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Who Needs Friends Anyway?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Juice, Jun 30, 2014.

  1. Czechvodkabaron

    Czechvodkabaron
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    I definitely think that it's the time and effort thing. Once life changes, i.e. someone moves away, gets into a serious relationship, has kids, etc., it does become hard to maintain the friendship. After you go a few months without talking I have found that it's very difficult to get back into having a friendship. To be honest it's weird and awkward to talk to a friend after you haven't talked for about 6 months, regardless of the reason.

    This happened with a friend of mine I met in college. I graduated at the end of 2009 and then moved back home. He was a local of the city I went to college in, and he grew up poor in kind of a broken home. I met him when we worked at a grocery store together and we were probably an unlikely duo to become friends, but for some reason we clicked and we did. We actually only hung out a few times--he lived with his mom and brother and always claimed to be "busy"--but we would call or text at random times and that was okay for awhile. Then a couple of years later he and his girlfriend decided that they wanted to have kids, despite the fact that neither of them even had a high school education or a stable job. Once they had those 2 kids and got married the communication with us basically stopped, and he eventually deleted me on Facebook. That's another thing: I have been deleted on Facebook by people who I was once close with but had fallen out of contact with more than people who I never knew that well in the first place. I really do think that it just gets to be uncomfortable when you haven't talked to someone you were once close with in a long time, but you still see them online every day.

    I cut my best friend since second grade out of my life in 2006, after he attacked me when he was drunk and threatened to kill me. Right now, I really only have one friend. We met in some college classes that we had, and right now we live in different cities. He has a serious girlfriend who he will probably marry, and I'm single. We only talk about once a month, but we still make the effort to see each other every so often. I think it works because we are both such easygoing guys that we don't expect a whole lot from each other. I am pretty lonely, though. As someone else mentioned, it's hard to make new friends at this stage in your life. My social life is with my family more than anyone else.
     
  2. xrayvision

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    I kind of see your point with the facebook thing. But I also think to actively go out of your way to delete a now distant friend who used to be close takes more effort than just leaving them on the list. It literally takes no effort at all to not delete someone on facebook. I mean, its easy to go and delete someone but that's not the point.

    People delete me a lot though because I like to put inflammatory things on my newsfeed. Mostly about anti-vaccination people. But if you are offended by the things I say, I probably don't care much for you anyhow.
     
  3. Rush-O-Matic

    Rush-O-Matic
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    Just the tip

    Yes, that is the game: try to slip penis in and see who notices.

    I don't think it's complicated - it's simply a matter of what circles you're in. When you're in a long term relationship, there are two of you that have a circle of friends now. Where those circles don't overlap, there are twice as many people to maintain relationships with; and, because you now want to spend more time with your s.o., you've got half the time to do it. Math no worky.
     
  4. D26

    D26
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    Re: Just the tip

    ...
     
  5. dewercs

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    It is just the natural course of things to move on from friends, it is not that I dislike them but I really don't care to see your kids play the fucking violin.
    They guy who was the best man in my wedding, who at the time I would have considered one of my very close friends, and I very rarely speak anymore. We used to vacation with him and his wife, we did real estate deals together, hung out all the time but then life changes. He adopted 2 kids, changed jobs and we drifted apart.
    I think it is good to purge some people from you life as you get older and more mature and replace them with friends who are well adjusted, every one loves to have crazy party friends when they are young but at some point your friend who is 48 and still does blow on Tuesday night after day drinking may need to turn into an acquaintance and not someone you hang with.

    Most of new friends in the last 10 years have come as a result of fishing or hunting, it is a pretty quick vetting process when you meet someone out of their element.
     
  6. audreymonroe

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    The most powerful cervix... in the world...

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    I've mostly encountered the opposite problem where, instead of never seeing my friend again, I make a whole new friend because their boyfriend/girlfriend is fucking always around. Thankfully, I have actually liked the vast majority of my friends' boygirlfriends and genuinely enjoy hanging out with them but even when I do it gets so frustrating when they automatically show up to everything I invite my friend to. (And then the few times the friend does want to just hang out without them it's usually because they have a lot of bitching to do.) It just comes off as creepily codependent.

