Friends. How / how often do you keep in touch?
How many friends do you have? Good good friends vs more casual friends. What's the dividing line or definition of one vs the other for you? Related question: what life stage are you in, and what was friendship like at a different stage?
How do you keep in touch, esp for friends not in your city? Do you call them randomly or call / video chat with them regularly? Do texts count? Do people welcome phone calls out of the blue or is it more like, "oh gosh you have cancer" if one gets a call from a friend these days?
How much effort are regular people* putting into maintaining/strengthening their friendships in their late-30s onwards? (Regular people being, maybe, folks who aren't terminally online, folks who are neurotypical, folks without social anxiety etc?) [edit: oh no I messed up!! I mean that I super want to hear from others who fit one or more of these boxes as well, but since I'm 3/3 plus all kinds of crazy I am interested to know if these are factors in friendships, particularly because most people are of the "normal" sort who would have to put up with me.....my apologies.]
Do folks suddenly realise maybe they don't have many/any close friends, or they're not as close anymore as they thought they were decades ago? How do folks maintain friendship as people age and move apart? Or is it just normal that once you're not in the same city to hang out, they stop being good friends?
Have you ever made conscious and serious efforts to make / rekindle friendships before? How, and how'd that turn out ?
This is a very interesting question, but I think any answer I have would be not quite what you're looking for, because I'm 0 for 3 there. :-)
Although I wonder -- are you likely to find many folks on Tildes who aren't terminally online? I wouldn't even have heard about this community if I weren't, much less put the effort into joining. It wasn't much of an effort, to be sure, but enough to block most casual users of the internet.
🙈 *internal struggle intensifies
That's a very good point. I was hoping in the way of being able to copy someone else's homework. But the problem is, folks close enough to me to lend me their homework are also folks who also didn't do their homework. Touche.
Insights from fellow irregular people also greatly welcome ??
Alright, here we go:
How many friends do you have? Good good friends vs more casual friends.
Good friends, about three. Casual friends, a few more, where I include some people I have never actually seen IRL but do have fairly regular and close contact with through means like Discord.
What's the dividing line or definition of one vs the other for you?
Good friends are contacts on my phone and in discord I guess? What I mean by that is that with good friends I also talk with them individually about a variety of stuff where with more casual friends that might not be the case.
Related question: what life stage are you in, and what was friendship like at a different stage?
Late 30s, always had few close friends. This is simply because of introverted attributes in combination with ADHD. I think that my largest total group of what I considered friends was in late high school. But my actual closest friends I mostly met through college and two of them through online means. The group of acquaintances was also much bigger during college. I use that word specifically because I did hang out with a lot of these people, some of them I never considered really friends. This might also be a cultural thing from what I understand where many people from the US would call some of these people casual friends.
How do you keep in touch, esp for friends not in your city?
Leading question, not everyone lives in a city ;) Not that it matters because I do.
Discord, gmail chat (previously hangouts) for people outside the country as well.
Do you call them randomly or call / video chat with them regularly? Do texts count? Do people welcome phone calls out of the blue or is it more like, "oh gosh you have cancer" if one gets a call from a friend these days?
Calling, no. Message them, yes. At least I try to for stuff like birthdays and whenever IR remember. But yeah sometimes the contact is also very out of the blue with something serious. With good friends I find you can pick up the conversation whenever and it doesn't really matter you haven't actually spoken in a while.
How much effort are regular people* putting into maintaining/strengthening their friendships in their late-30s onwards?
Skip ;)
Do folks suddenly realize maybe they don't have many/any close friends, or they're not as close anymore as they thought they were decades ago?
Absolutely that happens. I haven't quite determined how I feel about that. Some of it is fine, people get kids and generally more busy so they have less time to catch up. Though in some cases it would be nice to keep in touch a bit more.
How do folks maintain friendship as people age and move apart? Or is it just normal that once you're not in the same city to hang out, they stop being good friends?
I am not going to say that it is a given. But when people move away and your contact was mostly through meeting each other, the friendship is more likely to fade.
Have you ever made conscious and serious efforts to make / rekindle friendships before? How, and how'd that turn out ?
Sort of. Some friends mirror my characters, so they also have that introverted streak where combined with ADHD they simply "forget" to keep in touch. Not out of malice, it's just how things work for them. So whenever I realize that I haven't spoken to such a friend for a while, I do try to hit them up and see if they are available (when they are located close by enough) to hang out somewhere. They also do the same thing from time to time, so I guess it falls more under maintaining friendship?
So I have a lot of thoughts about this as it relates to me, but they're jumbled around and it's been a bit difficult to try to organize them to write this down. The core, though, is that I think I tend to view friendships very differently from most people. I haven't had friends local to my area ever since high school, which was in the late 90s for me. (And even then it was really only for one year, because I moved around a lot -- I somehow fell into a friend group that I clicked with for that one year.) I've had local family, and family of family, but that's it for those I'm close to or spend time with. I've been terminally online (heh) since those high school days, and I'm honestly just totally fine with keeping my friendships to online chat. I don't do phone calls well at all, and my friends and I don't SMS either. This doesn't mean I don't have what I think of as close friendships, but it's a different flavor, I suppose.
I'll tackle your questions, and maybe that'll help organize the thoughts. I just felt I had to establish that I was coming from a different place first.
How many friends? I'd say about... eight, I suppose. It's hard for me to quantify their closeness. I've known all of them at least fifteen years. Two of them I talk to daily, and three more I can go weeks without talking to but when we do talk we can get into some really personal and fulfilling conversations. For the rest, I have that deep trust and level of comfortability that comes with knowing someone a long time, but for the most part we don't have deep talks. (Interestingly, a not insignificant portion of these friends are exes of mine. I'm demiromantic so I tend to only fall in love with someone in the first place if we're already very good friends and, since I usually fall into friendship with people who are low-key rather than dramamongers, none of the breakups resulted in long-term negativity.)
