“The 50s are all about weeding,” a friend said at a girls’ dinner recently. She was talking about culling relationships from her overgrown social circle, not organizing her garden. I laughed because a day earlier I had in fact been weeding a flower bed at my home, which resulted in a real sense of accomplishment — as well as an itchy residual rash on my arm. It felt like an obvious reminder that everything we do leaves a mark, even when it’s the right thing. 

The conversation around our table found consensus. At a certain age, the word “bandwidth” takes on new meaning and we all agreed that we had less of it in our 50s. There are so many relationships we had accumulated over prior, more energetic decades that were great while they lasted but their expiration dates had long since passed. There never is an elegant exit strategy for an unoffensive yet uninspired friendship, however, so these relationships linger on and eat into hours and emotional energy we don’t have to spare.

The Covid lockdowns were tailor-made to solve this particular challenge. Many of those lovely people we spent time with pre-pandemic were now just occasional “social media friends,” isolated in their family pods on the other side of the city. Liking their posts was the last remaining gesture of connection just to keep things cordial, but it became clear that absent the routine of all the usual social events that previously glued us together, we were now painlessly drifting apart. 

No harm, no foul. By the time life began to get back to normal, the pattern of lunches with people you really didn’t need to have lunch with had been disrupted. 

Wouldn’t it be nice if unwanted relationships all so naturally resolved themselves? Of course, they don’t. We have to take proactive and sometimes painful steps to weed out the people who no longer serve us — and here is where age comes in handy. After age 50 you may have less collagen, but you trade it in for what must be a surge in the neurochemical that abides no BS and wastes no time. The freeing properties of this age-related high allow you to guard your interests and your remaining time on Earth like you never gave yourself permission to do before.

Some “friends” are just work, and no grown woman in her 50s with kids, a spouse, aging parents, a career, and a growing list of doctor appointments needs another job. When we were young we had patience for everyone’s problems, and perhaps the foolish idea that we could fix them all, too. Somewhere in our 50s we realize that we can’t fix most things, and that trying to do so is taking energy away from dealing with the pile of life’s problems at our own doorsteps. 

That perpetually unhappy girlfriend who has been complaining about her husband and her thighs for the last 20 years like a broken record may need a new sounding board, because we have finally learned it’s okay to move on.

The best kind of friendship weeding happens with the mean girls we somehow tolerated until now and will tolerate no more. One of the women at our dinner described being publicly berated recently by a “friend” she has known for 20 years because she voted for President Trump. My 50-year-old friend had an age-appropriate realization that her 30-year-old self couldn’t have imagined: Grinning and bearing it is no longer on the menu. As it turns out, even a weed with 20-year-old roots is easy to pull, and angry, self-righteous, soap-box boors aren’t at all missed when they are gone.

All this weeding feels good. It frees up precious time and allows you to spend it on the things that give you meaning and make you happy. And as a bonus, by the time you are in your 50s, you are much more clear about what is meaningful to you and where to find your happiness.

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Cleaning up also highlights that which remains. Once the clutter is gone, it is much easier to find your favorite jeans in your closet. So, too, it is with friends, family, and the things that matter. They come into sharper focus when your calendar isn’t packed with cocktail parties full of people whose middle names you will never know. 

Weeding out old acquaintances will probably also occasionally leave a mark. There will be awkward run-ins at events with people you didn’t invite to your husband’s birthday dinner. There are also friendships that might have been wonderful had you just been afforded the time to cultivate them, and that’s a shame. And, of course, while you are busy doing all that weeding, it is easy to forget that for some people you are actually the weed. It can be unpleasant, but it’s no tragedy. The rash on my arm itched for a week but eventually it healed, and it was a small price to pay. My flowers looked great.