Re-Watching ‘Friends’ Has Soft-Launched My Midlife Crisis

This week we finally ran out of new things to watch on Netflix, so we did what we always do in this situation: we started re-watching Friends.

Now, I know it’s not really the done thing to still like Friends these days, because of all of the things that are retrospectively problematic about it, but as we worked our way through the first couple of seasons, it wasn’t the fat-shaming, or the ‘Chandler’s dad’ storyline, or even the really quite incredible late 90s hairstyles that jumped out at me.

No, it was Richard.

 

 

I remember when the Monica/Richard storyline first aired, I was vaguely creeped out by it, because Richard was OMG OLD. He was a grandfather! An elderly gentleman! Pretty much dead, really. And every time Rachel and Phoebe inexplicably lusted after him, or Monica so much as looked at him, I’d just be like, “Seriously? He’s going to literally die soon, surely?! What are they thinking?!”

And then this week I re-watched the episode where Monica’s parents find out that Monica and Richard are together and it turns out that the other thing that was revealed in that episode is that Richard? Was supposed to have just turned 50 at the time: as had Monica’s parents, who also seemed to me to be more or less ready for the urn, basically.

Fifty.

They were only 50! Which actually seems quite young to me now: or at least not that old.

“Oh my God,” I said, turning to Terry in horror. “We’re closer to Richard’s age than we are to Monica’s age now. We could literally be Monica’s parents. Well, almost. If we’d had her when we were really young, obviously.”

I’m not sure why the aging process always comes as such a shock to me, but it always, always does. Like last year, for instance, when I was at a wedding with some friends I hadn’t seen in a while, and at one point I remember looking at them all and thinking, “Wait: these people all look like they could be someone’s parents suddenly!” And, of course, they are all someone’s parents. I am ‘someone’s parent’. Somehow, almost without noticing it, we’ve gone from being the Friends to being the Friends’ parents, and I’m finding this concept kind of hard to get my head around — for reasons that are obviously hopelessly tied up with ageism and misogyny, etc etc, but which are nevertheless proving hard to shake when I’m still sitting here waiting for my life to really begin, and wondering if I should just have the last of the Christmas chocolate for breakfast again.

In my head, though, I’m still about 25/26 — the age the Friends are supposed to be during the ‘Richard’ era — and I still feel like I have much more in common with Monica, Rachel and co. (and particularly with Chandler…) than I do with their parents, with their shoulder pads, and their knowledge of how to tip someone without making it awkward. Because I, too, still feel like I’m always stuck in second gear. That it hasn’t been my day, my week, my month, or even my year. That these two people are not even CLOSE to being my age:

I mean, Judy Geller would no way have impulse-ordered an ASOS jogger co-ord yesterday because she saw it on an influencer half her age and momentarily forgot she can’t pull that look off, would she?1 And Jack definitely wouldn’t be borrowing money from his mum for the Taylor Swift concert. No, Jack and Judy Geller were proper adults; ones with pension funds and retirement plans, and… wait: is that just the same thing? Is there a difference? Should I know the difference? I bet Judy and Jack know the difference…

(In this episode, Jack reveals that he bought a Porsche as his mid-life crisis item. “We’re not even going to be able to afford a mid-life crisis!” I wailed to Terry, obviously forgetting that the green ASOS tracksuit probably IS my mid-life crisis, and that I can’t really afford that either. “Everyone else is going to have a much cooler mid-life crisis than us, because they’re all REAL adults, and we’re not even financially stable yet.”)

Does everyone feel like this, I wonder? I mean, is it weird that I feel like I have more in common with a group of house-sharing 20-somethings than I do with people my own age, or does everyone secretly feel like they’re just pretending to be grown-ups, and not really fooling anyone in the process?

And yet…

“Mummy, did planes have propellors when you were alive?” Max asked me a few nights ago, during one of his regular bedtime ‘Q&A’ sessions.

“I still AM alive, Max,” I pointed out, pinching myself just to be sure we hadn’t inadvertently slipped into some kind of ‘I see dead people’ situation. “And, no, planes looked the same as they do now. I’m not THAT old.”

Max looked at me doubtfully. Then he went to his room where he drew this picture of me writing my books on a typewriter, because that’s what people did back when I was ‘alive’, apparently:

 

(I like the way the pieces of paper which are flying off my typewriter appear to be going from the typewriter directly to the bin behind me, almost as if that’s where they belong. Ima try not to read too much into this…)

As far as Max is concerned, I am a ‘proper’ grown-up: one who has all — or, OK, most — of the answers, and who probably remembers the invention of the wheel. No amount of ill-advised tracksuits or Taylor Swift tickets will persuade him otherwise. To him, and to pretty much everyone under 30, I am an old person from ‘the olden days’, and am almost certainly lying when I try to insist that planes didn’t still have propellers when I was ‘alive’ — which is his way of saying ‘when I was young’: a distinction which, to most people, doesn’t really exist, as you’re only really alive when you’re young, and everything that comes after that is irrelevant.

I am basically Tom Selleck, then, only hopefully without the moustache. Meanwhile, my husband is on the board of the village community association, our best friends are teachers, and, to all outward appearances, there is absolutely no doubt that we are, in fact, the older generation.

Yes, folks, I’m calling it: it’s time for my mid-life crisis. It’s going to be hard to pull off without a Porsche and a retirement plan, but at least I’ll have that green tracksuit, so I guess that’s something …