Life stage: I'm in my early 40s right now. As mentioned, when I was a teen or younger I had friendships in which we hung out in person, but other than a few exceptions none of these were more than casual hanging out at school or something. It's very hard for me to click with people and I believe it's due to communication barriers that exist between neurodivergent and neurotypical people. We just seem to talk in different languages, or talk past each other, and wonder why the other isn't getting it. All of my closest friends and family members are ND in some way, but it took many of us a long time into adulthood to realize it. We just knew that this was a person we could hear and be heard with.
I often look back at my relationship with my best friend of 7th and 8th grade with a mixture of amusement and bemusement: we spent all day in school together (most of the same classes plus lunch period), we talked, we laughed, we supported each other in small ways. But we never hung out outside of school, not once, and at the end of 8th grade we shook hands (really) (but with a slight air of irony) and never spoke again.
Keeping in touch: Discord, mainly, and also a couple of chat programs written by my friends. One friend and I were some of the last users of AOL Instant Messenger before it shut down in 2017, because we'd always used it to talk since the late 90s. We switched to Discord at that point, and gradually I added other friends from our various other online spaces and it became my main chat program. I've never liked the idea of social media; ever since the LiveJournal days, I've always felt like it was the mass production of human contact. I preferred to talk personally with everyone I wanted to keep in touch with. I have had friendships fade away because gradually they all signed up for Facebook and so on as it became more popular, but then, if we weren't keeping in contact already outside of the online community where we met, it wasn't a very strong friendship in the first place.
I've mentioned I don't really do phone calls well. I think one of the reasons I was so drawn to online friendships in the first place was because the delay in typing gives me time to really sort out what I want to say, which is something I sorely need because my mind just doesn't work fast at all and often goes blank on the spot. (I have tried, genuinely, all my life, to practice at this and become better at meatspace socializing, and I do believe I've made significant progress, but I'll never be comfortable with it or good at it. Many of the improvements come from rote memorization: learning what the proper reaction is for this or that type of situation so I have it ready to go. Cumbersome, and slow to learn, and definitely not applicable to all conversations, but it helps grease things.) However, one friend and I discovered that while we're both terrible at phone calls where the primary purpose is to have a conversation, it really helps to be doing something together, like playing a video game, and have a voice chat open to communicate about the game and incidentally talk about anything that comes into our heads. Making it the secondary purpose of the call makes it unforced and makes all the difference to our particular mindsets.
Maintaining: Pretty low key, just open up my chat programs and there they are! I will say that my friends are often the ones to start the day's conversation first, which I do feel bad about and attempt to remember to correct. My ADHD gives me huge out-of-sight-out-of-mind issues, and unfortunately this extends even to people (at least, that's the only explanation I can come up with for why I'm this way that I don't want to be). When I talk to someone I haven't talked to in a while, I'm suddenly happy and energized that we're catching up and it feels so good to talk to them! But when we aren't in contact, I often just... forget they exist? Like I said, I'm attempting to work on it.
Conscious efforts to make new friends: I don't usually do this, because the chances of finding someone I really click with are so low. (And finding such a person in meatspace? The odds have never been in my favor.) And generally, I'm pretty happy with my friends that I do have. Occasionally I'll try to join a Discord server for an interest of mine, but I usually find them overwhelming and soon leave again. I'm not sure how to "break in" to a community that's already established like that, where I can see people talking to each other like they know each other and to intrude on their conversations just feels rude and wrong. The sort of community where I made my initial online friendships doesn't really exist anymore (and was pretty rare back then, even).
I did have one temporary success in the past couple of years, but that group's now gone defunct. I watched the show Heartstopper when it came out in spring of 2022 and I became obsessed. This really took me by surprise. I know I can sometimes have an obsessive mindset, but it's usually about video games, not about TV shows. Anyway, I became involved on /r/HeartstopperAO, which led to reddit chat watch parties, which led to a new Discord server about HS fanfiction. Because we created it together, and it was small, for a while the conversation was buzzing. Eventually it fizzled out and all activity stopped, though. Perhaps we all just moved on from the fandom; perhaps some others there made lasting friendships they took elsewhere, though I didn't manage to. I did take an enduring love for queer love stories from the experience, and I learned some things about myself, so even though I'm no longer in touch with any of them I call it a very valuable time in my life.
Just wanted to point out: you have the right to decide for yourself how you'd like friendship to be. Of course, in the end it's always a two player game at least, but your own preferences and such matter just as much as your own.
So for many of your own questions, your own answers might be more insightful than you think. If you can't figure it out immediately that's fine. A friend (heh) I cherish greatly once said to me 'make the journey your home', which I think applies to many aspects of life.
Maybe a definition of terminally online would be helpful here. I usually understand the internet culture references but I'd say I spend about 2 hours a day online for pleasure. Does that count? I love Tildes because I can pretty much catch up on and engage with the days activity here within about an hour. Add in another hour for youtube and that's pretty much my daily online usage.
In my early 30s. I guess I can put it in a very short way: I keep in touch with people who also keep in touch with me. I don't like one-sided relationships of any kind, and I think I deserve just as much effort as I put into my relationships.
That being said, I mostly interact with the friends living in my city. We text often and hang out generally on a weekly basis. And these are friends I've made in the past couple of years, since I'm not a native where I live.
As for the people back home, some of them text me once in a while, and it's mostly for random chit-chats. Most of them don't.
I also had an unpleasant experience with visiting my home country - which I don't do frequently - and some friends not making even 1h to meet. So I stopped bothering with them.
Hmmm, one data point for physical proximity and regular face to face interaction.
Sad to hear you had an unpleasant experience with friends in the home country. It probably feels very disappointing when you've flown a far greater distance, only for them to not make the much shorter trip.
It is what it is.
