I have noticed over the years that my circle of friends has contracted. Some of this I attribute to my bizarre, backward work schedule. What I have also noticed, however, is that the friendships that remain are deeper and closer, which is a good thing, I think.

Another of the nice things is that I have a number of people from here that I consider good friends, even the ones who have been impolite enough to move to other parts of the country, or to have been there to start with.

We have friends we do stuff with, like our camping trip last weekend, and we also get together and play cards, etc. Not as many as we used to have; some of this is due to simple busy-ness, some to moving farther apart, sometimes marriages to spouses who wished to "re-direct" their social lives. My hubby had a HUGE circle of friends when we met and they're all still friends, but see each other much less. His best friend from HS, who was like a brother to him, now lives 500 miles away and we see him maybe once a year.

All of our friends now are my hubby's friends. Yes, I consider them my friends too, but he is the one they usually call about plans, mostly the guys, and just cll him to chat. I get along great with the wives and we can talk for hours when we get together, but it never occurs to me to call them myself just to chat or maybe have lunch. We don't have time.

I have 6 very close friends, that I spend a lot of time communicating with...sms, email, messenger, dinners, weekends away, etc....even if I dont get to see them as much as I would like.

We drifted a part a bit when I was married....one of them is single - no kids, she was my partner in crime for many, many years....two are a married couple....another is a very good friend, who was married (x 2), has three kids and now is a lesbian....the other an original online friend, who has turned into a real life friend.

I have many, many friends from my online life, some that have transferred into face to face mates, others that will, but mostly those friendships go back 5+ years.

My very best friend (the partner in crime), we seemed to avoid being friends for a long time..mainly due to a guy that was rooting her and trying to root me....he told me that she hated me and said things about me, and told her the same about me....our birthdays are on the same day and the married couple invited us to beers at the pub and we all got pissed and have been best mates since. After P & I confronted rooter dude and then she dumped him. :D

Many of the good friends I have made have been coworkers. As I've gone on from school to one company to the next, I keep some of those folks closer than others. 2 from college, 2 from my first employer, probably 3 or 4 from my most recent (it remains to be seen how close we stay now that I am no longer seeing them on a daily basis!)
I wonder if I'll make any good friends at my new job.

I'm making RL friends now and it's really uncomfortable. I've been in hiding for so long...it seems natural to "vant to be alone!"

I suffer from shyness, self-consciousness, and a habit of being alone. If you gave me Daniel Craig for a sex slave, I hit it, but he'd have to leave right after. Am I mental?

ME 2

UT, was your response to Bri's Daniel Craig comment?

ug, thanks for saying that. I love my childhood and teenage years. I don't find as many open people as an adult. Or maybe it's me that's scared and closed.

ah youth!

ME 3 excepting the Daniel Craig part.

Hur hur hur. Old people.
Catch you later, I gotta go hang out with Liam and Maggie and Carla and Savannah and Caitlin and Ryan and... no, wait, I'm not going anywhere, I just wanted to rub it in. I always get those two confused.

Yeah, come back and post after you've rounded the first side of the block, k? Perhaps you will be dryer behind the ears by then. ;)

I've found that since I quit drinking five years ago, my social life has shrunk to miniscule proportions. I think a lot of my social interaction revolved around drinking or activities that encourage drinking, so now that I avoid those sorts of situations, my 'drinking buddies' have all drifted away.

I became involved in online gaming about the same time, which opened up a whole new world of friendships. Many of these people have become RL friends, although I can't hang out often as they're scattered around the world. A couple of them are in my city, however, and we do get together now and then. The friends I've made in the gaming world are equal to any IRL. We chat on the phone, share pain and triumphs, send flowers and gifts for occasions, and enjoy the same online experiences (ingame). When any of us have the opportunity to meet up with others, we do so.

My best friends are my partner and my sister. I haven't seen sis in 9 years but we still email, goose each other on facebook, send txt messages and call regularly. My partner is my buddy in everything, including gaming. But the majority of my free time is spent with my children, because they simply grow up too fast. Eventually, I'll have plenty of time to sit around and commiserate with the other blue-haired, decrepit retirees.

But beyond all that, as I've grown and matured, I've found that I'm pretty damn happy in my own company. I happen to like myself and have tons of activities that I enjoy, so being alone is not a burden. Actually, I relish any time that I have to myself, since it's such a rarity.

That said, I am on Classmates.com and Facebook and it is nice to see how old friends are doing. Do I want to get all entangled with them the way I was when I was young and needy? Nah.

Not much to add from this quarter, except that I think this is a damn fine thread.

I seem to be a "social contexter" in friendmaking, though it's also true I am efficient at it. What I mean by the social context thing is that a great many of my friendships come of shared hobbies, most prominently those folk-of-the-air, the Society for Creative Anachronism. While this bunch of incurable romantics is a fairly big umbrella, I found it a society of people precisely as bloodyminded as myself, neither more nor less -- made a great fit.

as long as we're on this subject, I have a question that I've pondered for some time.

Why is it that when a friend gets married, he/she then only socializes with other married friends and drops the single ones?

I remember when my friend Jeff got hitched back in '89. He NEVER hung around with the single members of our group, only the married ones. And there were no women to complicate matters of avoidance, just men. As the single guys married, I noticed that they would get invited over for BBQ and drinks etc but not the single guys?

Is this subtle peer pressure to tie the knot? Snobbery? A voluntary unwillingness to drag the rest of the guys down with him? What?

That's pretty well known: singles, rightly or wrongly, get perceived by some of the marrieds (people bitch about their wives thinking like this about their not-yet-married buddies from earlier times) as disturbers of the marriage dynamic -- too much worrying about "Is that hottie over there going to draw hubby's eye, now that I'm older and ten pounds heavier and raising 2.3 kids?" This line of thought really eats at some people, and they write to the agony aunts columns about it.

Rational? Not very. Present anyway, you bet. It's down in the lizard brain where reproduction and aggression live.