Nett posted this up in the WDT and its a topic on Reddit right now as well. Friends and relationships are a complicated issue. When I was in my first serious relationship (relative term) right out of high school, I neglected most of my friends for a long time. Her friends became my friends and that was the circle we ran with during the course of our relationship. When it ended, I basically crawled back to my old group, and all of them called me out on it immediately. When I got engaged, another weird dynamic happened. Most of my non-engaged or married friends starting dropping off the map. Not at the fault of my fiance or anything, she lets me do whatever I want. I just dont hear from them as much and I find myself putting in much more effort into those relationships than what is reciprocated. They like my fiance just fine and she gets along great with them, they just seem to distance themselves. Conversely, Ive grown a lot closer with friends that are engaged or married. I met a high school buddy for breakfast over the weekend penis who has a kid now, and asked him about it, and the same thing basically happened to him, but it compounded once he had a kid. Now all his friends are other parents. Focus: Do people really lose friends as a result of having relationships or kids, or is it merely a result of the amount of time:effort that it takes to maintain those relationships once priorities change? Also, I'm going to keep bumping my own threads until more than 1 or 2 people start putting suggestions in there.
This is interesting because I think it happens to everyone. One of my buddies has a girlfriend who I mentioned in one of the other threads(the hipster who is overly pretentious with the silent Italian movie) and no one likes her that much. So instead of him neglecting all of his friends, everyone else started to neglect him. Lately, its starting to really catch up to him so he's desperately trying to reach out, but for much of us, its too little too late. A friend of mine from back home in Florida kind of fell off the map as soon as he got married, but I still made a pretty good effort to hang out. She had his testicles in a vice though because he had to check in with her all the time and we couldn't even do any fun stuff anymore like having beers at a pub or going to the shooting range. Once he had a kid, I pretty much never heard from him again. Now, he has 2 and I'm assuming he no longer exists except as a child care entity. I will say though, that the couple of times he did invite me to stuff after he got married, I was the only single person there and it felt weird.
I've had this happen with a few female friends of mine. When they were single, or their relationships went south (in one case it was a divorce), we would hang out quite a bit, and spoke often. As soon as another guy eneterd the scene, I barely heard from them. I'm sure being a friend of the opposite sex made it more difficult for them. As it was, the second husband of one of my friends asked both her and I often about our relationship, and found it hard to believe we never slept together.
Definitely yes. I experienced this the first time in high school. I will admit that I was young and stupid, but I lost all my friends going into high school because I hung out exclusively with my new and older boyfriend. I should have hung out with my direct peers because pretty much everyone I knew graduated in the next year or two. More recently, I see this a bit with el husband and me. We don't have each other on lock down but instead choose each others' company. I don't think it is ridiculous to think that the person I have chosen to spend the rest of my life with is someone I enjoy the company of. He still gets out to play rugby each week or visit the range and we'll occasionally hangout with some of the girls at work. It doesn't help that we are both homebodies who prefer a backyard BBQ or playing mariokart with friends here, while a lot of those friends would rather go out and party. A lot of the girls I work with, even the ones in relationships, have a version of fun that involves barhopping or getting smashed on the beach. That can be fun every once in awhile but it isn't something I seek out regularly. And ya know what? Not to sound superior, but maybe if these people had more steady lifestyles they wouldn't also always be having relationship problems that they create by them or their significant other doing inappropriate drunk things with other drunk people who are not their significant other. Just a thought. I always welcome people coming here to hang out for dinner/movie/video gaming, and I have been invited to other people's place to do the same. They just aren't as interested as I am in doing those things and it is fairly infrequent. It is also hard that my two closest friends have moved away, so I keep in touch by the occasional phone call. Possible alt focus? How do you find new friends as an adult? I know you meet people with similar interests by doing activities, getting involved, etc. But how do you take that step without it seeming weird? I have met people that I just clicked with instantly and even added them on facebook or what-have-you, but actually getting together outside of that single social activity is a big step.
Almost all of my good friends are married, and luckily they're with good women who don't try to keep them from their friends. I try not to bug them too much when it comes to going out, because I know they have a lot going on with their families and their priorities are different than mine. We still manage to have fun every couple of weeks though. Their wives still give us the "really?" look when we're out until 4 AM partying, but they know that we just need to get it out of our system once in a while, so they don't give us much shit about it.
I have a few female friends where as soon as I get a text or something from them, my thought is immediately, "Welp, looks like someone is single again. Or at least on the verge of being."
One of the most obnoxious things I ever heard from one of my single friends (shortly after I started dating my now-husband) was "Well, I guess we'll never see you again. That's what happens - you date someone and you disappear and have all new friends." Y'know what? How about you don't presuppose how I'm going to behave and get all mopey like I just kicked your puppy? That attitude does NOT fly with me. If you're worth having in my life, I will make an effort to keep you in my life - even if I move, get married, have a mess o' babies, whatever. But if you're going to act like every change is the downfall of our friendship, our friendship must not be particularly strong to begin with.