    It's more annoying with the long-distance friends, like with one of my friends from home. I visit maybe 3 or 4 weekends a year, and the conversation always ends up being: "Hey I'm in town this weekend. Are you free to get dinner?" "Yeah I think we're free on Sunday." No, I barely know your boyfriend. He seems perfectly fine but I don't want to see him. I want to see you. I want to talk about things with you that I don't want him there for. And then I always feel like a twat more or less asking them not to bring the boygirlfriend, so more often than not I just deal with it but it's llaaaammeee.
     
  7. AFHokie

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    I think people often mistake acquaintances for friendships. I know a lot of people and I'm friendly with most of them, however I can count on one hand with more than a few left over fingers people I consider true friends. That whole 'true friends that will help you move and friends that will help move a body' aspect.

    After college I went into the military as did the majority of my friends and as such we scattered across the US and the globe. However it still pisses me off that my friends would always invite me to travel across the country to visit none of them would ever bother to to do the same. Despite me inviting them out. After awhile, I realized I'm the one making always taking leave, bearing the cost of travel, etc while they just had to do was open the door and let me in. Motherfucking travel costs add up and roads/airplanes travel in two directions and I finally realized I was the only one doing all this and said enough. I wasn't going to be a friend of convenience. It honestly made me question the value others held my friendship in relation to the value I held.

    I also like to think I'm self aware enough to realize that out of my various circles of friends, I'm the one of the few who's still single with no kids pushing 40. I totally get the fact I'm not high priority in their lives compared to their wives and kids nor I should I.

    It can be kind of lonely at times, but I've found I am happier living MY life, not living my life at the discretion of others.

    On the flip side, I will say that they and like most of the friends I made while on while I was on active duty...we can go months or even years at times with only occasional texts/emails and then pickup like we just saw each other yesterday.
     
  8. lostalldoubt86

    lostalldoubt86
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    My junior year of high school, I had a friend who literally ditched me 3 minutes after meeting the guy who ended up being her husband. We drove to the next town over to see these friends of ours play a thing (I forget what this is called. We went to a place where people we knew were playing instruments and singing songs they wrote.) We pull up to the place and there was this guy she vaguely knew hanging out in the parking lot. She walked over to talk to him, and we didn't see her for the rest of the night. This was before cellphones, so my friend who drove us to the place and I had to go searching for her at the end of the night. When we found her, she told us she was going to get a ride from the future husband. After that night, we hung out occasionally, but it was always something that someone else planned. After high school she moved into his parents' house, got married, and currently has two kids. I literally haven't said anything more to her than a Facebook congratulations when she had her first kid since my sophomore year of college.

    I have another friend, though, who graduated high school with me, got engaged, had a kid, moved three towns over, and I still talk to that bitch every day.
     
  9. R_Flagg

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    I've always been a loner; I didn't have many close friends from grade school up until high school graduation, outside of a handful of people I'd chat with during lunch or whatever. Its only in the past four or five years that I've actually been making real connections to other people, so my experiences might or might not contribute to this whole discussion.

    Focus: I really do think that people choose to cut people out of their lives once they hit the 'marry'n and birth'n' stage of life, whenever that happens for people. I have increasingly little in common with most of the people that once had a place in my life; classmates, ex's, a few co-workers and the handful of people I used to hang out with; some because of distance or personal choices I wasn't willing to tolerate (smoking meth in a few cases), and others because of marriage or children. I've never liked being around small children, so when I go to the house of someone with a kid I'm just very uncomfortable being there for any length of time, and after a certain period of avoiding getting together the friendship just starts to fade. Like some others have said too, married people or people in relationships tend to spend time with others in similar circumstances. Being the only single guy just gets awkward and uncomfortable.

    Some of that is very much the time you have to devote to raising a kid or making the concessions that come with having a serious relationship. Since I do most of my socializing at bars they're usually not interested in staying out more than an hour or two, or even coming out at all, whereas I'll stay five or six hours at a time since I don't have anything really pushing me besides showing up at work the next morning.


    This is something that I've been struggling with for a couple of years now. As I said I've been drifting away from most of the people I used to interact with for one reason or another; and living in a rural/small town environment there isn't much going on that interests me; and people around here can be cliquish which only compounds the problem. I see the same people at the bar I go to every week and we all get along fine but not to the degree that I'm comfortable swapping numbers to meet up elsewhere. I'd like to build up a circle of friends, rather than relying on the same two or three people to hang out every week but so far it just hasn't come together yet.