These were also very good questions, but I was busy with work earlier. I'll start with the latter: a good friend is one I can be myself with, for better or worse. I'm not an asshole, but I have an atypical personality, and I don't like feeling like I'm walking on eggshells. I'm not an asshole on purpose, but sometimes I can come across as one. Generally I accept other people, with their qualities and flaws (sans immorality) so I appreciate the same courtesy being extended to me.
A good friend is also someone I can feel safe talking to about anything, which sort of ties into the previous point.
Now, I'm getting closer to your former question, and my reasoning becomes a bit obscure. I think two people can turn into good friends in two ways: by close proximity, or by passing together through some sort of fire. A challenge, some life difficulty.
I lead a very safe life (so far), therefore the second way does not apply to me. As for the first, most of my friends have their own busy lives, so it doesn't really apply either.
In the end, I guess I don't know for sure. I don't usually think about it too much.
Depends on the friend.
40, M, Two Children, Wife
Neurotypical (I think?), A bit socially anxious
I usually text a core group of friends daily, but we're all on the same text thread. There's been periods of our lives where we've lost touch due to distance, addictions, etc, but we've all come back together now and at least chat daily. Several of these friends talk daily on Discord (I only rarely do this).
I don't usually call these friends, but one friend in the group does call me periodically and I answer. This friend and I usually try to hang out frequently, though I've been somewhat bad about that over the summer; we usually get together and play Wargames, but I've been kind of burned out, so we haven't done that much. We did go to a tournament last weekend, however. I do try to get on Discord a little more when I'm in one of these moods.
Another friend from the group, we've been getting together once every few months to work on an engine rebuild I've been doing with him for the past 5 years. This is coming to an end soon though, so I need to schedule some time to hang out just 1-on-1, because we connect like few others in our group do.
We used to get together as a group a little more, but the one member that pushed for that more frequently moved to a different state, so we haven't done it much lately. But this does make me think I need to do that more often.
Another friend I see semi-regularly at D&D, but he's often busy or kind of doing his own thing, so we don't hang out too much with each other. He does occasionally call me and he's about to have his first child and me being a Dad for far longer, I'm kind of expecting to reconnect a little more as now we'll be having similar experiences. I do think we've lost touch a bit because I've been in this different period of my life for 7 years now, where he's been living the DINK life in that time. I text him regularly, though he only occasionally texts me back; initially I was kind of upset about it, but I do like him a lot and he likes me, so I've decided to let it lay where it is and I'm sure the relationship will enter a different phase at some point.
I do have a new friend I made in my neighborhood, who I've known for about 6 years now and we talk infrequently. I've been trying to be better and text her more regularly to ensure I keep that going, but I do see her monthly at our neighborhood meetings; she often invites myself and my kids over, but my kids are usually busy with different neighborhood kids and don't want to go to her house. Though I think she sees my kids more, because my kids do often wander over to her house, as it's only a street away.
Yes my relationships are different from how they used to be, as I'm busy with my family most of the time and I don't see my friends weekly as I used to. But, I also never texted with/chatted with them as much as I do now, so give and take.
As for good friends vs what I would call acquaintances: Good friends don't have to be a regular in my life, necessarily, but I do need to at least talk to them occasionally and specifically, have shared with them intimate details of my life and inner life with them. Acquaintances, I might see regularly and maybe even more often, but the relationship is often purely surface level and doesn't go much beyond that.
I've had many friends drift away from me and that's fine. Most relationships are transitory and meant for particular times in our lives, so I try to be content with the fact that I had a few very good friends where we drifted apart; by and large I haven't tried to rekindle these friendships. Perhaps they'll come back into my life at a later date and maybe they won't. I still think about those people and hope they're doing well.
Hopefully this makes sense, this was pretty stream of consciousness.
tl;dr: Friends are cool. There is no need for social min-maxs (no need to take an inventory on them). Nostalgia is a trip. Being internetcore and neurofucked is a blessing. Reminders that we all exist in an ethereal plane with dimensions unseen
(okay, maybe not mentioned), and most all, man6, you can’t be worried about that shit. Life goes on. Friends can/are/should-be/will-be/eternally fleeting, but so is life and yourself, have friends, don't, read some books, go bowling (with friends, or yourself), take care of yourself and the world around you and be a good person. Nothing is fucked here, dude.Quite a few, but I would never want to hang out with most of them. I have deep 15+ year long friendships where I've never met them, and they live half a globe away. We chat all day, nearly every day, for a good bit of them (about five) and a few I will talk to for days on end and then we go to radio silence for six months, before picking up like nothing changed for a few more days (rinse and repeat). Those are some of my favorite relationships5.
I only have one? two? local close direct friends, and I've lived here for over ten years. I have friendships, positive vibes with a good number of people in the area, some "friends by proxy" that I see at events, or we go out to movies or shows through people we know, but I wouldn't ever call them up just to chat or rant or rave about something. I don't even send those people memes, only close friends get memes and music links.
My good, great, wonderful friends are all casual friends. Sure, I have more of a quasiplatonic1 emphatic relationship with the "good good friends" as you would describe them, but it's still casual.
I am fairly farther ahead in my life stage at the moment, career and aspirations wise, romantically I was much farther ahead and then got bored about five or so years back, so probably fallen a smidgen behind in that regard, the emotional temptation is slowly getting up to speed again so I might try again in about five or so years, the interest is more in having and raising kids than needing the relationship at this time.
My friendships have always been this way, for as long as I remember. I would never want it any other way. Everyone is a casual friend, until reason beckons irreconcilable differences, and close friends tend to err on the side of the quasiplatonic1.
Most friends are out of town, a good majority are out of country, and that should say something considering I'm a 'native' to the country I live in. Most of them we just chat, there are a few we will just call each other (something I did a lot as a teenager, and something that my friends are finally coming back around to doing), mostly on our drives to/from work.