It should happen to everyone, if they grow as people. Unfortunately some people get stuck where they're at and get confused when others don't as well. It's not so much that the other people pull away from them, they just don't keep up.
But are we making a distinction between people who get married and have kids or just people who grow up and stop living the life they had in high school? Because I've drifted far away from the old crew back home. I went home to visit a few years ago and saw some of my old high school buddies and it was sad and depressing. Still living with mom and dad, had shit jobs, no motivation to do anything better and just exchanged old high school stories. After I left, I never hung out with them anymore because it was the worst. We had nothing in common.
I think a lot of it has to do with how life priorities change as your lifestyle changes with a relationship. If you have a group of friends who go out trying to pull every weekend and you hang out with them mostly while you're all collectively trying to get laid - and you enter a monogamous relationship... Suddenly the hanging out logistics just went to shit. Personally, I don't like kids. Just in general. But my house is entirely geared toward adults. There's dangerous stuff all over my house and it's not well child proofed. My fire juggling stuff is all sitting at a child accessible height. There's poison for the garden right where some little bastard could easily drink it. And if we're honest, there's bondage porn on basically every electronic device in my house. It'd take me a week to rearrange the house enough for any small child to come into the house and not end up in therapy or having their stomach pumped. Fuck that noise - if you've pooped out a brat, we're going to have to be occasional friends.
Focus Absolutely a person is going to lose friends or see them much less in a relationship. Sorry, but a relationship is the A-1 connection in life for people who don't want to stay single. If your glass is full, and you want to pour more water in then other water is going to splash out. The thing I like to ask guys is: are these guys your friends, or your drinking buddies? Because although you're both technically friends, the only time you see drinking buddies is when you're getting shitfaced. Friends you see outside that. Friends help you move, they travel with you, they show up at things you invite them to, you trust them with your money and vice/versa (as in THEY PAY YOU BACK what you lend them), you might go into business with a friend because you have a bond of trust that you established over the years. Even if you're separated by long distances, you stay in touch and still meet up. Meanwhile, a drinking buddy will tell the girls you have Herpes as soon as you run to get a round of drinks just to see the expression on their face. Drinking buddies are usually the friends who get/feel "dumped" when a fellow drinking buddy gets into a relationship. I still regularly see my friends. We'll still go out and get crazy, we help each other out with things, we do real easy things like, say, return a fucking text within 36 hours. However, we're in relationships where our other half also trust our friends and don't try to keep them from us. It's WRONG to give the "It's them or me" line to anybody. A relationship may be stronger than a friendship, but they have to accept the fact that you have known these people for a lot longer than them.
Am I the only one who saw this? What the fu... Did I miss something? Are we playing an online version of the "penis" game now, where we slip the word into posts and see if anyone notices? And what does it say about me that I noticed? Anyway: Focus: My wife and I have been together since high school (I know, blah blah, we're retarded), and through that time we've had a lot of common friends. There was a large group of us in high school, and we just kind of paired off and hung out a lot as a group with 4 different couples in it. The only thing that ended those friendships was college and us going different places, which ends a lot of high school friendships. My wife made a lot of friends in college, as did I at my last job, and and neither of is the jealous type. I suppose we've been together so long that we just kind of made friends since we've been in a couple. I will say that since moving back to our home town, my wife has been fairly depressed because it is so hard to make new friends when you're an adult. Most of her college friends moved away and they barely keep in touch. My wife wants some friends she can hang out with, but she mostly hangs out with my sister-in-law (they get along great). I've encouraged her to join "mommy and me" classes to make friends with other parents, but our region is sorely lacking for those kinds of activities, so she feels stuck. I know she wants nothing more than to make some new friends and have a more active social life, but with a 2 year old, a 2nd kid incoming, and both of us working, it's really, really difficult to find the time for new friends, let alone maintaining those friendships when they do occur.
My best friend growing up has drifted away from me in a big way. He came out of the closet and joined the gay club scene down in Brooklyn and I hear from him once a month, if that. Im really, really happy for him that he finally found his place that makes him feel whole, because for a while, he didnt and I know he didnt. On the other hand he makes harmless jabs at me all the time because Im getting married and that my life will be over when I have kids. I put in way more effort into maintaining the friendship than he does. I basically have almost nothing in common with him or most of the friends from home anymore except for a shared history. I realized that we now spend most of our time together reiminiscing about the past rather than doing other things. Theres one other guy in the group in the relationship. He completely fell off the map and now dates some horrible mountain troll and doesnt talk to anyone.
