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Comment by spike021 | Hacker News Reader

I don't keep in touch with any friends from college, even the ones I hung out with for a majority of my time there.

IMO for most people it goes the same way as earlier schooling periods; as people venture out to do their own thing, they make new circles of friends and generally you no longer fit into those circles. That's not to say nobody continues lifelong relationships, as you describe, but from my experience it can be like that.

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Same for me. I was super tight with my friends for 4 years during my college experience. We were in every class together for 6 hours a day. Did everything together. Took a few years after graduating but now we don't hang out anymore. Maybe meet up once a year.

Almost all of my remaining long-time friends are people I made friends with at university. I keep in touch with just one friend from high school. Everybody else either disappeared off the map or reinvented themselves and therefore didn't want to maintain their old friendships past high school graduation.

In Billy Baker's book "We Need To Hang Out", which is about trying to fix his lack of social connection as a middle-aged guy, he eventually realizes (spoilers!) that he should stop trying to reconnect with his college friends who are now widely scattered and instead focus on building new connections with the men around him -- that guy at Pilates who seems friendly, or a father of one of his kids' classmates. It's fun to revisit the college friends again, but they just can't be around for the week-to-week.

Why the men and not the people?

Yeah I did that :) got a girlfriend, joined her social circle, we both found new friends and I became better friends with my sister and her fiance.

Same here. Everybody from university does their own thing now. Unfortunate, new people I meet are often the ones who grew up in this town and still have their high school friends. They have no desire to meet new people. It’s hard to make new friends, if everybody has their old friends plus way more busy lives than when they were students.

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