Friends can call me whenever, I tend to just call people whenever, no one has complained, in fact most people remark how fresh and interesting it is because the social etiquette is to only call when told or asked, not just because. Lame. It can be like seeing a friend at a festival, or conference, an event you both enjoy, stopping to chat for an extended amount about whatever is going on, or it can be like seeing a friend or a colleague at a farmers market, or at a store, fleeting, a quick "how are you", "what's up", or a "did you hear what [person/place/thing]" that we talked about before, even ten years ago did, something that links/linked us. Most people never have interests that are forever gone, we all have an interest in nostalgia for better or worse and even interests we haven't thought of, or really care about anymore, will have a tinge of nostalgia to bring up. Interests are never truly gone, but we can evolve enough on the issue to not care presently for or about them.
Not regular, don't know what that is all about, terminally online, absolutely neurofucked, and extremely happy about it. I would never want to be the person some of my friends are that are outgoing, parties, drinks, event planning, the whole lot. Nope. No interest. I've done it. Tried it. Not my vibe.
Drankran through all of my life resources on partying in my late teens. Seems like a waste of good time, I would prefer reading or vibing in tandem with friends, listening to music, or watching a movie than going out anywhere with them, absent hiking, I do enjoy that but none of my more localish friends are into that, shame.Sure, yeah. I have friendships that ebb and flows, some friends I only talk to once every six months, perhaps longer. I don't see the need to do maintenance on friends, the world is a big place, if a relationship goes stale then it ran its course, sometimes they just get boring, so you take a breather find someone new to learn everything about, enjoy time with, share interests with, and then you have new experiences to bring back to the other relationship later. Likewise, I rarely put a final bookend on a friend/relationship, most people don't, so if some time passes and I think of them, or them me, then we might send a link or an image, or a simple whaaaazzzzup"3 to see if it's time for a vibe recall and refresh. Time gives experience for all on both sides.
Sure, yeah, most of them are fleeting, something to circle back on. Most have this strange experience of a person or feelings, I was four
version upgradesselves and I tend to not enjoy that. In fact, in a similar vein, I will have a longstanding relationship, and we will both, or just myself, will shift and change slowly or dramatically, and the feelings of being or talking to someone (even though my interests are always the same) will bring on these feelings of an older version of myself, and I just don't enjoy that marginal reversion. Just not my thing, if I start feeling that way, I move on. There hasn't been any fundamental changes to myself over the years, it's just the weird concept of personality and conscious2 state that changes direction, kind of like Tetris. I am both the entirety of the playing field, and the individual tetrominoe being flipped and turned to fit. Eventually, either by calculation (training, thinking, planning, scheming) or by luck, I will finish a line or two, the experience is complete, and they are removed from my mind, making room for more.Some work, some are fleeting, most are never closed forever, so the option will always remain there as long as they remain corporeal. Some are pretty painful, again reversion to past ideas and feelings of past selves, but I never regret trying4*. Or seeing how someone is, where our interests may lie. Some have sparked some fascinating dialog, opened some amazing doors for the both of us, sometimes you just need to spend some time apart, grow a bit, learn more about yourself and the ever-changing world around you. As the great supergroup Deltron 3030 said in their eponymous album from the far off year of 2000, talking about the great 3030s, "upgrade your grey matter, cuz' one day it may maaaatttteeeerrrr". The same applies to friends, colleagues, work, and life itself.
Be excellent to each other, take care of yourself, help others when they seem to need it, and talk about the event/place/shirt they are wearing. In person, online, it all works for the most part. Humans are social creatures, they like attention, they like new experiences in moderation, a conversation is an experience no matter how fleeting. It's also usually free, humans are social and they love free things.
A few other ideas - Weather is a common tactic, but honestly a boring subject for all involved, I dread the question. You can even just walk up to anyone you see with a question cocked and loaded for all times, "Do you consider the world as it is, or as it should be?" is one I use, you get some funny looks, it makes their brain do a few restarts, and you can get some really cool answers. Everyone will answer, it's just an open-ended conversation starter that is moronically and intuitively easy to have either a deep conversation, or a way to quickly divert onto a secondary path. The phrase is a reset code for the human mind, not sure why, but its a lot of fun.
Stream of consciousness signing off, this text box is getting a bit cramped.
No idea why I wrote this part, but I did, so it's here.
I originally wasn't going to answer this, but figured "why not", I had twenty minutes to spare and work is being a bit of a drag, so here is my clearly-needs-editing, overly verbose, response that I am sure someone will see the long block and remark "yeah, that dude is nuts", or read the whole thing and think "Whoa, they have a really messed up idea of friendships, dude needs to get some sleep (I do)". or someone else ten years down the line will be doing an archive jump or a search and finds this and remarks "fuck, that dude was nuts, what is he up to now, also, same, cool, that's pretty wizard". Hopefully I'll still be alive by then, if so, rad. I'll probably disagree with all of this by then.
1 As much as I consider myself queer, I hate the term "queerplatonic" that people have been rebranding the concept, I believe assigning the concept of "queer", which is a powerful statement in itself, to the term will exclude too many people who wouldn't normally consider themselves "queer". I also don't like "Quirkyplatonic", this isn't the wonderful Zooey Deschanel (c. 2011) we're talking about here.
2 I don't believe in consciousness, but the phrasing fits.
3 time for a vibe and refresh by watching this classic again, go ahead, you know you have to.
4 not withstanding the more romantic/sexually charged relationships, most of those have been dreadful or excruciating to rekindle, usually on the onset more than the offset (we already did that once, we trained for this!). Some are wonderful, some become quasiplatonic, some become close friends, but some are just (im)properly draining. Same reasons apply to reversion of past vibrational versions on those.