As I stated in the other thread, I have been the douche who was pussy whipped into losing all his friends. It started out like other relationships where I was able to maintain friendships but once we started to fuck regularly, she got to the point where she hated going out, partying, or even hanging with friends without booze. "It's date night." "Let's stay in." etc. Grew increasingly common. She was also verbally abusive and I didn't realize she was a horrible human being until after 4 years. She thinks I'm horrible cause I took her vcard and eventually dumped her ass... Oh well. Anyways, when I started dating my wife, nothing in my lifestyle changed. We met at a party of mutual friends and the groups just merged. Getting married changed things slightly, but that's just part of life. New responsibilities. Job changes made us have to quit partying all the time but friends stayed the same. Having a kid really changed things. Which we expected. I get to the local pub weekly for an hour or so. Couple weekends a month we see friends generally at our house so our son can sleep while we quietly play video games or board games. Same friends still. I will say my wife is awesome. I know she's never really been fond of my best buddy due to a beer spilling incident when we first started dating, but she's never said our done anything that caused friction between them. So yes, as life continues, your relationships will change. But as long as everybody is understanding and you're not a douche and your SO isn't a bitch, there's no reason you can't adapt.
My best friend of 22 years. We knew each other since second grade. He lived with me when his parents pretty much forgot he existed. This is the same piece of human trash that destroyed my garage apartment and still owes me about 2 grand in "rent" (about $100 a month for electric). He was drifting away for a while. Depression; I get that. I was one of two of his only friends. Quite actually only male friend. I tried including him in everything, despite my other friends hating him for being a piece of shit. He found someone, at work no less, willing to fuck him and they were moved in a month after they met. He completely cut me out of his life. He compartmentalized our relationship apparently. Any activity our one mutual friend was invited to, he did not invite me. He invited me over one night when the woman was out of town. He spent it drinking a bottle of vodka by himself and saying the most heinous shit about everyone we knew including his only other friend. I didn't bother with him after that. Then when I run into him at our friend's wedding he has no idea why I'm ignoring him. I'm half tempted to call him up on occasion. Not to reconcile, but to beg him to leave his pregnant now-wife. He's a poisonous, broken little troll and he will destroy that child. The best thing for everyone really is if he just disappeared. I've also got a close gal pal that pulls this crap with guys. When the break up occurs she murders my patience. I've even told her the only time she hangs on a regular basis is so she can complain. It's fucking rude. Kind of hurts too. Being an adult means you're cool with your friends having that honeymoon phase, and not being a petulant shit when they don't hang three times a week. Being an adult also means you can balance your life and not be a co-dependent pussy that crawls directly up your spouse's ass to hibernate there for a year, ignoring everyone then wondering why they get pissed. Hell, it's a good thing when a friends get a gal around. That means she can introduce you to her friends. Networking, people. Sure, she typically introduces you to the crazy cat friend or other nutbar, but the law of averages has to work out eventually. Right? RIGHT?
I get the networking thing if your buddies' girls are cool to begin with. Of the two friends I mentioned in the WDT one's girl is an obsolete zero personality wise and is friends with a gaggle of zeros. What I mean is the girl is insanely codependent and needs my friend to basically OK everything she does no matter how small the detail. My friend is a far from needing control as one could get and as laid back as they come and I don't even think he realizes how much she depends on his approval. She barely talks to anyone when we go out as she is latched to his arm the whole time and we can tell she has gotten drunk because she DOES talk to people. The other girlfriend of my second buddy describes her as "dumb." A dim bulb that probably doesn't have anything on her mind to begin with. Again Im not sure he want to "grow up" as Nett has been saying. He was just lonely enough not dating anyone as he had been that he's settled with the first girl who could provide a steady stream of companionship for him.
This, some people in relationships get smug, they start to feel sorry for their single friends, they start to feel accomplished because they found someone who will tolerate them. Then they try to give dating advice even though they sucked at dating in the first place. I could be in a relationship right now with a somewhat unattractive single mother of two who still fucks her baby daddy, lives at home at 34 and doesn't have a job.... Some people mistake being single for being bad at dating, when often times its people actually being selective about who they date. I could be with that train wreck, but thankfully because I have some confidence and ability to be by myself I'm not. And I'm likely avoiding the murder-suicide that was likely to occur when the baby daddy had enough of her shenanigans.
Hey everyone. Long time lurker, first time poster here. I have this happen all the time with a female friend of mine. We hang out/talk more when she is single or about to end a relationship, and almost never do when her relationships are going well. This puts 6mo-2year gaps in our friendship, which used to bother me, but now I think is kind of nice since having semi-regular reunions to look forward to. Being in my current serious relationship hasn't cost me any friends or anything, but it is harder to maintain my other relationships with friends. I definitely have to make more of an effort to hang out with my guy friends now, but they recognize the effort (I think) and haven't given me any serious shit over it. I do have one friend who kind of fell off the face of the Earth after he got his girlfriend pregnant, but I don't blame him for it. He said he needed to get his shit together if he was going to be a dad, and we mostly just partied together, so I think he made the right call.