Why We Need More Age-Gap Friendships

Liz Atkin makes the case for friendships that cross the generations, and against the generational labels — boomer, millennial, Gen Z — that make them feel unlikely in the first place. A communications specialist from Teesside, she argues that age-gap friendships are not a novelty but one of the more useful things available to us in a divided world.

Why it’s here: Atkin’s argument is an intergenerational one rather than a case made specifically for women over fifty. It sits here because the friendships she describes — the ones that survive a retirement, a bereavement or a move — are the ones that carry the most weight in a woman’s later decades, and because the stereotypes she is arguing against are the same ones this site exists to dismantle.