5 They are concentrated forms of friendship, a five-hour-energy, caffeine pill, amphetamine-soaked, adrenaline-pumping, marathon a minute, large hadron collider, atom smashing, god particle creating, quantum teleported, drop E on a bass, BFG Division times. And then you've had your fill, and as a semi-responsible individual you abstain from repeating often, lest you wreck yourself and kill the vibe, and make it into a sabbatical you take not regularly, but often enough to remain at attention, knowing the package will be airdropped on you at any time, right around the corner, no expected time of delivery, you get it when you get it.
6 gender neutral, ofc, take it as human if you want.
Edit: moved a section around, added a how to make friends section, fixed some obviously bad spelling.
'>..< based upon your comment's sheer length (I speak with admiration), style, formatting and diverse but insightful content, I feel like I understand quite well where you're coming from, and also honoured that I received both a meme and a song. Do you have an application form for me to fill out to be one of your friends? I'll sit on it for an unreasonable amount of time before suddenly remembering at 4am and send you a stream of consciousness novella of my life in return.
On the other hand. I'm slightly worried that, oh no, if you're self professing to be on the further end of the neurodivergence spectrum and your comment epitomizes how I prefer to communicate with other human beings and maintain relationships, maybe it's little wonder I am having a difficult time with friendship amongst the neurotypical people I care a lot about. -..- I have a feeling you won't be offended, but please don't be offended and I apologize if you are.
Those, my friend, are the best emails, notes, and messages I ever receive.
There are a lot of the neurofucked community out there, we are in good measure, we may even be the majority - we just tend to not be as outspoken and visible as the more "neurotypical" among us - and even then the ones who are, they also tend to have very good masking abilities.
Find the tribe you vibe with, build one yourself, or go totally decentralized and have one-on-ones (1:1) without any real overlap between the people. The latter is more what I prefer, as I am not fond of groups, and I tend to make friends with people of various different abilities and knowledge that are inextricably different from the others I am around. The people I become close to tend to be the same way, we collect friends and people and experiences, like we do books (or manuals, or albums, or geodes, or materials, or... or... or...., like I said all different types of people!).
I am absolutely, astonishingly, and astutely offended/s No need to apologize, you’re all good. Nothing really stirs the tides in my world, so just let it flow. No worries.
I'd say I have about 10 good good friends (folks where I would end up in the wedding party), about 20-30 more casual friends (people I'm comfortable hitting up to help me move a couch or come over for dinner), and probably another 40 what I would call place based friends (folks that I'm excited to see and hug when we do our common activities and sometimes get invited out for a beer with, but if we stopped doing the thing (swimming, volleyball, climbing, etc) I wouldn't see them anymore. I'd say they are friends because I know a good bit about them and we spend at least 4 hours a week together, but they are the people that haven't made it to casual friend. I think the dividing lines for me are 1. good good friends - they call you on your birthday/vice versa, they know how your life is going and check in on how your doing, they know your most private perspectives/fears/issues, and you can be completely yourself with them, no filter needed. 2. casual friends - they have a pretty good sense of who you are, you make time for each other outside of set activities, you do each other favors (watching pets, watering plants, help moving), and when you're having a rough patch or hard time they are there for you. 3. place based friends - they know a bit about you and your opinions, there is enjoyment in seeing them and expression of missing when you've been gone, but largely you see them in one space (work, sports, hobbies, volunteering, etc).
I'm in my 30s now and I think the number of friends I have has been an increasing trend line with time, it make sense the more your live, move, do; the more you find folks that align with you. I've also had phases where I felt quite alone, even if at times I had the majority of friends I have now. I think the benefit of having friends locally cannot be overstated. The majority of my good friends live anywhere from 80 miles to 8000 miles away. While I love them and we check in with each other frequently, it can be isolating not to have friends or close friends locally. So 3 years ago my answer would have felt different than now, even if the numbers would be pretty similar. I also think that last category of "place based friends" is important to feeling like you're part of a community. I see those folks all over town and it's nice to feel like you are surrounded by friends or at least people who you like.
For friends not in my immediate area, I use a combination of calling and texting. Lots of facetime for some and that can be nice to actually see them. I think it's a combination of hitting them up when something that reminds me of them crops up or a purposeful reach out when I feel like we haven't caught up in a while. I think most of my friends like when I call out of the blue and I really enjoy when they do.
I'd say I put in medium effort. Sometimes if I want to become better friends with someone I'll put in much more effort - like I started open water swimming for an hour every morning because I wanted to get tighter with one of my casual friends who I thought was awesome, it worked and he's a good good friend now. I think it only takes about an hour or 2 a day to foster all the relationships I have, locally and those with distance. Most of how it happens is passive, I'm very rarely expressly trying to "maintain" or "strengthen" relationships.
I think it's very easy to fall into the feeling of isolation or feeling alone, even when you have lots of friends. This is doubly so if you're in a new area or don't have a great community locally. People are largely pretty open to new folks and friends you have will likely want to hear from you.
EDIT: I've been mentally cataloging my friends and I think there is another category between Good good friends and casual friends. I have a number of friends that live internationally who I'm quite close to but don't get to see all the time. They aren't as close as my good friends, but for a while I'd travel internationally to see them about every other year and have for about 15 years. There are probably 10 people that fall into this category and I would call them good friends. They know me well, I can be totally myself in front of them, we catch up at least every other month and see each other every 2 years.
Like five good friends? But majority of them are not geographically close.
If I feel both of us are able to talk about serious things going on in our lives without fear of judgment, and that most of the time we already know each others' weaknesses and accept it for what it is.
I'm in my 30s. In uni, it was much easier to find friends and it is where I met most of the close friends that fit the above definition.
Chat. And the occasional scheduling of calls. It's not always easy to find a common time but it works. Maybe I'm wrong but it's mostly me who asks if they want to call but the fact that they say yes and make time is good enough for me.
Texts are fine but I find it a bit annoying to wait for replies especially when you have something relatively exciting to tell. So calls it is! Your mileage may vary.
