At lunch at my grandmother’s house in Amman – the AC broken, the heat oppressive, nobody leaving – a 65-year-old woman told me she was rereading Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. The same book that was on my nightstand. She had golden skin, startlingly blue eyes, and the composure of someone long accustomed to being the most interesting person in the room. Until I’d arrived, she had been the youngest woman at the table. I was 24. Nobody remarked on this. It was simply lunch.
There is usually a script in these settings. What do you study? Very good. And where? Your teta must miss you. A hand on your shoulder, a warm smile, a pivot back to the woman beside her. She dismantled it in minutes. We spoke about imperialism, then tableware, then my ballerina flats, which she liked – she owned the same pair. But I had arrived with a quiet assumption: that women her age had stopped being intellectually hungry, that her generation had simply not had the same access mine did. In fact, the appetite was identical; she had just been feeding it for 41 years longer.
If you believe the headlines, friendships like this are structurally implausible. A 24-year-old and a 65-year-old are not meant to meet as equals; they are meant to misunderstand each other – the young making TikToks about everything from their bosses to their yoghurt bowls, the old posting Facebook monologues about their entitlement. And yet there we sat, in Amman, talking about Edward Said and shoes, experiencing something that felt less like an anomaly than a homecoming.
That homecoming has a structure. Leen, 27, an architect in Dubai, grew up inside it. She has known Hala – 62, a stay-at-home mother and her mother’s childhood best friend – since she was in the womb. They FaceTime every Thursday. When Leen told her friends she was considering a postgraduate programme abroad, the conversation dissolved within minutes. “It became everyone else’s crisis,” she said. “‘Should I be doing a Master’s? Am I behind?'” When she told Hala, Hala asked what she hoped it would change – and then let the silence hold. “My friends would have filled it immediately.”
Hala describes the relationship in terms her children would not recognise. They call to ask what she needs. “Leen sends me a photo of a staircase she thought I’d find beautiful. Once she sent me a sentence she’d underlined in a book – said it reminded her of something I’d told her years ago.” She went quiet. “I don’t even remember saying it. But that it stayed with her. That’s something I didn’t know I needed.”
If you grew up Arab – in Amman, Riyadh, Ramallah, or in their careful recreations in London flats and Paris apartments – you recognise the structure that made friendships like theirs inevitable. Social life was sorted by proximity, not age. Your mother’s friends became your confidantes. Your neighbour had opinions on your posture and your prospects, delivered with the assurance of someone who had never considered they might be unwelcome. Every gathering contained a full cast: the newlywed, the divorced aunt who said exactly what she thought, the grandmother reading the same books as you – all at one table, eating qusa, informing you that your eyebrows were too thin.
The Arabic word for living room is salon, borrowed from the French – a colonial inheritance that says something about the region and something about furniture. But the Arab salon does not function like its Parisian ancestor. It generates intimacy across difference because no one is trying to engineer it. It places people together and trusts the afternoon. The architecture was not without friction – the surveillance was real, the opinions could cut – but it ensured that generations would, inevitably, share a table. In London, you can live in a building for years without learning your elderly neighbour’s name. When those spaces disappear, intergenerational friendship becomes a choice. And people, left to choose, almost always choose someone who looks like them.
What replaces the living room, for most of us in the diaspora, is the curated circle – tight, age-matched, reassuring. Diaspora life rewards self-curation as a survival skill — you rebuild your world in a new city and you reach for what’s legible: people your age, your stage, your particular vernacular of ambition and complaint.
The group chat becomes the salon, and the group chat has a structural limitation that is widely felt but rarely named: your friends your age are also, quietly, your competition. Charli XCX distilled the feeling into Girl, so confusing – a song about the uneasy coexistence of admiration and resentment between women on parallel tracks. TikTok has its own version: the sound cautioning against having a friend who secretly wants to be you.
The choreography is familiar. Someone gets engaged; the ring appears online, framed by flowers. At brunch, the conversation tilts – who is next, who is behind. The arithmetic is constant. And when you only have peers to turn to, you end up asking people who are equally frightened to reassure you – the comfort circulates, but it never quite settles.
The intergenerational friend exists outside of this arithmetic. She has already lived through the phase you are in, and her continued presence – composed, interested, faintly amused – offers a quiet counterargument to the panic that attends it.
Salma, 34, a photographer in London, found this by accident. She met Rania – a gallerist in her early 50s – at a private view in Notting Hill three years ago, without introduction or shared history. When a man Salma had been seeing went quiet after five dates, she ran through the usual routine – screenshot, group chat, theories – and then told Rania. Rania said the silence was the answer; she simply did not like it. “My friends would have helped me draft a reply I’d regret by the next day.”
“With my friends, it’s a crisis olympics,” Salma said. “Someone says they’re burnt out, everyone matches it, and you end up competing for who’s most exhausted. It feels like closeness. I’m not sure it is.”
Rania resists the idea that she is the wise one. “Salma asks me questions my own friends stopped asking years ago. I turned down a project and told her the timing was wrong. She said, ‘Wrong for who?'” Her friends would have said of course, you know best — kind, but not very useful. After decades, most friendships end up being both. They have lunch most Sundays at a Lebanese restaurant near Rania’s gallery – Rania orders for them both, Salma always argues, neither changes – a small, self-built version of the salon neither grew up near enough to inherit.
When I asked Rania whether the friendship ever frustrates her, she took her time. “Salma doesn’t let me coast,” she said. “My friends do. We’ve all agreed, without saying it, to be gentle with each other. Which sounds nice, until you realise no one is pushing anyone.” She considered this a moment longer. “I find it irritating and I find it essential. Most of the time I can’t tell which.”
The friendships that change us rarely arrive through curation. They arrive through an open door, an overcooked lunch, a woman you weren’t expecting to meet who turns out to have been asking your questions for forty years longer than you have.
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