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Who are your best friends?

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by bigpern23, Oct 29, 2014.

?

Who makes up the majority of your closest friends?

  1. Friends I've known since high school or earlier

    24.2%
  2. College friends

    39.4%
  3. Colleagues

    3.0%
  4. Other

    33.3%
  1. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    Two high school friends and several college friends. I see them all a few times a year, and plan to continue to do so in perpetuity. One of my high school friends has a son a year younger than my own, and it's really fun to see those two becoming friends now, too.

    I could honestly no sooner pick between the two groups than I could choose between my two children.

    I also have one friend from the newspaper/magazine/Web site business that I'm still pretty close to. We're in the same city, and we have kids the same age.

    It seems to me that having children the same age, or children at all, is a big key to remaining close to old friends, because you remain at something resembling the same life stage.
     
  2. Big Circus

    Big Circus Well-Known Member

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tybugI5CkIs
     
  3. bigpern23

    bigpern23 Well-Known Member

    Totally agree on the last part. Over the past year I've drifted pretty far from one of my good friends in part because he moved away, but mostly because his life still consists largely of gambling and getting blackout drunk, while I settled down and got married and spend most of my free time with my wife and son.

    I acknowledge he's not a bad guy, he just has very different priorities than me and the rest of our group of buddies. When he does occasionally hang out with us, he zones out and checks his phone whenever the conversation turns toward kids, which it inevitably does because three of the four of us have 2-year-olds.

    I'm glad, though, that I have a group of four friends who all have a kid between 1 and 2 years of age, and two of us have another on the way (due the same week in May) while the other two are trying for their second. We're all sharing similar experiences and getting the kids together keeps us close.
     
  4. KJIM

    KJIM Well-Known Member

  5. da man

    da man Well-Known Member

    Me, myself and I.
     
  6. RecoveringJournalist

    RecoveringJournalist Well-Known Member

    My 10 best friends are a mix. Four are high school friends, three are college friends, three are writers who I worked with or alongside.
     
  7. Baron Scicluna

    Baron Scicluna Well-Known Member

    My wife sometimes points out that I don't really have friends. I then ask her when am I supposed to have time to make them when I work at night and on weekends, which is when most of the world gets to hang out with their friends, and sleep during the day? Free time is spent with family and doing chores around the house.
     
  8. bigpern23

    bigpern23 Well-Known Member

    This is a major part of the reason I left sportswriting and moved to design. Regular hours allowed me have a life outside the office. I loved sportswriting. I don't miss it for a second. I did miss my family and friends.
     
  9. JackReacher

    JackReacher Well-Known Member

    Same here.
     
  10. I Should Coco

    I Should Coco Well-Known Member

    There are a couple good friends from high school (one from grade school) I stay in regular contact with, and visit when I'm back in town (or when they come out my way).

    Can't think of anyone I keep up with from college — other than my wife, of course. :)

    And the thing about the journalism biz — at least when I started in the first half of the 1990s — is you change jobs a lot, so even though you do fun stuff together both after work and outside of work, usually you don't stay in touch once you lose the main thing (job) you had in common.

    I'll agree about the kids, too ... once you have them, you begin to meet and hang out with other parents who have kids the same age. Especially once they get in school and start doing sports or other after-school activities.
     
  11. playthrough

    playthrough Moderator Staff Member

    A half-dozen guys from college. We've had an email chain that's gotta be going on 15 years old now, almost every day we're throwing crap at each other, from jokes to serious stuff. We don't get together as much anymore as a big group but most weeks a couple of us will play golf together.

    A few strangers will mix in for golf and such but our core group has been impenetrable. One guy got married a few years back and brought the husband of his fiancée's best friend along to his Vegas bachelor party, he turned out to be a tool and we're still giving him jive. No new guys allowed.
     
  12. Mr. Sunshine

    Mr. Sunshine Well-Known Member

    I can understand not having time for friends, between work and family. That doesn't explain a couple friendless decades earlier in the life, but whatever.
     
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