For someone who have most of their friends geographically far away, I think I'm above average at maintaining friendships. Most people I know in similar cases seem to only maintain friendships which are in person.
It would be great to have more geographically close friends but alas we can't really choose can we?
I don't know. I'm 30s.
I guess if you don't hangout and don't talk, the friendship is some sort of a limbo state. And the next time you talk or interact, most of the time, it's as if it was yesterday when you last met. There is also the possibility where you realize that your lives have diverged so greatly and neither of you are willing to make an effort. There's just this understanding to let it fizzle, or to try again at a later date?
Yes. Most people are happy to talk.
Admittedly, I am usually hesitant to make cold calls because I feel like (and it may or may not be true) a lot of people would be like: this person hasn't talked to me in years and is now interested in catching up. Do they need something from me? Do they want to invite me to their MLM?
Establishing an "open door policy" when it comes to phone calls is great for me. I have friends who'll sometimes call me to say one stupid joke, and other times we'll talk for hours.
When I give someone my phone number I say "Seriously, call me for any reason whatsoever."
That sounds fun, a 30s joke and dash as a way to normalize / hold the door open for longer conversations. I wonder if it can be started out of the blue even if no prior calling history exists.
I'm 40. I would say I have two good friends. No one lives close to me any more. It's at least an hour to go see one of them and 7 hours to visit the other.
I guess I define good as in, I knew them from outside work and it feels mostly equal as far as effort we put in.
I am married with no kids, while my one friend has three kids, so we don't hang out as much as we used to largely due to that fact. We mainly text each other with the occasional call. I have no problem speaking to him on the phone.
My other good friend is more one sided right now, but he has been suffering from PTSD and depression for years so I give him a pass on that front. I just do my best to support him but I am worried about him. He has talked about availing himself of legal assisted suicide.
I have a couple other friends who if we run into each other it's just like old times, but I realized I was the one putting in all the effort. After a while I just stopped caring.
The pandemic did a number on my friendship group. I probably had 6-8 people I could go grab a drink with or whatever that I haven't hung out with since before the pandemic.
I'm probably a bad example for maintaining friends. Like I said, I have two. My wife is my best friend, so I do most things with her or solo. I'm not really bothered by it.
I have 2 childhood friends (we are 37 now) and one that came later, when I was already 20 something, but we are all friends with each other.
I now live in another city, it's a 2hr drive.
I see them 2x per month on weekends. If I was still in my home city we would see each other every week. I do if am on vacation and staying in my parents. Gladly I'm not because we drink a lot when together.
In the city I'm living now I have 0 friends. Joined briefly a boardgames group, but I get bored pretty easily and stopped going. It's just me and my SO. She has three or four work friends and we hang out from time to time.
I really don't know how to form new friendships.
I'm in a pretty similar boat actually and I've been doing a lot of thinking reading everyone's responses.... Maybe it's one of the blessings/curse of having childhood friends. They're so wonderful I don't know how to go about doing it as an adult
I have about 7 good good friends. These are friends from middle school and high school, we’ve all graduated from college about 4 years ago. We stay in touch through group chats on snapchat and discord. I think we have the benefit of being part of the first generation to stay connected through social media. I remember my parents telling me “your friends in middle/high school won’t be your friends for life” which was probably true for their generation but now they’re my only best friends.
I think keeping the same close friends my whole life has made it harder to make new friends. Going to out of my way to meet new people has been a struggle ever since high school, because I knew I could just go home and play games on discord with people I’ve known for 10 years. I’ve gotten better at it with age, I’m 27 now, but I still feel drained when I have plans with new people more so than old friends.
Depends on the friend and the context.
For all of it's faults Facebook lets me keep in touch with many friends and relatives who I don't have that much in common with anymore, but it is nice to hear from them occasionally. I wouldn't bother to call them or they me, especially for the little life moments they share on FB.
I have 3 good friends I call every week or 1-2 weeks:
I have close friends and family, maybe a half dozen of each. Most of us aren't online a lot, or use traditional social media.
I made a "friend" and a "family" group MMS chat on my phone. I make a point of sending random little photos, fun articles, weird experiences, etc. once or twice a week. That usually triggers some fun back and forth, and segues to personal conversations. I make a point to try and respond to others when they send a message as well. This works really well, because with work, travel, etc, we might all be on different continents, but can still usually text and share photos.
For those more computer inclined, I've hosted a teamspeak server for decades at this point. Someone will decide to play a game or get on their computer, and send a text chat letting folks know. If people have time they'll hop on to chat, or sometimes play a game together.
For me they key is consistently engaging folks in a low barrier way. The easier something is, the more you do it, so make sending notes to the people you care about easy and routine.
Of course, for special holidays I'll schedule zoom calls and we will sip drinks together for a few hours a few times a year. That takes more planning for schedules, which isn't a problem because I've normalized communication through texts, so it's pretty quick and easy to poll people for times.
Background: Married, mid 30s, I live in a densely populated state but in an area bordering on rural.
I have 4 people I would call good friends, in that I message with them on a regular basis and keep up with their lives and they keep up with mine. We offer each other emotional support. I could potentially add in a 5th but we have a slightly different relationship due to a number of factors and he isn't someone I confide in about very personal topics so he gets a little downgraded. An additional number (4-5 people) are in a more casual friend place where I meet up with them when possible, often through some of the others, and we sometimes message but not on as frequent a basis (less than every 2 months or so).
My friend group has changed as I grew up, high school friends faded, college friends faded, grad school friends stuck the most (3 of the 4 close friends), and work friends stuck a bit (1 of the 4 close, the one semi close, and 3 of the casual friends).
