position to me that I could connect with?
- Are groups easier for me than one-on-one interactions? Are there social/volunteer/political groups or organizations I could join?
- Can I start small with more texting with friends, or more phone calls, and build up to whatever my goal is (e.g., a weekly lunch with a friend)?
Friendship can be wonderful, but it can also feel like one more thing to deal with if you’re already tapped out. If you believe that stress and fatigue are the primary deterrents to having the friendships you want, consider therapy that focuses on helping you manage your time and commitments in different ways.
You only live once, and if you want more friends, this is a worthy goal. Of course, if you recognize that now is not the season for more friends and you want to focus primarily on career and family, there is nothing wrong with that either, as long as it feels right to you.
Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten, aka Dr. Psych Mom, is a clinical psychologist in private practice and the founder of DrPsychMom. She works with adults and couples in her group practice, Best Life Behavioral Health.
