For Elaine, staying in touch with friends takes effort and you cannot expect people to come to you all the time.
Transcript
We have a real large circle of friends that we still keep in touch with, have breakfast once a week with a good number of them. I used to give dinner parties all the time and I’m finding that I’m giving less and less and less dinner parties. Because by that time of the day, my husband’s not functioning very well and that puts great stress on him to have people over for dinner. The last thing I want is our friends to not want to come, and sometimes that’s very hard to see your husband or your friend not handling things very well. So, I’ve gotten away from that kind of thing. And our friends know that if they want to see us, breakfast is great sometimes and so is lunch. […] Good friends are very accommodating and it’s wonderful to have good friends. It’s an effort you’ve got to keep that. You can’t always expect people to come to you all the time. You have to be open and—I’ll explain, “It’s not so good today,” or “I think we can’t come for dinner, but if you’d like us to come for lunch that would be great,” or meet for lunch. It’s a short time. Then it’s not later on in the day. That works best.
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