We mostly text and organize hang outs. I try to reach out and check in on a regular basis. My closest friend I try to talk with weekly and we hang out about once a month. We live in the same state. Another friend lives in a different city (2 hours away) and we message weekly and see each other about every 2-3 months (sometimes she treks out to me, sometimes I visit her city). The third close friend lives in another city (4 hours away) and I message her (sometimes multiple times a week, sometimes we go a month) and also try to visit ~2-3 times a year. The fourth close friend is also same state but has a much busier lifestyle with a family so we hang out about every 2-3 months but our conversations tend to go deeper.
Well I am 33, as I have gotten older I put more effort in because I am not naturally seeing these folks at work or in class. I try to mentally keep track of the last time I messaged or saw a person and then organize from there. I do have social anxiety and have put a lot of effort into finding people I am comfortable putting the effort into. I have let many many relationships die because they were too one sided or I didn't have the mental bandwidth to give enough effort to keep them going.
For me the reckoning point in how many friends I had was when I was planning my wedding. Like how do some people have like 5-10 bridesmaids and like 500 guests?????? I notice that as my life has changed the time I have has changed but because we have less of it for friends it just feels more valuable. I might only see my best friend for brunch or game night once a month when we used to be together daily in grad school, but we still feel just as close. There is more understanding when you get older that the way you hang out changes. Instead of girls night sleep overs with a friend we now have dinners with our husbands and her kid.
Yes. I will purposefully pursue spending time and attention on a person to ensure a friendship is maintained when I worried time and space would damage it. When that person reciprocates it is successful, when they don't then it is in a cool down of deciding if I have enough history with the person to try again later (maybe even years later) or basically letting it fade away. I have a set of friends in another city (1 hour away) that I am seriously considering trying to re-bond with, but am weighing that against my free time right now.
The most important thing is just making time when possible. I find people understand adult schedules suck, but I plan hang outs with friends months in advance at times because then it happens and I keep the friendship going. It is worth it.
I have like 1-2 good friends I stay in touch with on any kind of regular basis, and even that's only like 1x a week. I have a number of online friends that while I'm not super close to- we've had some good times and stay in touch periodically. Plenty of online acquaintances / people on social media I interact with in positive ways.
And, generally, I am okay with this. Back in church/school/etc days, life was structured differently in that so much more "forced" social interaction naturally led to more friendships and interaction. I am okay that that has diminished as I've gotten older and we've all mostly grown apart. I have very little in common with most of those people now and would not even want or seek out to continue those friendships, really.
I am quite introverted / like to keep to myself / rarely get truely "lonely" and find most social stuff exhausting anyway, so this very distant life I've built for myself is one I prefer.
(Also sorry to go on a tangent here but it's been on my mind a lot:) That said, I am slowly looking for ways of, while keeping some space / distance as I always have, building community a bit more - because, thinking of it all from a class and leftist perspective, community > individualism but my desire to be distant most of the time and being my own personal company 95% of the time means I haven't found exactly how I can fit into organizing / leftist power systems / community / etc in a way that works for me. Some of it is realizing that discomfort is necessary for any progress to take place and otherwise, I'm sure there are ways (whether it's quiet activity or support, creative/information work, or other kinds of "background" support, etc)
So while I don't really experience or feel downsides to being extremely sparse in my friendships, especially close ones, I can see how it affects my ability to find community
well, im neurodiverse, but i dont think im terminally online? (how much online is considered terminal? lol) and i dont think i have social anxiety. But, pretty big caveat, i strongly prefer my own company, so "normal" friendships (like what i see depicted in media or by some of my friends with their other friends) sound horrendously suffocating to me so that definitely flavors my friend-making and friend-keeping skills.
Im in my mid-30s, and my friend group consists of my current partners (poly), most of my ex partners (i consider us friends anyway) and a couple other friends who i acquired over the years.
I have no friendship decay, so for example, if one of my childhood friends suddenly messaged me out of the blue, I'd be perfectly happy to strike up a conversation as though the intervening decades hadn't occured. until and unless someone does something worthy of backing off a friendship, i default to the assumption that we are still friends (and i pretty much only have one friend like that. i dont consider us not-friends, but im not gonna go out of my way to talk with them or hang out with them or help them unless its a dire life-and-death emergency.)
I pretty much only initiate conversation on people's birthdays (if i know it) holidays that are inportant to them (if im aware of them), or if i find a particularly relevant meme. My friends are all pretty much the same, and honestly if they were the sorts of people who needed constant contact and reassurance that we're still friends, we probably wouldn't have ended up being friends lol.
As far as moving on from friendships, im not sure im statistically relevant lol. I left a high-control environment as a young adult which pretty much made me persona non grata with all my friends parents, and since all my friends were all also moving on with their lives, none of us ever really reconnected. they all kind of followed the proscribed life path, and since i didnt it kind of made us fundamentally incompatible lol. Im still fb friends with some of them now, but we never really interact (possibly bc im never on fb, but im never on there bc theres no reason other than to make sure nobody i know died lol)
I have noticed that friendships of circumstance (such as sharing college classes) didnt really last for me, but that could have been for a lot of reasons. On the other hand, some people i went to college with and didnt really click with then are actually pretty solid friends now that we're all actual adults.
as far as re-making old friends, i actually did have that happen with one very old friend who also didnt follow the standard life path (though for different reasons than me). We were moderately close as kids and teenagers, they lived close to my cousins, and we did a lot of the same activities, but we definitely drifted apart after i left. we pretty much just occasionally wished each other happy birthday for...gosh probably a decade or so? and then one day we just.....started talking about something and realised we had a lot more in common now, and now we hang out occasionally (work permitting lmao) and text relatively infrequently but theyre usually good solid convos.
idk. I feel like drifting apart and then reconnecting (for any reason!) is actually pretty common. Like my boss is married to someone he dated in hs, and they didnt see each other for ages after graduation. i think most people i know have one or two relationships like that.
I think adult, especially mid 30s+ adult, friendships are very much defined by circumstance. For instance, one of my friends is divorced with two kids and is recently in a relationship with her partner who is also divorced with a kid, and they each have different friend groups but their friend groups are very much defined by the fact they have kids. Im solo poly, so most of my friend group is other poly people and occasionally the extended polycule. some of my coworkers are married with no kids, and they (i hear) tend to gravitate towards hobby-based friendships. (which ive also heard as advice for making friends as an adult. Put yourself in situations where youre forced to Do A Thing with people who also chose to Do The Thing and see what happens.)
Way too many friends, lol, I'm a social butterfly. I don't like to categorize and I like to recognize the fluidity in life, so it would be difficult for me to tell you who's good versus casual as I feel those are expansive categories and there are significant differences within each category. For example, I have rave friends and queer friends that could broadly both be considered casual, but exist on different axes of fulfillment.
How often I keep in touch depends on the friend. I text a lot. Probably send anywhere from 20 to 200 texts on an average day depending on who I'm keeping in contact with. I'm in a bunch of group chats and discords. Some of these folks I only really talk to when I see them when I'm out, such as rave friends. Others I purposefully keep in contact with on a more regular, usually text or group chat basis. I also do voice notes. It's rare for me to call or video chat, those are just generally not how I roll. I absolutely welcome phone calls out of the blue, but almost no one I know does that... if they want voice they typically text about a call first, or do voice memos.
I'm 36. I put a lot of effort into my relationships - everything from acquaintances to partners gets a good share of my time of day, but I'm on the extreme end of extroversion. I've spent a lot of time curating who gets my time in life, because those are the folks I'm most excited to see and the folks who recharge instead of drain me. I'm not "regular" people, but my take on regular people is that a lot of them also put a lot of effort into this, depending on they self identify along the axis of introversion-extroversion with extroverts spending significantly more effort on this.
Nearly everyone I've talked to who talks about realizing they don't have many/any close friends self-reports on the introversion side of the axis. People get a lot pickier as they get older, and start to cut contact with folks who don't fit into what they need or focusing more of their time on the folks they really vibe with. This is completely normal. Some of them drift/move away, have kids, transition to a new field, or otherwise make large life choices which involve reprioritization of needs/wants as well, so there's always a slow trickle out. If you aren't building new bonds or visiting 3rd spaces this can leave you quite alone.
All of my efforts to make and rekindle relationships are conscious and serious. I can't imagine doing it any other way. I want to spend my time around the coolest and greatest people on the planet, and that doesn't just happen by chance. Whether the cool folks I find stick around or disappear, however, is ultimately a function of chance. There's a lot of great people in the world, and some of them can align with your needs, wants, desires, and interests at this point in time... and that alignment won't last forever.
Ooof you might have pointed out a big big part: extroversion vs introversion. It's not how much on loves or value these awesome people, but sometimes about how even the most positive interactions need a recovery period.
As an introvert, you can certainly learn to be sociable and outgoing, but you'll never be able to truly escape the fact that you need time alone to recuperate.
I can be a social butterfly, but I'm exhausted by the end of the day because of it.
Guaranteed nobody is going to read this too deeply, so I'll try and keep it brief unless someone asks to expand.
I'm in my mid 30's, moved around quite a bit when I was younger so I never formed deep friendships until much later in life. I had a lot to learn, and ended up losing friends a LOT. I try to hang on to the ones I have now.
It depends on he definition of "friend". Anywhere from a handful to several dozen if I lump online friends in.
A good friend is someone I would enjoy seeing more than once a week. I don't really have any anymore.
When I was younger, I was always moving around, so I never invested much into friendships. I wasn't sad when I lost them or excited about making new ones. Friends came and friends went, and I just got good at socializing with anyone. In a nutshell, "Can I enjoy this persons company right now?"
In my twenties I began to form deep and long lasting friendships, with many rocky roads. It was deeply rewarding, and they became a surrogate family. Eventually, I lost them all, for one reason or another. "Friends are like family; too bad my family is dysfunctional."
In my late twenties/thirties, I focused on making new friends based on hobbies I enjoyed rather than convenience or proximity, These have proven to be much more mature and durable friendships. We may not "hang out" often, but I really enjoy those times we do.
Most of my distant friends keep in touch through Discord. I have a discord community I manage for a game, and it's become like a big friend group for me. Another Discord server is where I keep in touch with friends from a forum I used to frequent two decades ago.
I have just one friend who I've kept up with from my younger years, he lives across the country and we just randomly text or call each other from time to time. We keep tabs on each other, and I truly value this connection more than almost any other.
Other friends, we mostly use group chats to keep together. Rarely phone calls.
I am not neurotypical, but regular enough I suppose. I put in a moderate amount of effort. Mostly for my D&D group, we've been going for almost 6 years now and it's a group of like-minded adults. We all support each other in times of need and our games glue us together. If I'm not actively in an activity with someone, I soon forget about them. A possible consequence of my upbringing.
In my late twenties I realized I was drifting apart from my old friend circle and didn't really enjoy being with them anymore. I put in a conscious effort to try and make new friendships, with some bumps along the road (woops I accidentally entered a conservative christian group as a progressive atheist) but now that things have settled I have a group of friends whose company I enjoy.
I feel it's perfectly normal and natural for friends to drift apart eventually, but then I also grew up constantly changing friend groups, so my perception may be off.
Yes, see above. I also attempted to rekindle some old friendships when I moved back to an area I lived in when I was younger but only one person took me up on it. We had a decade long STRONG friendship until we rather violently split apart. I haven't seen or spoken to him in 6 or 7 years now.
D&D groups are a wonderful thing: you get to go on extra special hang out adventures together.
I'm reading all replies and I need to do some thinking about them all. The difficulty with moves is especially relevant to why I am asking, so thank you for your response, /u/Hobofarmer.
Thank you for responding! I always have an internal struggle with making comments, especially on large threads, because I feel it'll just get lost in the noise.
If you have any more specific questions, I'm happy to answer them.